Tag: Photoshop

My project is turned in and I am awaiting a grade for it.  With it behind me I feel like I can speak on how I did.  One quick aside, Corona Virus decided to make it’s global debut right in the middle of the project so I didn’t get to finish as much as I would like to.

I feel like I did way better at figuring out Photoshop than I thought I might before I started.  I knew I could learn the program, it was my mindset that was going to hold me back in this project.  What I found as I went along was that if I had an assignment or a task to complete it was not hard for me to make it happen.  However, on the projects where I needed to come up with something from scratch I often needed some inspiration.  Overall, I feel like I have a good working knowledge of Photoshop and how to use it.

My evidence is in my portfolio which can be found here.  I’m excited to be able to put up some original work and show off what I learned.  As I mentioned above, there is still learning to be done so I’ll be able to finish that up during the summer.

One of the projects that I have been assigned in my graduate school program is a genius hour.  In short, it is a time set aside for me to work on a topic skill that I have self selected.  The only specific in this case was that it had to be associated with Educational Technology.  I chose to learn a skill that I have thought about in the past, but never fully understood.  I am learning Adobe Photoshop.

I won’t bore you with the procedural details like how I am learning it, what my end product will be, etc.  Instead I wanted to catalog what I am learning  and how it applies to future endeavors.

My main takeaway so far with Photoshop is that I can learn the skills but my weakness is my creative mindset.  I am enough of a tinkerer that I can figure out most programs relatively quickly.  There are some specific quirks to Photoshop that I am learning on the fly and getting frustrated with at times, but those are few and far between.  When I struggle the most is when I lack inspiration for what to create or modify.  The course that I am walking through suggests some practice exercises.  They are trying to leave them general enough to fit anyone’s interests, but I sometimes have a hard time getting started because of no inspiration.

The question for me is how do I build my creative mindset to the point where I do not get frustrated getting started?   I am assuming this comes down to practice.  So I will endeavor to practice using the creative part of my brain so that I do not get so easily frustrated.