Lessons

Lesson Info

Bootcamp Introduction

We've got a lot to cover, we've got a lot of awesome stuff to cover. And I guess the first thing I have to ask, and if you're sitting at home, has anyone ever been to bootcamp? Actually been to bootcamp. Okay so we got one in here, so I've been to bootcamp. This is my bootcamp from 2002. And it took me a long time to find myself here because we all have the same mean mug, but I found myself by my ears. There we are, right here. Cool, so that's me at bootcamp. There's a reason why I like the fact that we put this course together and we called it Bootcamp. The word bootcamp, the name Bootcamp, and as the name Bootcamp implies, especially if you've ever been to bootcamp. Bootcamp is one of those things that everyone goes into bootcamp with all of these predisposed notions of life and how they grew up and how they were raised down to how they folded their clothes and what their family life was like. And everyone goes into bootcamp with their hair the way it was, their clothes they way they...

were, and then pretty much get shaved, everyone looks the same, you all get the same clothes, and you get built back up from the base level all the way up to who you're gonna become in the military in that military capacity. Now we aren't in the military at this point, but why I like the term bootcamp specifically for this course is that I'm not gonna shave your head, but the point is is that, I want you to take this and think about it as you're learning Photoshop from the bare basics and working your way up through to the point that you're gonna learn how to fold your clothes, so to speak, a little bit differently than you did before when you were working with Photoshop after seeing this course. The way this course has been designed has been designed specifically to do that. To break you down to what we call parade rest in the military, and build you back up to the person that you're gonna be using Photoshop. I'm not gonna yell at ya, I'm not gonna scream at ya. I could, I could throw my best TI voice on, as I do this, but nobody would learn anything that way. So we aren't gonna do that. Here's an overview of just what we're gonna do today. And talk about, especially on this presentation. We're gonna talk about the endless learning curve of Photoshop, we're gonna talk about what to expect from and throughout this course, and we're also gonna talk about the three main parts that build Photoshop and what Photoshop's foundation is built upon. Photoshop is an endless learning curve. You've probably heard the fact that Photoshop does have a huge learning curve before. No pun intended, there are curves in there. That was a bad, bad Photoshop joke. (laughing) But the Photoshop learning curve is huge. And this can be a daunting thing. When you are going into this, whether it's client based work, landscape work, not matter what work it is that you're gonna be doing with your photographs, the idea of taking on a program like Photoshop can be very daunting. It's kinda like this, it's kinda like when you think about your existence, let's go a little bit off here, when you think about your existence and who we are on this planet standing right here, we seem so minuscule and we have this huge vast universe around us. Photoshop is the universe of photo editing. It literally is. So if you try to think about even one small little part within Photoshop, if you try to think about the whole spectrum of Photoshop in one fell swoop, you're probably gonna fall. You're gonna fall down, it's gonna knock you out because there's just too much that's going on it. So you have to think about things in their individual levels and build your way back down from that universal view down to your view to see how you exist within this entire universe. It's the same thing with Photoshop. If you think about Photoshop as this vast program, you're never gonna understand and you're never gonna get it. But when we break it down and we look at the individual little teeny tiny parts, it becomes a lot easier. This is not something I want you to be intimidated by by any stretch of the imagination. I want you to be excited about this. This is something that it is to be excited about. There are many programs and many plugins out there, but the reason why Photoshop is my favorite is I'm still learning. You might think that I'm standing here teaching you, so I must know everything about Photoshop and I'm gonna be the first one to raise my hand right now and say even though I've developed this entire course that's over 400 hours put into this, I still don't think I know everything about Photoshop. As a matter of fact, I'd say probably, I may only know 60, maybe 65%. And that's great, I like that. I'm excited by that. I'm not intimidated by that. And every time I jump into Photoshop I teach myself something new. So I'm just gonna give you a basic timeline of how I started. And I'm not doing this because I want to fluff my feathers, because everyone is in a different chapter of their life, especially when it comes to something like Photoshop, they're in a different chapter of where they are with Photoshop, and I just wanna show you where my timeline began and where it's ended with Photoshop, so you get an idea of how long it's taken me to grasp these concepts. But the point is, I don't want you to look at this timeline and be like, "20 years? "I don't wanna be here for 20 years." That's the point, I'm gonna expedite this process for you so you don't have to be here for 20 years. So in 1998 I got my first version of Photoshop, it was Photoshop 5, long before they put the SC in front of it. I was all self-taught. I was basically probably doing illegal things by putting my face on dollar bills. But that's what we all do when we first get Photoshop. We come up with different ways we can make a self portrait. I might have handed them out as business cards too, but that's neither here nor there. I was 18, come on. 2002, I took my first course in Photoshop. Actually four years went by of me thinking I knew everything about Photoshop and that I wasn't gonna learn anything from a digital printmaking course in college. And I was wildly wrong. I learned how to mask four years after jumping into it and trying to teach myself for the first time. Then 2006, I started to, after college, I started to really do a lotta landscape work. I moved to the California coast, so I was doing a lotta things with my landscape images that I would then turn into paintings. And so I started trying to tweak the things in Photoshop to get an ideal look at what my painting would look like, but still I wasn't that great in Photoshop. 