Adobe Photoshop is an image manipulation/creation tool used by professionals in many fields of work. It has become the industry standard for graphic creation and for good reason - you can pretty much create anything you can think of with Photoshop. However, it does have a high learning curve along with a hefty price tag. Once you get past the learning curve, the sky is the limit.

Jason currently uses Photoshop 7.0, but he started teaching himself how to use the tool with version 5.5. He has become very skilled with the use of the tool and can make something usually out of nothing. Jason uses the program daily and is always trying to find new and inventive ways to create and manipulate images. Currently Photoshop is at its eighth version, Photoshop CS. Jason has yet to try it but is looking forward to.

Photoshop Examples

• Blending Modes
  Photoshop comes equipped with a wide variety of blending modes. Blending modes can take a layer and blend it in with the layers beneath it. With Photoshop 7.0 there are 24 different types of blending modes available. Depending on the blending mode used one can make a variety of different images. Good examples of this technique are these two images. They are both combining the same two pictures. One is of a tattooed man, the other of a circuit board. By using different types of blending modes, Jason was able to come up with two entirely different images.
  
  
• Masking
  Masks are a useful tool in Photoshop. What a mask does is isolates a certain section and any changes made to the image will only take place in the masked area. In this image, Jason created a mask of the butterfly. He then inverted the mask so everything except for the butterfly could be altered. He then used different types of filters and blending modes to change the background. A mask of the butterfly's shadow was also made and a landscape image used to replace the shadow. Both images are included to show the before and after effects of using masks in Photoshop.
  
  
• Painting with Photoshop
  You wouldn't think that a program called Photoshop would be useful to make a painting with. However, Photoshop comes equipped with quite an arsenal of options and brushes for all of your painting needs. It also lets you create your own custom brushes from pretty much anything that you want. In this example, Jason used a filter on images of clouds and a cow to make them appear that they were painted. For the rest of the painting he used the brush tools that come with Photoshop to create the landscape.
  
  
• Photoshop Effects
  Photoshop comes with a large amount of filters to use at your disposal. These filters can be used to alter your image is a vast amount of ways. For this project, Jason created a montage of four images. He used some of his favorite paintings from well-known artists. The paintings are "The Campbell's Soup Can" by Andy Warhol, "The Scream" by Edvard Munich, "American Gothic" by Grant Wood and "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali. Using filters and a bit of Photoshop magic, Jason turned the four separate works of art into one montage masterpiece.