Among all the design tools, the most helpful and user-friendly one for me is definitely Photoshop.
The work portrayed above is the first design project I had created using Photoshop. This is an album cover for the band Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. The background was a painting done by me on paper.
My first experience with Design Software, Photoshop.
The first time I had finally got a chance to create work using digital design tools was when I enrolled in a Creative Media course at Yoobee college last year. With straightforward instructions given by my tutor, I quickly found my way in Photoshop and then Ai. One time I was tasked with designing an album cover for a 1980s rock band of my own choice and I decided to try Photoshop for this project. For the background imagery I wanted to paint it my own as this would provide more originality and also give the final work the vintage feeling it was supposed to give off. Since this is rock and roll, I made use of analogous colours: red, orange and yellow to create a strong sense of energy and passion. Additionally, the thick black strokes standing out in the imagery partly signify rebellion and distinction, which are some iconic characteristics of Rock and Roll. I then scanned the painting and started working in Photoshop. For image adjustments, I used Camera Raw Filter in the Fiters bar and then blended the edited background with Joan Jett figures (which I had cut out with quick selection tool to remove their original backgrounds). For blending, I solely went with Blending layers options as I find most of these choices make different layers work really well together.
Practise
Encouraged by positive as well as negative feedbacks for my first digital project, I started creating more work using design software.
These are items I designed for sale in the Matariki Festival during my course. This was when I realized Photoshop was extremely helpful in colouring shapes as well. I chose red and blue as main colour choices because these are both strong, vibrant colour so that the energy of the people and the festival could be best signified. The blending options also made the wrinkles of the shirt more realistic looking. For this project I simply sketched out the designs on paper, then outlined them with the pen tool in Photoshop and finally colored them in the software.
Overall, I would say Photoshop is my most favourable design software as a beginner due to its variation of tools, the ability to edit images and animation in different styles and its straightforwardness. One minor problem I would say when you want to use Photoshop is that you have to pay for it because it is not a free software. Another thing that some people have mentioned is that Photoshop has less support for vector graphics and I did realize this when I tried out Adobe Illustrator and compared the vector graphics to that of Photoshop.
Reference
22 Pros and Cons of Using Adobe Photoshop. (2019). PGBS. Retrieved from http://www.proglobalbusinesssolutions.com/photoshop-pros-cons/