WIA Activity Sheet 1: Photoshop Tutorial
For My Web Imaging Applications – Activity Sheet 1 (Photoshop Tutorial) assignment I chose a tutorial from PSD tuts+ (This one to be specific…)
First let me say this tutorial took a really long time for me to finish, as a lot of the links to images and resources were dead. To download the full exercise file pack you have to be a paying “premium” member, so that was out of the question for me at this particular time.
For some of the resources (images, fonts and such) I tried to approximate the best I could.
In hind sight I probably should’ve chosen a different tutorial, but by the time I realized this I had already put too much time into the project to want to start over again.
I chose this tutorial because I like the grungy look and thought I could learn some good techniques.
It turned out that the tutorial wasn’t ground-breaking for me, but it did walk me through some good uses for options I don’t often use in Photoshop. Specifically, the Pattern Overlay and Stroke layer styles.
I also liked the technique for getting a drop shadow at an angle to the original layer by making a layer copy and then turning it black and applying a blur…and then slightly moving and rotating it. This is a technique that I think I will be able to use quite often, as I seem to see it in a lot of places and I think it looks good.
Some of the challenges I faced were in “reading between the lines” of the instructions. While the author described this as an intermediate to advanced tutorial, I think he left out some key steps in order to obtain the desired result.
Over all this is a good tutorial, but it could be a bit clearer and the resource links need to be updated.
That being said, how cool is it that there are so many great resources available (for FREE!) on the internet! Thank you interwebs. Thank you very much.
Until next time,
Cory
