In This Issue

1. Welcome
2. This Month's Tutorial
3. Resources

This Month's Tutorial
When I get to feeling creative, bad things can happen so sometimes I like to funnel that energy into making something with photoshop instead of getting in trouble by re-painting my office. I often have no plan whatsoever of what I want to make and after the first couple of times I tried this, I found that the results were (to me at least) quite good and I learned things along the way.

The first step is to open Photoshop and create a new document.  Make the size appropriate for a wallpaper (desktop background) if you like.  Check your resolution settings to find the appropriate numbers.  In my case, I have a widescreen format 24" LCD monitor with a resolution of 1920 x 1200.  If I had a more standard monitor, I might have 1600x1200 or 1280x1024.  So I click File...New and enter 1920 for the width and 1200 for the height.  I will leave the other settings to their defaults (background contents should be transparent).

If you have never used filters and layers in Photoshop you do not know what you are missing (if you have never used filters or layers, why didn't you just stick with mspaint.exe and save $600?). I will start off by changing my foreground and background color from black and white to green and blue (remember, to change them, you click one and then you can pick the color. I will now pick the gradient tool (this is the alternate for the paint bucket - if you do not see the gradient tool selected below, click and hold on the paint bucket and it will pop out so you can select it.

Before I create a gradient, I will create a new layer for it.  Either click Layer...New Layer...OK or use the easier way which can be found in an earlier newsletter if you were watching. Make sure the new layer is selected and click on a spot, drag, move to a new spot and let go.  You should now have something like this:

Now for no reason at all I will select the "Chalk and Charcoal" filter. Click Filter...Sketch...Chalk and Charcoal.  You will notice there are numerous settings ('Charcoal Area', 'Chalk Area', 'Stroke Pressure'') and a preview window.  Feel free to move things around and see what you get. I will accept the defaults and click OK.

I will now duplicate this layer (right click on the layer and click Duplicate layer) and your layer palette should look like this:

We will now flip the top layer horizontally, so press CTRL-T and then right click on the image then click "Flip Horizontal" now click on another tool (like the gradient tool and it will ask if you want to apply transformation - answer in the affirmative. Now reduce your opacity on this new layer ("Layer 2 copy" in my case) to 50% and you will see something like this:

I will often go on and on and try many different filters and I recommend that you do. For this example, I will do one more and stop.   Click Filter...Render...Difference Clouds and you will end up with this (or some facsimile thereof):

I also have many additional filters I have purchased over the years from Alienskin - these can be a lot of fun! I will use one for this last step. You can stop at this point and save for web and set it for your new wallpaper.

I will first use the type tool to put my name in big letters:

I will now select one or two of my fancy Alienskin filters and come up with this. In case you are curious, I did this: applied Diamond Plate filter, duplicated the layer then used shadowlab on the lower layer in the stack. I then reselected the top layer.  Next I applied a Rust filter and finally a Corona filter (the filter, not the beer).

If you have children, they would love to have you do something like this with their name - trust me.  ;)

Resources
Here is where I will tell you about resources for learning Photoshop.

NAPP
Membership for one year is only $99 and in addition to getting 12 issues of their magazine, you will often get a free dvd, booklet and cd filled with training videos, samples and tutorials. You also get various discounts on car rental, services at Kinko's, as well as a website filled with thousands of tutorials. If you think you might be interested, pop on over - you will love it.

Canon Photoworkshop
Canon has some online learning for their EOS camera.  Some of the training is generic enough for any camera.  You may want to give it a look.

Free Web Seminars
I came across a bunch of seminars from Adobe - check them out.

Closing
Well, this wraps up our third newsletter - I hope you found it to be helpful and interesting. I am willing to go in whatever direction everyone wants just take a moment to send me your thoughts. Was this too basic? Too advanced? Just right? Drop me a line at stjacobphotoshop@klompy.net and let me know. If you have a question send it in and I will give you something.

Thank you very much.

PS - I am planning on having a physical meeting soon.  Any preference for day or time?