Photoshop
Last time we spent some time working with Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop is a complex but very useful and well-known piece of software design for the creation and manipulation of digital images. When we were working with our Digication portfolios we were all interested in creating a more personal “feel” for our portfolios by adding a banner image. So last time we first started by making some composite images and we then moved on to creating banner images for Digication or elsewhere.
We started by combining a couple images. I took two pictures from the web, one of Barack Obama and one of Mitt Romney. I then showed how to combine the images by cutting and pasting parts of one onto the other. This creates “layers” in a photoshop file. We also added text layers to add text on top of other images. The size of the Digication banners are 779 pixels wide. Hight is variable but we found that about 175 pixels was about right.
While we were working, I think the two most common things that people wanted to do was to resize whatever was cut and pasted from one image to the other. This is done with “free transform.” If you use the keys ‘Command’ + ‘T’ you will see that a box appears around the segment of the image that you pasted on the first. This selection can then be resized, moved, or even flipped backwards. (If you hold down the shift key, the resizing will retain its length and width proportions). When you’re done resizing, just hit the enter key to exit and accept the transformation. There is a nice tutorial about this here.
Something else that was a common request was the ability to delete or erase the 
background of one image when putting it on another image. This is best done using the ‘magic wand tool.’ The magic want tool allows users to select a tiny segment or a pixel of the image and then selecting all of the pixels that are similar in the image. So it is possible to select a single pixel of white for example and then all of the pixels in the image that are similarly white will also then be selected. They can then be deleted so that you are then left with the remaining part of the image. It is possible to determine the ‘tolerance’ of the magic wand tool so that you can determine how closely to match the selected color. A higher tolerance means a larger selection. Experiment with tolerance numbers to get an idea of how the selection works with the magic wand tool. One the desired pixels are selected, you can delete them or manipulate in some other way.
We also played a bit with opacity. By selecting “Blending Options,” it is possible to control how opaque or transparent a segment of an image is. You will see a sliding control that indicates the percentage of opacity of a layer. THis is useful for creating artful bleedings of images into one another.
Here are a few resources that may help in your exploration of Photoshop:
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