Week 2 (Day 2), What I did Today – Photoshop Experimenting

So today, our main focus was the editing of the Photos. We went right to work on them.

So the first (and pretty much only) thing  we had to do was figure how exactly to extract people (us in the picture), from the background. A lot more complicated than it seems, especially if you’re completely new to Photoshop like I am.

TUTORIALS:

Sites – So I visited a lot of sites to help me out with this, but they were pretty much worthless and not helpful at all. I wasted around 1-=15 minutes surfing the internet before deciding to switch to videos.

Videos –  So I’ve only had help from a few YouTube videos. I went for quality and not quantity. I only looked at a few good ones. Again, a lot of these were unhelpful and/or unclear, but there were some worthwhile videos.

• Magnetic Lasso Tool – This mainly accounts for what I mostly did today. This is a tool that helps you select the an object from the background.

^^^This was a really good video tutorial. Really helpful. The main video I watched. (And I think it was done by a kid, judging from the voice. Just an observation, but a lot of the good tutorials are done by kids)

I spent nearly an hour pouring over the video  tutorial above. I kept checking the video and trying to duplicate whatever the person was doing in the video into my picture. The magnetic lasso tool is actually pretty neat. It’s pretty easy to get the selector (I’ll call it rope, due to the tool being called ‘lasso’). to wrap around the people in the image. Will expound more on how to use this tool later.

• Erasing the Background – So there were a couple of videos about this, but none were really helpful. I mainly relied on what Mr. Dickson told us yesterday.

The Three Different Types of Erasers

                       

– Normal Eraser Tool – This feature is the normal eraser tool. Everyone knows how to use this. Old-fashioned way of doing things. It has no special features whatsoever to make it easier. So it’s basically a feature in every single picture edit tool. Not too hard. You need to be very careful and precise though, as you might erase the person if you’re not careful.

-Background Eraser  Tool – So this one I really wanted to use, but encountered a problem with it. The feature wouldn’t work. Basically, this thing samples the color of the background, and then when you move your cursor to erase, it will only erase the background color, even if you touch the person. So this is a really neat and useful tool. But I’m having problems trying to use it.

-Magic Eraser Tool – This thing is like a group deleting button. You select a certain area and it deletes the part. Not sure how it works, but it’s for mass erasing. Good for big pictures with one color backgrounds and pictures that do not have much detail. Really useful and easy to use though.

So that’s basically what I did today. Having trouble figuring things out, especially because I keep getting confused with the layers and stuff. So I have to find about 4-6 different uses on Deleting Backgrounds and Extracting Images. I may or may not post more about my findings. I also have to finish up my mood board. So loads of stuff to do.