An Introduction

An Introduction to Photoshop:

  Photoshop is the industry standard software in photo editing, manipulation, and graphic design. Used along with other Adobe products such as Flash, Dreamweaver, In Design, and Illustrator, users can create breath taking designs, web content, and much more.

Take this photo for example

 There are several features that make the ad stand out. First of all, You may notice the droplets on the can. These were created using several layer styles and brush effects, making a black dot look like a realistic water droplet. Next you may notice the coke and cherry background. Advanced masking was used here to make the cherry's dissolve into the coke, and the stems dissolve into the background. Next, is the bottom banner. Originally it was a vibrant burgundy color, with just the white letter logo of Coca-Cola on it. Well, because the whole point of an ad, is to make things pop out at the viewer, I decided to use a layer style on the coca cola logo, called bevel and emboss. This basically gives any layer a "2.5D" effect that can make it pop out, instead of fading into the background. Also the sound waves, which symbolize energy, and "hipness" were merged together using a simple masking technique called "looping." Then those "looped" layers were merged into one, and were given a three tone color base that matched the colors of coke cherry. This may seem like a ridiculously long process, but once you learn "the way of Photoshop," These kind's of things will just come to you.

  That's what this blog is all about. Showing people techniques that they can use in Photoshop, to create stunning graphics. What I will do is have one design that uses several techniques, walk through all those techniques, and then show the end result in one compilation.