Photoshop: Armed & Dangerous

Earlier this week, I took a workshop that unleashed me into the world of computer graphics and digital design. I spent six hours in an adult education computer lab getting an introduction to the basics of Photoshop. Now I am imagining endless possibilities of perfectly edited photos, beautiful text effects and scanning without waiting for it to fit into my husband’s schedule. I have Photoshop: I am armed and that is dangerous.

What’s so dangerous about that, you ask? I will explain.

My husband works in the field of computer graphics and so up until now I have relied on his assistance to do my scanning and occasional critical photo editing and other digital work. I didn’t learn how to do it because it was faster and easier for both of us to just have him do the tasks, and with his professional skills he could get better results than I could probably ever reasonably hope to achieve. But recently my work output has increased to the point that my needs have outstripped his availability to assist me, so the time had come to throw me out of the nest and force me to try my own digital wings. Conveniently adult education was advertising the upcoming workshop and so I signed up and off I went to venture into the land of Photoshop.

I came home with a hundred questions for my poor husband about how to do things and anxious to put my new skills to use learning how to scan. In the meantime, I immediately sat down and tried some photo editing. After peppering my husband with a half-dozen questions, I produced my first photo edit – for a tag for Donna Downey’s blog book project – and was thrilled with the results! I admired my handiwork and basked in the knowledge that I was managing Photoshop!

That thrill started me thinking…most of my pictures are film and getting them scanned to disk reduces the resolution over what they would be if they were taken originally in digital. So of course I need a better digital camera than my current 2.0mp model so that I can have better originals to work with for editing (ignoring the fact that I have long espoused my preference for film).

And then I started thinking….wouldn’t it be so much faster to scrap some pages digitally? And I wouldn’t have to worry about wasting anything making mistakes, or making trips back and forth to the photolab, or guessing what print sizes I need, and it would be so much cheaper. So of course I need to buy some of those great kits of digital elements that I see all my friends using for their digital scrapbook pages.

And then I started thinking…now that I have photoshop to do the effects in, I should really start doing colored text on my pages. It would make them look so much more put together. So of course I will need to buy some more ink cartridges since I’ll be using them so much faster.

See what I mean? I am armed with Photoshop….and it’s dangerous to my budget!