2010 I went to Photoshop World. So here's that's 12 years difference. That's a big gap. But I thought, I said you know what, when I go to this place, these guys can't teach me anything. I know 95% of Photoshop. I walked in there thinking I was the bees' knees and I walked outta there know 5% of nothing about Photoshop. They taught me better practices, they taught me better ways, and that is where I said, you know what, I'm gonna dig into this program full heartedly. 12 years of working with Photoshop before I decided that I really knew nothing about it. So I started a blog. That's what you do, right? (laughing) 2011, I dug even a little bit deeper and figured well, the next step is let me just make a YouTube channel about this, because YouTube people, they'll tell you right away when you're doing something wrong. (laughing) So I learned a lot better practices from them as well. This whole path of Photoshop enlightenment, so to speak. 2013, I started writing some books, developed some courses, and that's when Photoshop started becoming a second language for me. That was 15 years. Now, this is speckled with a little bit of formal education, and a lot of self-teaching. Whereas if you're watching this course right now, you're in a much better place than Blake was within that 15 years. You have the desire to learn this in a way that you're going to take a course that is going to teach you everything about Photoshop from the bare basics. And that's exactly what you're gonna need so that you don't have that 15 year gap. That's the whole point is I do not want you to take 15 years to get to this point. It's ridiculous. It was just my stubbornness of not wanting to take an official course on Photoshop. So in 2015, I learned CSS and HTML coding from one of my friends and I started developing panels for Photoshop that would help me speed up my workflow. At this point, Photoshop is not just a second language, it's like I'm getting really fluent in Photoshop. 2017, went a little overboard, have three panels now that I've developed, now presently, I guess I feel comfortable enough right now to be teaching you this on the set of Creative Live. So this has been 20 years of Photoshop experience and I'm still learning. I'm still learning Photoshop. And every day, every day is a school day in Photoshop Land. Because every single time I open Photoshop, and I always leave time to experiment set aside from my normal, day to day stuff. Every time I got into experimentation zone, I go, oh, I never knew that. That's awesome. I'm gonna write that down. And then I end up teaching it in some form or fashion. So even though you might think 20 years of all that experience, even HTML and CSS coding panels for Photoshop, this guy must know all the stuff about Photoshop, and I can humbly tell you that no I do not. And that's exciting for me. And even you sitting here can probably tell me something that you do in Photoshop that don't necessarily do, because we go beyond the practicality of a tool, and we go into the technical uses of it, and the technique of it, more specifically. And some people have some phenomenal techniques. So some best practices. So now you're probably thinking, "Great, now I got 20 years, awesome. "It's gonna take me 20 years to do this, right?" That's not the case. You have to break it down into those small parts. Again, if we think about this universally, you'll be stunted, you'll be stifled and you will not want to continue. So I encourage you to break it down into smaller parts. Actually, that's how we've designed this course into the smallest parts to build its way up. And I recommend that when you see these small parts, you take two weeks for each one of them. Two whole weeks. So I know that you've got client based stuff and you might have your landscape stuff, whatever it is that you do in your business, you say I can't take two weeks to do that, Blake. And I say I know, I can't either. But I know that if I set aside at least one to two hours per day for two whole weeks, even if that means sacrificing some sleep, that by the end of that two weeks, I will know that part really darn well. And then if I start incorporating them into my workflow, it becomes second nature. Then grab another topic, two whole weeks, during your experimentation time. Everyone can take an hour, it's just like working out. Working out is a discipline. If you set aside that time to work out, it becomes a part of your life. If you set aside that time to experiment, it becomes a part of your life. I want you to develop a workflow here and not, this is important, not a random access of functions. Because Photoshop can very easily become a random access of functions. And what I mean by that is, oh yeah, I know how to use the clone stamp tool well, but I don't use anything else in Photoshop. Photoshop has a lot of cool stuff in it that you can use. When you develop a workflow around it, you have everything at your disposal to work on, and you're not just going in there for a random access of functions. So what are we gonna expect during this course? This is four whole weeks of Photoshop. As we said in the beginning of this, this is 20 days, it's broken down into days. If you look at the way these weeks have been built along this course, we're gonna be covering some very basic things