Monday already? MERRY XMAS

Wow.... Its a little sad that I didn't think to prepare. So rather then going balls to the walls (like i will in coming weeks), I'm going to touch on some of the more basic elements that I'm going to be covering.

My style of art is photomanipulation, so most of my tutorials will focus around ones abilities to 'play' with pictures.

The following are things that I ask you to familiarize yourself with, with little tips for each that I have found helped me over the years

We'll start with the Magnetic Lasso tool...this is amongst the most important tools to be used to if you plan on doing anything but touchups. Your goal will be to google and image then to copy the focus of the image (I find that still life is great for beginners).

Also Familiarize yourself with the 'Crop' Tool. Much of the time when working with 'stock' photos, your going to be resizing the photo to 50% right off the bat just to make it more workable.. Once you get the model / image extracted, crop it and turn your zoom way up so you can see the finer details of JUST your manip target. Later on when you go and do some layer masks / etc you can worry about resizing / blending the image back in.

Get yourself used to the Image ->Adjustments menu. get Very familiar with auto color, auto contrast, and auto level. Many times these 3 will save you the task of re-lighting your or dodging / burning it to suit your needs. Also notice that you can 'desaturate' and also 'gradient map' both of these are indispensable tools that you CANNOT make a good manip without.

Now jump over to your 'filter' menu, again this is another menu that you CANNOT do without. Unless your a photoshop pro, don't mess around with the 'liquify' option too much it will make about 99.9% of your images look $%!77y. Skip down to your 'artistic' ones. Play around with 'cutout' a little bit, you can make some cool effects with that. also familiarize yourself with the 'blurs' since thats are HIGHLY useful as well. When using the 'distort' menu, be sure to know what your doing and to understand how to use your history palette. A lot of these options are useful... namely displace, its especially good for textures (its actually what im teaching next week).

Play around a bit with dodge / burn / blur / sharpen / smudge (side not, for hair smudging (since someone asked me) 70% strength to extend hair 25-40% to texture said hair)

Eraser is your best friend, play around with the size a bit, and get used to the opacity settings on the eraser, it can add a great 'fade' effect if you get it just right.

Well thats all for today, sadly I cannot write more, or even include images (as I will in the coming weeks, promise) because i have some family obligations to attend to. I hope i have given SOMEONE an idea on how to work with the tools and concepts a little better.

Good luck and merry Xmas to all.

Xero.