Maker Project
Through tutorials, I refreshed my Photoshop skills and decided to create a photo bricolage loosely inspired by a book I recently read, The Alchemist. The main two tutorials I used to help me create my Photoshop bricolage were a tutorial for creating collages and montages in Photoshop, and a tutorial on how to use filters. Both tutorials came directly from the Adobe website, the company that created Photoshop. The tutorials were clearly designed for people just getting into Photoshop, and people mostly interested in using the program to manipulate and use photographs to produce original creations.
Keeping the audience in mind (beginners to Photoshop), the author explains in detail every step of the process to get to certain functions of the program. This includes explaining how to navigate different tabs in the program to access tools, such as the “free transform tool” and the “move tool”. I followed the instructions and used them in my own process of creating a bricolage. While the filter tutorial did provide example pictures of how certain filters looked, the tutorial explaining how to create montages did not provide any visual aids. I think a screenshot of the program during various steps, and perhaps even a video tutorial, would have been more helpful than just using text to convey the instructions. Especially for people who are visual learners, seeing the Photoshop interface in the tutorial and being able to recognize the various tabs and windows might benefit the instructional process. After bringing in various images I wanted to use in my creation, I referred to an additional tutorial on the Adobe website to help refine my selections with the “lasso tool” to cut images from their original background. This helped me cut out both the eye and the hawk from their original photographs. Again, the instructions were easy to understand, not only because they came from the site that had created Photoshop, but also because they specifically tailored for people either completely new to Photoshop or trying to get back into it. While the tutorial did have some visual representations of the tools being explained (the lasso icon is shown when the tutorial talks about selecting it in the first step), it also seemed to lack screenshots from the program itself. This could be partially because there isn’t much to show, the tutorial is mainly just telling you where to find the “lasso tool” and select it; however, in order to be accessible to as many people as possible, I think that screenshots or some further form of visual context to the instructions would have been beneficial. I tend to learn best from video tutorials, and while the text instructions were adequate for what I was trying to do, I know that if I had been working with more complicated aspects of Photoshop, I would have sought out a video tutorial on YouTube.
Overall, the tutorials I used helped me in creating my project, and while they may have benefited from some more visual aids, they sufficed for what I wanted to do. I created the image which I had initially sketched out on paper, using both some prior knowledge in Photoshop and some online tutorials from Adobe’s website.
Tutorials:
Adobe. (2016, August 22). Create collages, montages | Photoshop, Photoshop Elements. Retrieved from www.https://helpx.adobe.com
Adobe. (2017, August 4). Filter basics. Retrieved from www.https://helpx.adobe.com
Adobe. (2017, February 15). Select with the Lasso tool. Retrieved from www.https://helpx.adobe.com
The process it took to create my Photoshop bricolage is shown below:
Initial sketch, to get a loose idea of what I wanted to do
Importing the first photo I’m going to use into photoshop
Moving the photo into the position I want (using the free transform tool from the first tutorial)
Applying a filter to my photo, as shown in the second tutorial
Getting the second image I want to use
Cutting out the part of the image I want to use in my creation (using the lasso tool from the third tutorial)
Applying a filter to the second element of the composition
Further editing the eye to blend it with the rest of the composition (adding an outer glow)
Getting third image which I want to use, isolating the part I want with the lasso tool
Applying a filter to the third element of the composition
Using the paintbrush to add color elements to the composition
Adding another color element using the paintbrush
The finished project within photoshop
The finished bricolage, printed out as a physical object
