When first opening Photoshop, you go to file and New, then bringing up a new window. Where it says "preset" which we would usually click "International paper" as this is the best one for us. Not only this but we've been taught that the measurements for A4 and A3 which for A4 it's 21cm width, 29.7cm height and for A3 it's 42cm width, 29.7cm height. After learning this, we brought up Photoshop. Jo told us having 300 DPI for print which is the best quality. We were also told about colour mode. We will be using the two main ones, "RBG" and "CMYK". "RBG" stands for Red Blue Green, and "CMYK" stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and key. CMYK is the best quality colour mode to have when printing magazines especially.
Firstly, we used the Marquee tool, a tool for making certain shapes, such as ovals, circles, rectangles and squares. When clicking on this button and dragging across your page you'll make a shape. When wanting to draw a perfect square, you hold down shift and then drag, changing a rectangle to a square. The shapes I did are to the right, adding colour with the paint bucket located on the left hand side of the Photoshop screen. To get a perfect circle, you also press shift which will then allow you to do so. 
Afterwards, we were to make our shapes have smooth edges. This will therefore come across as friendly, and welcoming, whereas sharp edges instantly portray harsh tones which is not what you want. To do this, you go to select, modify and click on smooth, you then set it from 1-16 on how smooth you want your edges to be, 1 being not very much, 16 being the smoothest they can be. By smoothing the shape it portrays happiness and calmness rather than anger. 
After this, we made our own brushes. This is cool, creative and fun and makes your work so much better because you're showing you have a great imagination. To do this you go on google and choose any image you like, you then paste it into Photoshop via CTRL V. Afterwards you go to edit and define brush presets. You'll then rename your brush, so I renamed mine Finding Nemo. After that you go to your brush set and your most recent brush will be at the bottom, so you click that, click on the colour you want and you'll then have your brush. 
My favourite part of this task was using the history brush tool. This is where you make your image black and white but then colour a certain part of the image in colour to therefore make it stand out from the rest. To do this, you choose any image you want, so I chose this picture of Rihanna and Drake. This is because it's an image bursting with colour, making it easy to create an effective image with history brush. After downloading an image, you click image, mode, grayscale, DON'T FLATTEN and then you repeat this, image, mode, RBG mode, DON'T FLATTEN, and the image remains in grayscale. You then click on the history brush tool in the toolbox and select how big you want your brush to be, clicking shift and open or closed bracket ( [ ] ). You then choose where to colour in, and so I went for Rihanna's red lips because they represent power and passion, and I also coloured in their jumpers to show how aesthetically pleasing their dress sense in this photo is.
Guides in photoshop are very useful, helping you line up an image. By doing this, it can help you to get it in the right place much easier. To do this, you have to drag your cursor over the rulers at the side and at the top, drag it down to where you want it to be on your image. If you don't want to see the guidelines, you can always hide them, all you have to do is hold the Ctrl key and the colon key (:)
Afterwards, we learned how to use your own custom shape tool. This is selecting a different shape, other than a typical square or circle to make your posters or creative CVs a lot more interesting. To do this, you go to the icon to the left, you then click on the different shape tools at the top. All shapes may not instantly appear, so what you have to do is go to the cog and click on all to bring up all possible shapes. 
Not only this, but we learned how to warp a shape. To do this, you firstly draw your shape, I chose a rectangle. Afterwards you choose a gradient. A gradient is using two colours, fading from one to another which is really creative and aesthetically pleasing. I chose to go from a light blue to dark blue, creating a monochromatic feel as it's two shades of one specific colour, meaning they match well. Having this at the top of my page looks professional yet creative. After this, we warped our work, which makes a simple rectangle transform into a funky looking shape, useful for a border maybe for your name to go in. As cool as this looks, we were introduced to opacity: a tool which enables you to choose how much a shape is faded in colour. So I decided to fade mine to 40% to see how well it would look and it turned out amazingly well. It's not as harsh, much more subtle yet still noticeable and looks a lot more aesthetically pleasing. 
Afterwards, we were told how you create a stroke. By doing this on your page it enables you to look like you're creative and professional, you look like you know what you're doing. To do this, I clicked on the paint bucket and changed the colour to light blue, left clicking then onto my page to change the white background to blue. By using my marquee tool, I created a shape on top of my screen, leaving the light blue colour still showing, as seen in the image provided to the right. Just by using the stroke I've made my page look a lot more eye catching and pleasing. Not only this, but you can also stroke an image, outlining it to match the colour of your border. To do this, you have to CTRL and click on the thumbnail, and then go to edit. Once you've hovered over edit, you go to stroke, which then brings up a box asking you what colour you want your border and what width. 
I chose to go with the blue colour I used for my stroke on the background to keep up the consistency. I also chose my width to be 40px so that it was thick enough to be noticeable but not too thick to be the only thing you look at on the poster. 
After doing my border on both my image and the Photoshop as a whole, we learned how to edit an image. For example, there's such thing as iris blur, enabling you to focus on one particular part of an image. For example, the photo on the right is the original image, and so by using the iris blur tool on the left hand side I've been able to focus on the main flower in the middle. To do this, I had to go to "filter" and then scroll down to the "blur" option. After hovering over this, it brings up several options, including iris blur, so you click that which then brings up a new window to choose what you focus point is going to be. After clicking OK you're taken back and your image has been changed and you then have a blurred photo.
Afterwards, we were introduced to another sort of blur called tilt shift, a creative way to focus on a a part of a photo vertically or horizontally. So for my example, I used a firework display next to the Eiffel Tower. I figured that I should focus on the Eiffel Tower rather than the fireworks because the fireworks would still be recognizable even when blurred. So, I focused on the Eiffel Tower shown below. By doing this it creates an effective image due to your eyes instantly being drawn to the Eiffel Tower. You're allowed to make the tilt shift as wide or as narrow as you want, so I set it to be wide in order to get a couple of the fireworks in the background. This overall creates a powerful image.
After blurring a photo, we learned how to create noise on an image. This is an example of noise. By doing this you had texture to your work rather than have it quite boring. This is an effective tool for a creative CV as it shows you to be inventive. I also added a stroke to this so it added the noise colour to the outer area of the image. I chose the colours pink and white as they compliment each other, using a subtle pink to match the purest of white, therefore creating a calm image, relaxing, yet made fun by the Noise effect.
We then moved onto the different texts. For starters, we learned how to download new fonts. By going on "dafont.com" you're welcomed to a page full of different fonts people have made around the world. After downloading it, you then extract it and add it to your downloaded font file at the bottom of your windows page. After doing this, it will automatically add to your fonts so from then on you're able to use it.
However, before doing this, we just used our default fonts, exploring what we could do with these.
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