Learning Photoshop

Here is it mid-February and as of yet I haven't posted any freebies on my other blog. There's actually a couple of reasons: with all the snow my kids have had a really long, extended vacation the past week; I've gotten a couple of genealogy-related emails that have prompted me to do some (as of yet unfruitful) research; and I downloaded and am trying out photoshop! Yes, after all these years of being a HUGE fan of PSP, I decided to give photoshop cs4 a trial run.

It all started with Corel releasing a new version of PSP. I downloaded the 30-trial and was really disappointed in the new feature set. They really focused on some of the photo-editing features, and particularly work flow using the organizer. Personally, I am not a big fan of the organizer. In earlier releases it slowed my computer down so much so that I created my custom workspace without it - and, yes, PSP performance on my computer was greatly increased without it!! What I was most hoping for was better text support -- like creating text within a shape -- and also better support of layer styles.

So the timing could not have been more ripe when a few days after checking out PSP X3, I got an email from Adobe for a special offer for Photoshop CS4! So I downloaded the trial to give it a try. The last week or so I have been trying out all the photoshop tutorials I can get my hands on (one of the best sites is scrapbook-bytes). I am absolutely loving clipping masks and layer styles!! Naturally I'm still on a learning curve with much of the product. It's a little frustrating - especially learning a new set of keyboard short cuts, but I am really enjoying the added functionality that I have come across so far!!

At this point, I am trying to learn the product better by working on tutorials and making some scrapbook layouts. Hopefully before long I'll be back to creating some papers and elements. So stay tuned - I will hopefully have more freebies ready soon!!

P.S. A special thank you to Rachel who left a comment on my last blog post confirming that Shutterfly books are glued, not sewed. It is, however, reassuring to know that Shutterfly stood behind their product when some pages came loose from her photobook.