Thursday, September 23, 2010

Review of Photoshop Tutorials

For this blog post I've taken reviewed three tutorials found at the site  27 Best Photoshop Tutorials

The first tutorial I chose to complete was the Photo Portfolio Web Page Layout. I actually found it terribly confusing to follow although after a while I was able to determine what the author meant. I like the final product it produced and did manage to learn a few things about the way photoshop works, but the tutorial itself lacked a lot in explanation. There was not enough step by step processes, inaccurate screen captures (the shape was a color that wasn’t established until the next page) and just a lot of assumption about using the tools and how to access them. There were also inaccurate instructions about how to access certain features. I’m not sure if that’s a version issue or an author issue.

The next tutorial I tackled was Create a Sleek, High-End Web Design from Scratch.
This one was much easier to follow. The steps were more clearly defined and the author explained what he was going to do before giving the instructions. The only problem was I had issues with various elements working as described. No matter how carefully I copied the gradient color numbers he supplied, my background color was different which through off other elements of the design. Also the graphic he used was no longer available on the wesbsite he specified. However I was able to make due by grabbing the piece from the tutorial itself. I learned several new techniques in this tutorial and over all felt it was time well spent, even if the exact outcome wasn’t replicated. The author also took the next step of sending you to a site to learn the html to actually create the page, something the previous tutorial had not done.

The last tutorial I took was 3D Studio Layout - Portfolio Layout. This was the simplest of the tutorials and the easiest to follow. It also provided all the tools you needed to complete it so in the process I gained a couple of interesting brush sets. It appropriately explained the steps and gave nice pictures to compare. I was able to easily reproduce the image and learned some neat techniques along the way.

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