Starting to Get the Hang of Photoshop

Photoshop is one of the only applications I've ever used that continues to baffle me after such a long time. I can usually work something out within a couple of hours at most and I can normally gt my head around even the least intuitively designed pieces of software. For a long time however, Photoshop has had me baffled, flummoxed and bewildered.

Today however, I needed to do something that I couldn't do in Fireworks. Fireworks has been my Photoshop cop out and saviour because until now, it could do everything I needed Photoshop for but in a much simpler and (in my opinion) more intuitive way. After following one of the many tutorials on the web which corresponded exactly with what I wanted, I began to find some of the features in Photoshop actually very useful. The macro recorded was particularly useful in this instance because I was performing the same transformation on a lot of photos so that saved me a great deal of time.

Sadly, after finishing the first illustration exactly how I had envisioned it, I couldn't replicate it again for the second one. In fact, the second one looked so horrendous that I am going to have to re-do the first one with an exacting formula so that it can be replicated for the other ten illustrations I need to do. I would have gone back to using the macro but rather than set steps that I was merely repeating, the transformations were qualitative rather than discrete and tweaks were being made left right and centre. If I could go through and arrange all of the components perfectly first time or even find out the properties of the components in the first illustration, I wouldn't have a problem. As it stands, I'm not sure if Photoshop has that feature and even if I did, I probably wouldn't be able to find it.

With time, perhaps I will start using it over Fireworks but at the moment, I know what I like and I'm planning to stick with it for a bit longer.