I know this is awfully simplistic, but, having been immersed in Photoshop most of the day for the last few days, making digital renders and retouches, the following occurred to me:
If I had to boil down Photoshop to 3 things, it would be:
Everything else (and that’s a lot of everything else) builds on, is an offshoot, or refines these elements.
What do you think? Would you dissect it differently?
I’ve been doing quite a bit of photo retouching this past week, and in the process realized that I wasn’t being as efficient in my workflow as i could. I decided to consciously seek out the single-keystroke shortcuts for those tools that I was using the most. Here they are, in no particular order:
Now, I realize that these are pretty basic, and that there are many more single-key shortcuts (and we’re not even getting into multi-key shortcuts, like image or canvas sizing), but I’m willing to bet that a lot of us out there suffer from this same condition of convenience, and just move the mouse/pen over to the specific tool on the palette, thinking that in the short run that one step really makes no discernible difference. Whether it does or not is another matter, and entirely up to you to decide.
I, for one, plan on continuing to use these and try to make my workflow a tiny bit more efficient.
The year ain’t over yet. Here’s a roundup of the latest…
When I set off on the “alphabet series”, there were a handful of fonts that, from the get-go, I knew I wanted to use. OCR was one of them. I used a not-too-old self-portrait (I guess you could call it that) and decided to give myself some digital “hair” replacement. Enjoy!
I was walking around the mall this afternoon running a couple of errands before I start my new job on Monday, and I happened to come across a poster for the upcoming Scott Pilgrim movie. I thought it was pretty cool as a teaser type poster (I’ve always been partial to bass and drums). That is, until I took a look at its feet:
What jumped out at me was how oddly angled and out of proportion (relative to the figure as a whole) the sneakers looked. And let’s not get into the shadow. For a second I thought the whole thing might have been an optical illusion created by overly baggy pants, but the jeans looked loose or relaxed, but definitely not baggy. I also looked Michael Cera up on IMDB, and found that the kid’s close to six feet, so not only did the shoes look like they had been replaced, but they were now tiny as well (I’m fairly confident in saying that, if anything, Mr. Cera would not want to be known as the guy with the tiny feet).
Just so things are in context, here’s an image of the whole poster. I took the liberty of really quickly drawing a rough “wireframe” of where I think the original feet were placed.
I’m hoping the reason such slipshod work was put out was because of time constraints. I’d hate to think this exemplifies the type of quality the studio’s marketing people (whether in-house or not) are putting out.
So, tell me– am I correct in my observation? Am I completely off-base here? I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this.
Continuing our alphabet series, I give you the letter “b”…
Since I already had Photoshop up and running, I started playing around with some old drawings and sketches I had scanned in some time ago. The drawing’s mine and the brick is a free texture (pretty sure it’s from Bittbox).
Here’s the original doodle:
So much for the “every day” part. Although, I have been doing a fair amount of work these past couple of months, so it’s not like I’ve dropped designing and coming up with stuff altogether. Anyhow, I think I have a plan on how I’m going to get somewhat caught up fairly quickly. Here’s a start.
I was reading online today about two things that seemed to dovetail together in a funny way– to me, at least. First, the capping of the well out in the Gulf (BTW, if this isn’t the definition of cluster#$%&, then I don’t know what is. I’ll get off my eco-political soapbox now). Second, I read on a blog somewhere about a series of short videos made by the Old Spice Guy (OSG), some of which personally thanked celebs or “internet famous” folks. Both these things got me thinking about the long-running meme about Chuck Norris. And, being a fan of the show Deadliest Warrior, I started to wonder who’d win should Chuck and the OSG were to meet in a mano a mano.
For the past month I’ve been kicking around in my head the idea of literally interpreting this song title– Bullet with Butterfly Wings, by The Smashing Pumpkins.
(Butterfly and bullet images courtesy of Morguefile).
random thoughts and casual ruminations 