here in week one. Then we're gonna go into Photoshop intermediate tasks. Then we're gonna get advanced. And then I'm gonna show full workflows and ways that you can create your own creative effects by week four. So if we look at week one, this is the intro, right now. Then we're gonna go ahead and talk about Bridge. Adobe Camera Raw's gonna be next. Then the Photoshop interface, breaking down the interface, bit by bit, part by part, to set you up so that workflow becomes something conducive for you in Photoshop and you maximize the real estate that's on your screen. Cropping, you'd be surprised how much you can learn about cropping and how important cropping is for our images. Then we're gonna get into layers. Week two, layer tools. That's a really fun one. We build up on layers. Now layers, if you see there, we're not gonna talk about anything to deal with opacity or Blend If, or layer styles, that's all gonna happen in layer tools. And then when we're talking about layer tools, we aren't gonna talk about masks until masks need to be talked about. Just the brush painted mask. Then we're gonna get into selections. And break down how we can use masks with selections with layer tools with layers, and it's all just like a children's storybook of continuation, of things just building up as it goes. Then cleanup tools. Ways that we can cleanup our images and still maintain the integrity of that photograph. And then talk about shapes and text, and how that's really important for photographers. By week three we're gonna get into some more advanced things. Smart objects, transforming and warping our images, actions, automated workflow happening right there, just by the click of a button, just by pressing play in Photoshop. Filters and how those filters are both practical and artistic and which filters you need to use and when. And editing video, that's a really fun topic that we don't often realize we can do in Photoshop, but in my business I know I edit video quite a bit. We can do some really cool things by editing video. By week four, we're gonna get into custom effects, natural portrait retouching, portrait workflows, there's gonna be a whole workflow where, what you see in this last three is really exciting for me, this is awesome because what we're gonna do in these last three is we're gonna go back through all of this stuff that we talked about here and build it up into composite workflow, landscape workflow, portrait workflow, and circle all of this stuff into here. So you're gonna learn all the basics of all these tools, and then by the time you get to here, you're gonna see how all of it comes together. From Adobe, from Bridge, from Adobe Camera Raw, from culling my images in Bridge and to Adobe Camera Raw for basic editings, and then jumping into Photoshop for those more advanced things. And we're gonna finish it up with some of the most difficult things like compositing. Or moving a subject from one image, placing it on the background of another image, and even, maybe even talking about some things like replacing skies in there too. At the end of all this, I've created a panel specifically for this. I talk about panels, and I've created a panel for this Creative Live bootcamp. So that, I don't want you to cheat with this, I want you to learn all the stuff throughout the course, but this is automated, it's like a workflow machine. You push buttons and it does things. Especially when it comes to things like Blend If, can can be really confusing, this is a push button Blend If, really responsive, awesome things that you could do with those layers. When I say push button, I don't want you to think that it's a series of presets, because I'm not a preset man. I like to set you up with a workflow, and have you modify those layers that get built within that workflow, rather than you think that, okay, if I push this button I'm gonna get an image that looks like Blake. No, I wouldn't do that anyway. Because you're an artist, and I don't want you to look like mine, I want you to have your own style. So I want you to think about Photoshop now, what I want you to get to, is think about Photoshop and your learning as a car manufacturing plant. At a car manufacturing plant, you've got a foreman that is somewhere at the end of the line, or the supervisor that is operating around that line. And on that line you might have a person who's whole job is to put one bolt on the trunk. And then you have another person who puts one bolt on the hood. And then another person who puts the wheels on the right hand side of the car. And then another person on the other side that puts the wheels on the left hand side of the car. And then the person at the very end puts the windshield on, so that by the time that car goes from the very beginning to the very end, it's done. Now, it probably takes a lot more than five people to do that, but... (laughing) If for some reason this individual gets sick. The foreman can't necessarily jump in there and do that, because he might not know what that person's job is. But he knows the person to call on. So that space can get filled. So the job can continue to get going. How does this related to Photoshop? Well, the foreman essentially would be the person who knows what tool to kinda go to in Photoshop, but doesn't necessarily know how to use it. And then each one of those individual people on the line would essentially be a different thing that happens within Photoshop. So my goal here is for you not to, is for you to no longer be the foreman of Photoshop. I want you to know all these tools, so that instead of just, oh well, yeah, I know that I can do that with that tool, but I don't really know how to use it, lemme go consult with X, Y, Z to figure that out. I want you to understand and know these tools so that you're not in a position where you look at it and you're just like I wish I could do that, but I can't. So I'm just not going to. That's not the case, I don't want that to be like that at all.