They are many techniques are available in the Adobe Photoshops. It just a matter of the user/designer creativity to use it in a proper way. That is how active and self learner take place. All student independently have to explore details on how to use all the tools available. One of the most important techniques I used is a crop techniques. All the pictures have been applied to this techniques. This technique purposely to combine two or more picture to have a one nice picture. Others trick I used is duplicate layer and background layer. It is to avoid interruption to the layer so that ease for us to manage our work.
Filter also my popular tricks in order to get a nice effect to the picture. For example in my picture one (1), I used motion blur and noise filter to get some nice motion blur effect. For my picture two (2), I used pixelate, mosaic and also gausian blur filter. This kind of filters is to pixels the picture and illustrated many windows on single picture. To create the water color paints and rain effect in the picture four, I also used a filter technique. For example I used cut out filter and media filter (bluring the image) to produce water color effect while again I used noise, gacusian, and another motion blur filter to produce a rain effect.
Next technique I usually used in this assignment is play with the blend mode to the layers. For example, I used color burn mode for picture one, overlay and multiply mode for picture two, pinlight and softlight mode to the picture three, and mode luminosity to picture four. I noticed when I play around with this blend mode, I can see a nice transformation effect to each of the layer that have been applied. So effective technique and love to use it. Other than that I also play with color and used brush tool to get a nice effect to the picture. For example, I used colorized image technique to picture one and then using brush tool to paint the image in order to get natural skin color.
Last but not least technique that I applied to my last picture (picture five) is, I used plugin software. This is very useful tip in order to ease our job where its can minimise the steps to produce an interesting picture effect. For this picture I try to use two different plugin software. There are Dither plugin and Niksoft plugin. This two plugin have a different function and features also different interface but combination of them produce very interesting impact to my picture.