RTF As Breadcrumbs

I was working on a digital art project today which suddenly stalled. I wanted to try a particular effect in Photoshop CS3, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember how to get there. It was something I knew I had done before which added to the frustration. So I plugged in my external hard drive where I keep my digital art and scrapbooking files. (Without the EHD, my laptop’s hard drive would have long ago burst forth like Lucy Ricardo’s bread did in her kitchen!) When I create a digital scrapbooking page, a greeting card or any sort of digital art, I make a separate folder for it. I found the folder I was looking for. It held four experiments I had done working with a photograph of autumn leaves. In addition to the four Photoshop files, I also had a Rich Text Format document (RTF) in the folder. On that little no frills document I had typed up each step, filter and setting I had used in each of the digital experiments. Sure enough, there, under #4, was the previously elusive setting of Filter > Distort > Glass > Texture > Blocks which I had been hunting for.

Moral of the story? Create an RTF doc and jot down what you did. With all the fun things to play with in Photoshop Elements or CS3, some nifty technique could easily fall by the wayside. But with the RTF you can find your way back.

Here’s an example of what I was working with (using a photo from Lexington) - which after all that and all that, isn’t what I finally settled on!