P is for Photoshop

I have used Photoshop for a long time, but often I feel like I’ve skimmed nothing but the intuitive surface of the application. The version I have is old and secondhand, a disc I picked up somewhere along the way. It works well enough and I don’t have any complaints about the functionality on offer, but I can clearly see I’m not hitting half of the menu options.

I picked up a simple guide to using Photoshop, but it requires reading and somewhere along the line all time for that seems to evaporate. When I originally got it I spent some time going through the first twenty or thirty pages. I immediately found tools I had never used before. When I did use them, I discovered they offered a way to do one thing or another that I would have completed some other way – probably taking three or four times longer.

I’m not completely without hope and when I do use it, I’m not without a base level of skill. I tweak images a lot and use layers and brushes to turn sketches into reasonable final products.

Here’s a map I sketched:

Here’s the final product after I tinkered around in Photoshop.

I know I need to make the time. Indeed, I’m certain if I did spend a while getting to grips with the wider toolset I’d probably save the time spent and more not going round the houses, grappling with inefficiency.