Ok-Chap 9 has been redeemed

So now I understand the mask lesson-still not sure why I was not able to access the mask to uncover the mountains the first four times and the redeeming factor was learning how to merge all the photos and then being able to paint in his misses into the last photo-can't wait until I can use that- I have ideas brewing....so over all this was frustrating but rewarding in the end-still think he needs to have someone go through his lessons to make sure his instructions work....

Frustrating Chapter 9-Building Layered Compositions

So this is this worst chapter of the book....so far...if only he would tell us the goals before we started the assignments it would not be so bad...I have to say the chapter started off fine with the fruit lesson and football... (It was fun to play with the dimensions of the fruit hat )which were a little fun but alot of times I wished he would give us a little intro to want he wanted to accomplish...and he did with the first two lessons, but somehow after that with the mountain lesson the good directions got lost...and I found myself wanting to just quit and walk away...but I didn't I just skipped over some parts that instructions were lacking-at least in my book...wish he would sit with someone while they were doing the lessons in his book so that he would know when he needed to elaborate more or have more pictures to help explain some of his steps....I think that these processes have become so easy for him that he doesn't understand how difficult it can be for newbies like me...I wish he would give real life application of when we would use these tools...seems like we're just doing silly assignments....and maybe they have to be to illustrate the tools but the tools are quite amazing and it would be nice to learn about it more practically and maybe have this chapter less dense....I really liked this book up until now....maybe he will redeem himself before the end of the chapter....

Lesson 8 Focus and Filters

This chapter was amazing and at times a little frustrating...
Sharpening the bears images was quite amazing-made me want to find all my out of focus photos and fix them up...The subway exercises were cool but frustrating...it was fun to take the graffiti off using the stamp tool, vanishing points and planes...making the grids was way cool-but adjusting the text was way frustrating-even he knew that when he said "good luck" finding the handles to resize and fit the text into the walls...this took the most time, but was intriguing because of the 3-D effect and working within the planes...cloning the walls and then moving them blew me away and thankfully this time he had good directions...so it made it easy to follow his steps.
of course, the best part about this chapter was the last lesson where we used the free-form distortions...this was way fun, fun, fun and again quite amazing and he had good instructions so that made it easy to follow...I was again amazed at the ability of photoshop to manipulate pixels....makes me want to buy photoshop so I can play around with images.