En Route to the Milky Way

For the last two hours and a half I have been using Photoshop for the first time in the creative way I had envisioned the software allows an image-maker to do.

I have been doing tutorials on basic operations of Photoshop on lynda.com. There is much more for me to learn about the basics of this program I've owned for years but frankly never sat down to learn to use. I thought I'd take a break from the back-breaking, peon work and try something more imaginative.

A book I bought at the 20% sale at Half Price yesterday was the vehicle for this fun activity, Michelle Perkins and Paul Grant's 2002 Traditional Photographic Effects with Adobe Photoshop (Amherts Media). I wanted to try the book out in case the instructions are no longer applicable to CS3 Photoshop. They are, with very slight variation. I like how the software builds on previous emendations without deleting these when adding innovations.

I've always wondered how other photographers applied different-color tones to their photographs. I thought what they did was simply amazing and an example of the great advantage digital images have over film ones. Employing Photoshop we can modify digital images not only for over-the-top alterations like composites (the book authors use "grandma with a monkey on the moon") but also to recreate traditional effects when photographers processed film in their basement labs.

This afternoon's exercise is encouraging. I am eager to explore the creative potentials of the software and of digital images. I feel I've gone the distance from here to China in what I've experienced with digital photography but the road stretches as far away, it seems, as other galaxies on the Milky Way!