File Under: “Duh!”

But cross reference it under: “Valuable Lessons”.

Yesterday I worked in PhotoShop Elements. Earlier in the week I had watched one of the free podcasts by Corey Barker. He’s the host of “Adobe Photoshop Elements Killer Tips” (available on Apple iTunes). I wanted to try some of the techniques I had seen. So I started from scratch. The only pre-made item I used was a Grunge Texture. Everything else was the result of my experimenting with colors, textures, layer styles, shadows and fonts which live in PSE. I worked at it for a couple of hours, including a quick review of one piece of the podcast. I was very happy with the final product and started typing up a little information sheet in Text Editor. I was about to save the PhotoShop file when the keyboard froze up. Yup. Locked up completely. I didn’t even have a cursor or a “spinning beach ball of death”! My heart started pounding as I groaned aloud. I felt so stupid! I asked Chuck for advice, but I knew he didn’t have a magic wand. I hadn’t even saved the Text document, which detailed all the colors, settings and techniques!

I drew a quick sketch of the layout and then I pushed the button and shut the whole computer down. I kept my fingers crossed as I powered the laptop up again, but no chance. Everything I had worked on was gone. So I started over. As soon as I had a couple of layers I saved and named the file. And I saved it over and over every couple of layers. It’s my habit to save word processing documents frequently, but I had never thought to save PSE files in progress! I think I associated saving with “merging” or “flattening”, but saving keeps all the layers separate and editable. Lesson number one learned.

Lesson number two was equally valuable. I was able to recreate the entire layout in well under half an hour! When I started over, I was dreading how long it would take to redo the project. But because I had already made all the choices, I breezed through it. Chuck looked over and saw how rapidly it was all coming together and reminded me how slow and agonizing working in PSE was just a few months ago. It felt great! I realized how much I have learned and how much more smoothly and surely I navigate within the program.

Here’s the finished product:


Layout, photos and paper by LMR/Pink Granite. Software: Apple iPhoto 5 & Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 for Mac. Refresh Grunge Texture by Lori Cook (available at Scrap Girls) Font: Bradley Hand ITC TT.