Technical/tools #Des100

Adobe Photoshop is an image and graphic design software developed by Adobe Inc, that allows the user to edit and touch up photos, as well as create digital art. I have used Photoshop off and on, for a number of years now, first starting back in year 10 of high-school in order to touch up photos for a school project. Regrettably, I did stop using the program after year 10 for a few years until near the end of year 13, when my computing teacher asked the class to touch up some images for the final class internal assessment (A selection of my touched up photos can be found below)

One of the best parts about using Photoshop is that, due to it being the industry standard, there are thousands of written and video guides for the software, for both beginners and more experienced users, covering everything you need to know. Another benefit to using Photoshop is the huge number of tools and features that are included within it [1]. Some notable examples are:

The pen tool, that allows the user to draw paths and shapes using anchor points, allows for extremely precise shapes.

The dodge tool, which can lighten the area of an image.

The type tool, which allows the user to add text anywhere on the canvas.

Unfortunately there are also some downsides to Photoshop, the major one being price. Due to Photoshop being part of the Adobe creative cloud software suite, there is no way to buy Photoshop to own. Instead a certain amount of money, around $15 dollars per month for Students, must be paid in order to have legal access to the software. This subscription does also include a few other Adobe photo programs including Adobe Light room (A cloud based photo organizing service) and Adobe Premiere clip (A mobile video editing software). Other subscriptions do also exist, which in addition to Photoshop, includes other Adobe software e.g. Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign, however these subscriptions are also more expensive, with access to the full Adobe suite costing up to $80 per month. There is no current way to just buy Photoshop on its own so if, like me, you don’t use any other Adobe software $15 per month is still rather expensive.

Unfortunately due to primarily using Photoshop on school computers, I haven't been able to find much of my past work. One example I did find is of an old web page I built for a school project, the background image has been edited in Photoshop to be slightly darker. On a later version I also edited the header image to match the colors of my page better, however this is not shown in the screenshot below.

Screenshot of a web page I created for an NCEA internal, the background image was edited in Photoshop to lower the brightness.

References:

[1]: https://www.trustradius.com/reviews/adobe-photoshop-2014-05-22-09-24-25 by Eric Karkovack May 22 2014, accessed on the 09/04/20 at 2:30 pm