Monday, June 27, 2011

Photoshop Tip of the Day

An old joke in my family ran like this:

A man is lost in New York City. He can't find Carnegie Hall. He stops and asks a wino, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" The wino paused a moment and answered, "Practice, man practice!"

That's pretty much what I heard from an airbrush expert this past weekend. He spends time doing drills, thousands of them. He can create strokes that look identical because he's done it thousands of times. I'm not saying you need to press the keyboard shortcut for the Brush tool a thousand times. You do need to continually practice what you learn. Use it or lose it.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Organization

A large part of using Photoshop is being able to find the graphics you are going to work with. This means organizing your photos and organizing the kits, templates, overlays and so on that you have bought. Spending time learning shortcuts to work faster will do you no good if you are wasting time searching for your files.

Organize in a way that works for you. Using a system that someone else created won't help if your brain doesn't work that way. If you think in dates, working best chronologically, a system that uses names in alphabetical order won't work for you. The one thing that will help any system is to use complete words. If you are labeling something from a trip to Orlando, "Orl" is not the best choice. "Orl" could also stand for "New Orleans" or "Oriole."

Don't think you must purchase fancy software to organize your images. I managed for many years simply using the directory structure of files, folders and sub-folders present in Windows. Now that I own the fancy software, I still use that structure as the base of the system.