Lessons
Bootcamp Introduction
16:22 2The Bridge Interface
13:33 3Setting up Bridge
06:55 4Overview of Bridge
11:29 5Practical Application of Bridge
27:56 6Introduction to Raw Editing
11:00 7Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface
07:39 8Global Tools Part 1
16:44Global Tools Part 2
20:01 10Local Tools
22:56 11Introduction to the Photoshop Interface
07:13 12Toolbars, Menus and Windows
25:07 13Setup and Interface
11:48 14Adobe Libraries
05:57 15Saving Files
07:39 16Introduction to Cropping
12:10 17Cropping for Composition in ACR
04:44 18Cropping for Composition in Photoshop
12:40 19Cropping for the Subject in Post
03:25 20Cropping for Print
07:34 21Perspective Cropping in Photoshop
07:11 22Introduction to Layers
08:42 23Vector & Raster Layers Basics
05:05 24Adjustment Layers in Photoshop
27:35 25Organizing and Managing Layers
15:35 26Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes
21:34 27Screen and Multiply and Overlay
09:15 28Soft Light Blend Mode
07:34 29Color and Luminosity Blend Modes
12:47 30Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes
07:43 31Introduction to Layer Styles
11:43 32Practical Application: Layer Tools
13:06 33Introduction to Masks and Brushes
04:43 34Brush Basics
09:22 35Custom Brushes
04:01 36Brush Mask: Vignettes
06:58 37Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn
06:53 38Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation
07:52 39Mask Groups
05:52 40Clipping Masks
04:11 41Masking in Adobe Camera Raw
07:06 42Practical Applications: Masks
14:03 43Introduction to Selections
05:42 44Basic Selection Tools
17:41 45The Pen Tool
11:56 46Masks from Selections
04:22 47Selecting Subjects and Masking
07:11 48Color Range Mask
17:35 49Luminosity Masks Basics
12:00 50Introduction to Cleanup Tools
07:02 51Adobe Camera Raw
10:16 52Healing and Spot Healing Brush
14:56 53The Clone Stamp Tool
10:20 54The Patch Tool
06:38 55Content Aware Move Tool
04:56 56Content Aware Fill
06:46 57Custom Cleanup Selections
15:42 58Introduction to Shapes and Text
13:46 59Text Basics
15:57 60Shape Basics
07:00 61Adding Text to Pictures
09:46 62Custom Water Marks
14:05 63Introduction to Smart Objects
04:37 64Smart Object Basics
09:13 65Smart Objects and Filters
09:05 66Smart Objects and Image Transformation
10:57 67Smart Objects and Album Layouts
11:40 68Smart Objects and Composites
10:47 69Introduction to Image Transforming
04:34 70ACR and Lens Correction
09:45 71Photoshop and Lens Correction
14:26 72The Warp Tool
11:16 73Perspective Transformations
20:33 74Introduction to Actions in Photoshop
09:27 75Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface
05:06 76Making Your First Action
03:49 77Modifying Actions After You Record Them
11:38 78Adding Stops to Actions
04:01 79Conditional Actions
07:36 80Actions that Communicate
25:26 81Introduction to Filters
04:38 82ACR as a Filter
09:20 83Helpful Artistic Filters
17:08 84Helpful Practical Filters
07:08 85Sharpening with Filters
07:32 86Rendering Trees
08:20 87The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters
15:08 88Introduction to Editing Video
06:20 89Timeline for Video
08:15 90Cropping Video
03:34 91Adjustment Layers and Video
05:25 92Building Lookup Tables
07:00 93Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type
15:11 94ACR to Edit Video
06:10 95Animated Gifs
11:39 96Introduction to Creative Effects
06:08 97Black, White, and Monochrome
18:05 98Matte and Cinematic Effects
08:23 99Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades
12:20 100Gradients
04:21 101Glow and Haze
10:23 102Introduction to Natural Retouching
05:33 103Brightening Teeth
10:25 104Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool
08:07 105Cleaning and Brightening Eyes
16:58 106Advanced Clean Up Techniques
24:47 107Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization
14:47 108ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits
21:27 109Portrait Workflow Techniques
18:46 110Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization
12:17 111Landscape Workflow Techniques
37:36 112Introduction to Compositing & Bridge
06:59 113Composite Workflow Techniques
34:01 114Landscape Composite Projects
24:14 115Bonus: Rothko and Workspace
05:15 116Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos
07:05 117Bonus: The Mask (Extras)
05:18 118Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR
04:54Lesson Info
Brightening Teeth
First thing's first, here. We're gonna go ahead and just open up our image into Adobe CameraRoll. Now, I had my lovely assistant, my wife, helping me with this, so you have to kind of see this, 'cause it's just a little bit funny. When you're trying to tell someone how to focus on the eyes, and you take 150 some odd pictures to try and do that, you start to look like that. We don't want to process this one. We just want to process this one. So, before I even start the whole retouching process, because I am shooting with the raw file, I'm gonna start by just making a nice little baseline photograph for me to work off of, right here in Adobe CameraRoll. And here, I might fix things like my white balance, the exposure, and just getting the image right before I hop into Photoshop. Now, I'm not gonna do a whole lot of the hard or heavy lifting, I should say here, of the actual retouching. I'm gonna leave that to Photoshop, because it's got an abundance of layers and tools that are gonna hel...
