For many years, I have been a great lover of good quality pictures. I started buying my digital camera 5 years ago and it was a Fuji 3.2 mega pixel camera.

I loved taking pictures of friends during outings and family members during gatherings and even simple hang outs.

After I have my taken my digital pictures, I try to tinker them with Photoshop.

Photoshop is a very neat software. One can easily manipulate picture by just clicking auto color or auto level or auto contrast and voila – the picture gets significantly enhanced.

I initially started using Photoshop to edit my photos for my personal digital photo albums which I share to my friends and close relatives. As I progressed, I started using Photoshop to earn extra little income by enhancing photos for local magazines such as those in school and organizational magazines. Later on, I started using Photoshop to make brochures and giant posters printed in tarpaulin.

Using Photoshop can be daunting for a beginner. Because of its hundreds of features, a beginner can really get confused with how to go about with using the feature.

I think the key to learning this software is to play around with it and not getting scared of what may happen. The learning curve is very steep at the beginning. In fact, it took me some months to get the hang of it because I was self studying. I read a lot of tutorials on Photoshop on the internet.

The feature I like best with Photoshop is its layering ability. This is like stacking several photos and manipulating each layer to come with effects, say, a giraffe with a human head.

Like a physical working table, the editing window of Photoshop comes with dockable or movable palettes or tool sections. This tool includes selection tools like square and oval marquees, lasso and magic wand tools. There are also the eraser tools, rubber stomp, cropping tool, slicing tool and others.

Photoshop can even deal with many kinds of color models like RGB and CMYK models, Lab color, Bitmap, Gray scale and Duotone. It very easy to switch from one color model to another. I use RGB models for photos used on the computer like web graphics and CMYK for photos used on the internet like web graphics.

Another neat feature I like best with Photoshop is its ability to handle vector and raster graphics simultaneously. For those who are not aware, raster graphics are those that are mapped pixel by pixel on the computer screen, hence, they are also called bitmaps. Vectors on the other hands, are drawn on the screen using a mathematical formula. For example, a font or a line or any many other geometric shapes are drawn using a pre-defined mathematical formula. With Photoshop’s support for both vector and raster graphics, one can make postcards and other similar item which have photos with letter and other geometric shapes.

As of this writing, I think Photoshop is already at version 10 marketed as Photoshop CS3. But even with my version 7, I am a very content user already.