[Award Winner] Tutorial~The Mystery Behind the Mask ~ Photoshop Masks +

[jfrazierjr]

All right, once again, my two cents -- for whatever it's worth!

I went through your entire tutorial (Hey! It's not done yet! There's a cliffhanger at the end!),

Actually, I hope to get that part done tonight. However, EVEN when I get that cliffhanger part finished, I plan to throw up several more posts/videos adding additional tips and tricks.

and I still think my personal favorite is the text version with screenshots. I'm not saying that the videos would not be helpful -- but not only did these go off of my screen and cut off the view of what was happening, but they were very fast, and I missed what you were doing (not helped by the missing portions, I think!).

Even the later ones? I actually plan to redo the original one and get the physical dimensions down some to avoid the off the screen problem. As for the speed, I tried to go at slightly slower than my normal speed, but no so slow that I wasted a lot of time which would bloat the file sizes of the video (which as stated is why I did very short videos as stated before)

I think that in a text-type tutorial, one could assume that the viewer has some basic skills with the graphics program they're using (PS, GIMP, etc.) and some of the screenshot examples could be left out -- things like 'create a new layer and name it 'Water Texture' and other such basic instructions -- thus cutting down on the number of screenshots you'd actually need to use.

I wanted to make this tutorial accessible to anyone, no matter what their level of experience was, however, it was made for intermediate people in mind. Typed out bullet points are much less time consuming for me than taking screen shots.

And here's another totally outrageous idea... There are some tutorials that I like to refer back to frequently. How about providing a downloadable (PDF) version I can keep forever and ever and ever??

I know. I'm making MORE WORK. I'd actually be willing to help out some. I'm a pretty good editor, and although my PS skills are hardly up to professional quality, I'd be happy to try to fill in the PS equivalents to GIMP commands.

(And I'm probably up to about 25¢ now, huh?)

I would love to do the whole PDF thing, and wanted to... but... I really don't have any way that I know of to do such, at least not that I know of. If someone could point me in the right direction to some free software for layout that would export to PDF, that would be ok. However, it has to be something brain dead simple. While I am a techie and fairly smart, I just don't have the time to learn any new programs right now...