Friday, 19 July 2013

Photoshop's Most Dangerous Competitor - MS Office!

That's right, forget all these new fangled competitors. Good old Microsoft Office is probably Photoshop's most dangerous competitor. Here's why, it's already installed on your machine, there's a fair chance you have some idea how to use it and it has some functions that take a lot of effort in Photoshop.

It's not dangerous, because it's as good as Photoshop. There are a lot of limitations, but for sheer speed and efficiency it's hard to beat.  You can remove a background in seconds, correct most colour imperfections equally quickly and apply a large range of Artistic effects.



Once you have your photo in decent shape then you can add a frame very simply indeed, there's a decent range of presets, but choosing your own is only a couple of extra steps.




Then finally there are the cropping tools. Click crop and a rectangular crop comes straight up, but you can crop to any shape you like. You want a love heart it's yours.

The one thing that seem less than keen to flaunt is how quickly you can save them back to an image. Just right click and save.
Sometimes this doesn't get you the effect you want as it just throws out the original image.
To get the final effect, use:Then right click and save image. If you want the mask to stay in tact, I recommend Save As Type PNG.

Once you are an expert,  it takes me less than 2 minutes an image to create worksheets for my students.


I challenge anybody to create  an image like this in under 1 minute in anything, but MS Office. I can't even load a Photoshop image in that time, on my beat up old laptop.










Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Infographics, a posh word for a PowerPoint Slide!

Seriously, people say that they no longer want slides and that it's all about Infographics. Then they find a new way to bore people with images that go on forever.  If you want a quality Infographic look no further than PowerPoint and if you'd like those statistics to be a good deal less bogus, use Excel to calculate them.   In this video, I show you how to make an infographic in PowePoint.  


For those of you who are teaching here is a Scheme of Work that I made: