I decided to add another hobby to my list of things to waste my time on and today I began my journey into learning Photoshop. I may regret starting this.

This short post falls under the heading of ‘You have to start somewhere’ and with software as non-intuitive as Photoshop that more or less means a few steps past launching the program. I began with something simple hoping that it would facilitate learning the interface–but it didn’t.

I started with a photo shown above left of a sphinx I took in the museum at Delphi, Greece ten or twelve years ago.

I wanted to replace the drab museum walls surrounding the sphinx with a more pleasing background. The lower waterfalls from Lombok Island, shown to the right, an island immediately east of Bali in the Indonesian Archipelago, fitted the need for a more interesting background.

Both pictures were imported into Photoshop as layers. I cropped the sphinx pic and removed its background and then I arranged the layers so the sphinx is on top the waterfall pic. The result is shown to the left.

The composite pic only took a few minutes once I understood the Photoshop jargon and found the right buttons, but that took about 45 painful minutes. The software is not for the casual user, and it will take some time reach a proficiency that doesn’t raise my blood pressure every time I use it. I’ll post something a little more involved later on.