Photoshop or Awesomeshop!

Week 9 in ETEC leads us to Photoshop. After a few tutorials, I am ready to try it on my own. This week's assignment: Alter a picture of myself. Low and behold, I took a picture of myself using the trusty iPhone (no longer in my possession) and proceeded to alter it the best I could.

Starting with a simple Google search I found a sweet flaming skull picture. After selecting the skull itself, I copied it over the face of my picture. From there I selected individual fire sections to put on my shoulders. To try to blend the flames into my shoulders I used the smudge tool to drag sections down and create the illusion. The clone stamp tool was used to resurface my neck area to match the black and grays in the skull face. After that was all done, I linked those layers and transferred my whole picture to a new background using the selection and copy tools.

The obstacle I encountered was thinking of a way to make the flames look like they were coming out of my shoulders naturally. While it was not the perfect solution, I think the smudge tool worked well for this attempt. I learned a bit more about Photoshop. The greatest success in this project showed me the new selection tool that was not present on previous versions (5). It works like a charm to get almost exactly what I wanted to select.

I like what Photoshop can do and I can't wait to use it for more projects. It is a great tool for retouching photos especially with custom macros. Not only that it is fun to just mess around with creating funny pictures.

Skull picture from: http://pda.88000.org/63__Flaming_Skull.htm
Background from: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Healthy_People,_Healthy_Planet/Wasteland.jpg

Lolcats!

HTML and CSS - Look Out Internet!

The past two weeks in ETEC have focused on HTML and CSS. Starting with HTML, we all made our own webpage using basic HTML code. I created mine in notepad and followed the instructions on our Blackboard assignment. It was easy enough, but I learned some very helpful lessons on where exactly to put the h1 tags (in the body). One obstacle for me was learning the correct order of tags and I think this lesson straightened it out for me. Learning the basics of HTML will help me with future assignments and at work. I can use it along with what we learned for CSS to make my own website.

The other topic we learned was some basic CSS skills. I did not create my own CSS template but was able to modify an existing one to change the way the webpage looks. One obstacle I encountered was working with the padding. With a little trial and error, I was able to get a better idea of how padding really works. After making a few changes, they website was already looking better than it was before (in my opinion). I think learning a bit more CSS will always help in the future, especially when I want to change the style of an entire website.

Lolcats Time!