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How to Cheat in Photoshop by Steve Caplin - 2002: Chapter 1 Natural Selection




This book was published 22 years ago! So I am bearing that in mind as I got through it. However I've found it is  not very intuitive and that has nothing to do with age. It's just difficult to understand. It took me a while to find the CD ROM - yes, it's that old - however I'm sure I probably got it about 15 years ago, but it doesn't matter. 

Though the files are still the same psd formats, the quickmovie instructional videos did not work because of the age. This was irritating because a lot of the exercises seemed to rely on users following the video rather than the instructions. 

It starts off chapter 1 which is Natural Selection and roughly has eight lessons. Regarding copyright I used the images supplied on the CD with the book or from https://www.loc.gov/free-to-use/colors-tell-the-story/ where you can get free stuff.

The fundamentals

The first project was using the quick mask tool but the instructions weren't very clear, and it took a while to understand. Note this book was published 2002 - yes! And it shows. However more importantly are the commands still there? Yes! The only way it shows its age is by not using masks and working directly on the image which appears to be a no-no nowadays. 

The take away is QuickMask mode  still works by pressing keyboard  'q'.


QuickMask: Better selectivity. 

This was just playing around with QuickMask which at the time was the 'most powerful' tool for selections in Photoshop. Hard to say if tit's the same twenty years later. 

However it still works! So who knows.

Quick mask selection

 This was just selecting and changing filters or playing around with gradients.
Quick mask selection half tone
 However it was also working on the layer, and Photoshop best practice has moved on since then. Just press Q but it makes no sense without masking.


Quick mask inverse

Putting the Pen Tool To Practice.

This is one of the most difficult tools to master and I've never really got the hang of it until I used illustrator even then I'm not really good. 

so I ended up doing it a different way.  I think it was trying to do too much, and since I' breezing through this, I had no time to do things again.

Pen Tool practice

Next was the pen tool practice, but I can tell you, it can take lots and lots of practice to get decent at this skills. 

After that was was something I didn't know - lock and load. You actually have a few options for locking a layer so that might be useful. However a big tip is ensuring you don't have anything selected - I got frustrated because mine didn't work and I realised I had something selected. He also has a useful tip on how to add shadow.

Find and Replace Colour.

 There is actually a command for this Choose Image>Adjustment>Replace Color  and play around with it. Again most of his instructions did not make sense but I got the giste. For example he doesn't tell you to select before applying these commands so it gets messy.
Colour Range function

Color Range Changing the Sky 

Changing the Skies

It seems okay for replacing skies but Adobe now has that inbuilt. 

Verdict

So far I don't think I would have understood this book when I bought it. The instructions are patchy and difficult to follow missing steps. However there are still more chapters to do. 

Is it worth buying it? Not sure since there are easier ways to do things since Photoshop has come a long way since 2002, but if you can get it for less than a fiver. Maybe.

 
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