Photoshop Assignment 1

As you know I have started design school as of May 1st. The first two weeks of school were actually just an orientation to the program so last week was my first actual class and assignment. With the certificate program I am in, I basically start a new course every six weeks and turn in one project a week. I plan to document a lot of the work I do in my program on this blog so I can look back and see how my skills have grown over time. 

My first six-week course is Photoshop and I was really happy to start out with this because I already have a pretty basic understanding of it (so hopefully this will help me sort of ease into the challenge and stress of school). Our first project was pretty simple but I had a lot of fun doing it and definitely learned some new tricks and tips along the way. For this assignment, we had to take the yellow taxi cab you see below and alter it into a basic ad for an unknown client who wanted to see the cab in multiple colors. The details of the assignment were pretty specific and did not leave much room for creativity but I still tried to add in extra touches where I deemed appropriate. For the first part of the assignment, we practiced using different selection techniques to take the taxi cab out of the street scene, black out the windows and ads, and clean up any rough details (such as making both tires rotated the same way). Then we had to take the selection further by duplicating it and recoloring it several times. The final step was to place the cars in a "colorful cabs" layout with a basic gradient background.

Anyways, like I said, pretty basic but still it was lots of fun and I have to say that it's so amazing to be in a school program that has no tests or papers, just hands-on projects. The instructor seemed to like that I did a couple things in the assignment that were not required (such as adding the text, flipping the orientation of some of the cabs, adding sample text to the ad boxes, etc.) so I think that means its safe for me to go outside the bounds of the instructions and go farther with my creativity next time. This weekend I will be working on my next assignment which focuses on image retouching. I'm really excited to learn more about that because its something I can never quite figure out how to do right. Hopefully after this next lesson I will be a pro and will be fully equipped to erase the braces off myself in Jake's upcoming graduation photos :)