Old Dog Learning New Tricks

As I posted on Facebook, the day in which I really need to learn how to work with Photoshop has arrived. I need it for many things, not the least of which is to restore old photos. I look at the program and I am totally lost. I have books, I’ve looked at demos, but it’s all so complicated and so foreign to what I am used to that I give up in frustration.

Nevertheless, I’ve decided to give it the old country try again. And not just do exercises or try to do a few things, but really read the books and figure how the basics of the program. I think my frustration has been trying to do a few “tricks” and getting lost since I have no idea what to do with layers and how to overlay and work with masks and filters. So it’s time to buckle down and stop playing and study.  If I just follow a tutorial, I don’t really understand what I am doing and I am limited to following that tutorial every time, since I don’t know what I really did.

I think my sister’s suggestion of reading Photoshop for Dummies the best idea. I’ve started working through it and some things are beginning to make sense, starting with the names of the tools that are used.

Now why are there three copies of the same photo? Well it’s an old photo from around 1961 with faded colored and very blurry. The original scan and the improvements I tried to make on Picasa are the top photo. Then I worked on it in Photoshop with my very limited understanding (abandoning the idea of layers that up till now still escape my comprehension). I like the two versions I did. One is sharper and brighter, and the other more blurry. Which improved version do you prefer?

This is a very good discipline for me to have to learn something that is way out of my comfort zone. I hope eventually to buy a good DSLR and learn to take good photos of flowers, as well as portraits of dogs and cats so that I can have something to work with on painting. Gotta keep this old brain active so as not to lose my gray matter.

Speaking of gray matter, I am currently working on memorizing the Sermon on the Mount in Portuguese. Now that’s a challenge for me!