The Wonders of Photoshop

I've seen a former boss of mine do incredible things with Photoshop.  He could create beautiful and eye-catching posters with just a few photos.  He could twist cherry blossom branches around words on a poster, advertising a poetry reading, and he could make an old face look young again.  I therefore always viewed photoshop as a great tool for people in advertising, marketing and PR as my boss created posters and promotional materials for university events. 

He taught me a few things, but I was still rusty when I tried making the above photo.  It started off as a simple winterscape, and I inserted my golden retriever Riley into the scene.  I did this using the lasso cut and paste technique.  I wanted to master cutting, pasting and moving objects around in a photo, so my third "layer" became the tree on the right hand side.  It's a copy of the tree trunk on the inner left-hand side.  Once that was done, I experimented with the magic wand.  Highlighting the grass on which Riley was sitting on in his original photo, I turned the snow into grass using the magic wand.  To make the grass look more realistic, I tried to vary the color to create a shade effect.  I also used the smudge tool to blend the grass into the snow.  The magic wand was also used to put more fluffy snow around Riley so it looks like he's sitting in a snow bank.  Flowers that were cut, pasted, shrunk then copied and text were the final touches. 

I'm pretty happy with the final result - it's certainly amateur but that's okay.  Photoshop is a great way for kids to create book covers, posters and artistic images for class projects or extracurricular activities, like drama club or student council.  Teachers often like to play with images when reading poems or narratives, so it could be fun to challenge students to create a metaphorical background for a poem through photoshop.  Teachers should reach out to school tech professionals for tutorials, and for extra support when teaching kids how to use photoshop.