Adobe Photoshop CC

I love Photoshop. Just this week I completed my first digital painting and it worked out very well. I've used Photoshop for years to design logos, banners and web graphics, enhance photos and now paint with their digital tools using a stylus which connects via USB. This allows my touch to be pressure sensitive and this is reflected in the painting. The lighter you press on the pen is like a 5H, 6H or 7H pencil and the heavier you press makes it like a 3B or darker. The difference between using this tool and a mouse is like night and day. The mouse is always very heavy and uses 100% pressure. The stylus uses the entire range of pressure sensitivity so it's much more natural. Very similar to the real thing. While the use of layers to build up color depth and keep colors organized is awesome. I'm so happy to have an intermediate understanding of Photoshop finally because it allows me to pursue creativity in a way that uses Photoshop tools that increase my artistic freedom. There is no mess when using Photoshop. You can draw and paint in a way that feels natural while erasing quickly and infinitely. There are multiple ways to blend and shade colors and once you get the overall idea it's becomes completely intuitive. Especially with the use of keyboard shortcuts in conjunction to the graphic tablet. You can take steps super quick by using keyboard shortcuts and once you have them at your fingertips you'll enjoy Photoshop way more. If you search Google Images for 'Photoshop keyboard shortcuts' you'll find some cool keyboard maps which lay them all out in front of you. The ability to use textures in your paint brushes in another super fun way to paint with Photoshop. For example, after you build up the layers of shadow and light in your alligator painting before you add your highlights you can use textured brushes to add a rough skin to it. Using Photoshop styles is fun too. I've used them frequently to create amazing text logos. You can have your text logo made of plastic, metal, wood, cloud or fire and so much more in a few clicks. How fun is that? The actions are cool too which allow you to perform a set of pre-made actions which manipulate images in a complex way. To make a 2D book into a 3D book cover for example once again, in a few clicks. Adobe has a great knowledge base and tutorials available which I've used extensively. The videos are helpful and to the point. I've used them recently to learn how to utilize layer masks which is a feature that enables altering of an image without destroying the pixel information. It's most popular for replacing parts of an image with a different background, for example. I appreciate the cloud based pricing for Photoshop CC. At $9.99 U.S. per month rather than a steeper $1300.00 or so for a license I can take action with my art and always have the latest version which makes all of the add-ons created by others compatible. In fact, I had a version of Photoshop Essentials which came with a Wacom tablet I purchased a few years ago but it didn't work well with my current graphic tablet. Once I installed Photoshop CC on my laptop it all worked smoothly and I was so happy. As I mentioned above the difference between using the mouse to paint digitally and the pen stylus for the graphic tablet is massive. It feels completely different with so much more control of your pen strokes. I love it.

There is 3D capability in Photoshop CC which I'm using but the video card in my laptop isn't current enough to utilize this functionality which is too bad considering it's got 8GB ram and an iCore 5 making it otherwise fine for this, I believe. And there is certainly a learning curve involved to becoming an expert but once you have this knowledge you have access to unlimited creativity.

When you first start using Photoshop you may think why is there so much to learn; what good could all of this functionality serve? But the fact is once you take time to understand the concepts they make great sense and save time or hassle guaranteed. While increasing your overall artistic freedom and creative expression at the same time. It's a great $9.99 per month to invest in my opinion. But there is a free thirty day trial with no limitations for you to check it out without a credit card so why not? If you were once passionate about your art but don't want cleaner, quicker way to have more creative than you have ever imagined I highly recommend spending some time with Photoshop. Search Youtube for 'digital art' and 'speed painting' and you'll some excellent ideas.