Yesterday I posted about becoming friends with Photoshop and that she wasn't my BBF yet, but we are getting rather chummy. Some of you asked about the secret to becoming friends with her. It's not really a secret but a process, I guess.
First you need to do some research about her. For me that was taking some classes. I must have dabbled in our friendship for quite awhile. I took a class at scrap-a-faire (remember those?) and from Renee Pearson at BPS, but nothing really stuck. I bought books and while they were helpful, our relationship still wasn't clicking. I discovered Jessica Sprague's classes and that helped a lot and things really began to make sense for me, but I still wasn't sure she was someone that I wanted to know.
About this time, I decided that I wanted to learn more about graphic design with computers. So I decided to take and online class in Photoshop, and not just digital scrapbooking. Did you even know that Photoshop had other uses than digital scrapping??? I found this company called ed2go.com and they do online classes for a ton of community colleges and started taking classes.
The classes helped but the key to making this relationship work is actually USING Photoshop. Imagine that! The more I use the program to create digital layouts, enhance pictures, create blinkies and ads, the closer we become. :-)
I now feel fairly comfortable with my friend Photoshop. Although her sister, Illustrator, and I are barely on speaking terms.
A few more comments from yesterday:
-I still make paper layouts, probably a majority of the time. But lately, it's just been easier to scrap on the computer.
-I'm currently taking an XHTML/CSS class from ed2go.com. It's the language that most websites are written in now and the wave of the future (or so I read in my lesson today!) Speaking of which, I should be working on right now.
Enjoy!