Practice using Photoshop

Last year i did a video based production and therefore have no previous experience in using photoshop and photo editing programmes. Others in my group however do have knowledge about how to work the programme and have had experience using photoshop even though they some of them also did video based production last year. For this reason i decided to get a few images and play around with them to see what effects i can do and how to do these. However i did not use photoshop as i do not have access to photoshop at home. I used a programme called Paint.Net which is considered to be very similar to photoshop. I felt that although this is not photoshop i will stil be able to gain some knowledge on how to create certain effects and how to even fo some of the more basic things. Therefore this will give me an opportunity to enhance my techniques and learn how to do things as i go along.

Our group has already come up with an idea for our front cover and we will soon be uploading a mock up design of our digipak. I decided to try and put together the front cover by using Paint.Net just to see how i would come across doing this.


I used the two images below to create the 3rd image. I will explain a few pointers below about how i did this.

Our initial idea is something along the lines of what you can see above (however this is only a practice that i did and there were some effects that we are going to try and create in our final design that i have not yet been able to conquer).
I did not have any images of a person standing on a hillside with a balloon in his hand and therefore decided to take two seperate images and merge them into one final image. In our actual design for our cover we will be using an image of our artist shot in such a scene and therefore will not need to put together the two images.
I firstly edited the picture of the girl holding the baloon in Paint.Net. I removed all the background and coloured the remaining in area in black so that it looks like a shilouette. However the girl in the image is wearing a hat and is also not an image of the girl head to toe. Therefore i had to draw the rest of the body and also had to erase some areas to create a figure like shape. I then had to create another layer with the hillside background and change it so that it is an overlay. This image i changed into a black and white tone which was very simple. I then cut the figure and pasted it onto the black and white hillside background. However it was slightly challenging to change the size of the figure without distorting the shape as it appeared that the pixels altered the shape making it look slightly strange. This left the final thing to do which was changin the colour of the balloon. However when i filled in the balloon in the orange colour it looked very odd as it was a very blunt image of the balloon. To make it look more realistic i used 'gassian blur' to slightly blur out the colour so it looks like a slightly more softened shape.
Although this may not seem like much skill and may not seem like alot of affects have been created i feel that for the first time of using Paint.Net i have been able to create a good image. I feel that i will be able to improve my skills now that i have basic knowledge on how to use photo editing programmes. I do realise however the image looks slightly 'cartoonish' and i will work on trying to improve my editing skills to making the image look more realistic.