Picture Tubes

I must admit, I still haven't seen the great usefullness of Picture Tubes. That isn't to say I don't think they're pretty cool. I know my students love playing with them. I still see them as a special type of clip art, and therefore not much more funtional than clip art. I did, however, find some nice Christmas picture tubes and thought I might make a nice Christmas themed title for my class home page. I'll throw this on the page sometime right after Thanksgiving.

Layers

I didn't have a fun images to practice layering techniques. I do see another great use for layering. I use it like a spreadsheet for graphics. That is to say layers allow me to play what if games. Using layers it is easy to change text, backgrounds, and images without being required to redo the entire image.

To create this image I opened a blank background layer and used the paintbrush tool with the ocean texture to paint in the "water." Then I created the text in a separate text layer. Then I create a separate layer with the embossed salmon I created for lesson two. By using layers, I was able to easily switch back and forth, adjusting opacity, adding shadows to the text, etc... This my not be the dramatic artistic effects some people using layers, but, I find it very useful.