Phototshop Beginnings!!

It has been a bit since I have had a chance to post!!

On January 4, I began an on line Class with the fabulous Dj Pettitt. Dj does amazing work with paper and fabric , creating beautiful textural books. She also is quite an acomplished painter and photographer and she has put together a wonderful class teaching Digital Editing of photographs using Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. She uses her own photographs and combines them, adds to them and then prints these masterful images on fabric and paper, then incorporates them into her fabulous books. I know that she has a book class on her list of To Do Projects as well. I can't wait!!!
There are about 150 of us students and we all communicate thru an on line forum sharing ideas, trials, mistakes and successes, all led by Dj. Dj has done an amazing amount of work to create chapters putting Photoshop into artist's terms and then she has devised exercises for us to practice on .
Here you can see the first picture that she posted for our first exercise. We were then able to follow along step by step, to modify the picture using our own computers with the Photoshop program.




I had always felt that this would always be something that Other People Did. I am not shy to say that computers scare me and I am just as happy to let my kids and husband figure out the tough stuff with the beasts!!!But........I have become so enamored of Dj's beautiful work and so excited by the possibilites of using my own images in my work, that when Dj announced her class, I was overjoyed and even a bit hopeful that I could gain some level of comfort with the program with all of the tools that it offers.

Below is the image as I repaired it with Dj's wonderful instructions and advice. In the original above you can see a very distracting leaf above the birds head, I got rid of it. There was a distracting snowflake above the birds eye that I removed. There was a reflection on the birds breast that was removed as well as some "noise" along the top of the birds head that we learned to remove.

We are learning all about layers and creating brushes etc and all are having a wonderful time with the whole experience. So now I am on to the next exercise, feeling like I have accumulated a bit of working knowledge of this very complicated but oh so wonderful computer program!!!

Stay tuned!!