Photoshop Fun

Last week, I began a real foray into the world of Photoshop. I had used it before and watched other people use it, but mostly to crop down pictures. This time I used the application do do more of this but I also used it to create a background for some of my ads.

Since my jewelry company name is Green Dragonfly Designs, I found a neat picture of a stenciled dragonfly. I then used the select tool to select just the outline of the dragonfly itself. It took a couple tries, with a zoomed in page and a smaller highlighting pixel to get just the outline selected. It's nice that Photoshop has a tool to de-select as well, since too much was often selected.

I proceeded to take my outline and copy and paste it three times into another Photoshop doc, making a nice pattern for a background. I increased the lightness to make the dragonflies look more like a watermark, and presto - I was using Photoshop successfully.

This may not seem like a good or particularly interesting triumph. You might be so well-versed in this application, that some of the terms I used are not exact or whatever. But since I've taught myself how to use Photoshop, and InDesign for that matter, I'm pleased with the fact that I'm proficient enough to make backgrounds and stuff.

Have any awesome hints for using Photoshop? Anything that I could be doing better?