p me make these modifications. So, what I'm working on is, I'm typically right here, I'm just trying to get maybe the exposure a little bit brighter, bring out some of the shadows in the background there, maybe boost up those shadows just a little bit. And then drop those highlights, because they're pretty hot on my face right there. Some of these things, I could do in Photoshop, but it's just so much easier to do them right here, so that the original raw file has these saved in the XPM sidecar file. I can look at the white balance. If I use the white balance tool, press I, I can press and hold shift... I can just press hold shift. Why is it doing that, I don't want that. There we go. I'll just go ahead and press and hold shift and make a selection for the area on my face, to see if it fixes the white balance. If it doesn't, if my white balance is already pretty good, all I gotta do is press control Z, command or control Z, to back up and reverse that. It's just basically a check. If I need to add more temperature there manually, because the automated process of the white balance isn't quite working out for me, I can maybe make this a little bit more on the yellow side and add a little bit more magenta to that, to add some life and color to the image. So, here we are before, and our after. Little bit of color, little bit of exposure, not a whole lot working there. So let's go ahead and open this up and start working on this in Photoshop. The whole time we're working on any of these portrait retouches, what we want to do is we always want to consider making things that are non-destructive. So I'm never gonna do anything to this background layer that is going to destroy the effects of this background layer, or destroy the integrity, I should say, of the background layer. If it's going to, if you know for a fact that you might need some of the data from this to what, what I would do is I'd press command or control J right now to duplicate this before I even start, and then what I might even do, just so I know, take the lock off of this, press control G on this to put it in its own group. That way I know, that's the original stuff. I can even double-click on here and say original. If I can spell. Or-i-gi-nal. I can even turn that layer off, now. That's just, if I ever need to go back to it, I have it. That's really being kind of nitpicky on this whole non-destructive thing. Some people don't do that, it's just one of those steps that I might take, especially when I'm working on a portrait like this. The first thing I'm gonna do, because it's probably the easiest, I'm gonna work on using the hue/saturation adjustment layer to whiten the teeth. And when whitening the teeth, we can also whiten the eyes at the same time, so we have to get uncomfortably close to ourself, especially if we're doing our own portrait retouch, and zoom in pretty close to these things. I know you and I are gonna get sick of looking at I, here. (laughing) So I'm gonna go ahead, add the HSL adjustment here. And with the hue/saturation adjustment layer, I'm gonna go ahead and modify the yellows in the image. This is most likely what I'm gonna modify. But if I take the targeted adjustment tool and I click on that color, it might actually be something else. Like, right now, it's actually telling me that there's a little bit of red, a little bit of yellow in those teeth. So those are two colors that I'm gonna want to pay attention to when editing those teeth. You see that? Like, this side is red, this side is yellow. Right, there is yellow, don't prove me wrong, okay. So what I'll do here is I'll just drop the saturation a little bit in that. And what you can also do, because if yellow is yellow, yellow is yellow for a reason, it's yellow because it doesn't have a lot of blue present within that pixel. So, you can either drop the saturation of the color yellow, or you could start moving the hue of the color yellow closer to the color blue to allow more blue to be incorporated into that color yellow, because if we look at the complimentary colors, complimentary colors, when added together, will even each-other out. So if I move the hue over, you're gonna start to see that as I move the hue closer to the blues, the teeth do get a little bit whiter as well. And then drop saturation a little bit. Increase the lightness. And I start to get whiter teeth. Now, you'll notice what happens here. That's selecting all the yellow in the whole image, and we'll take care of that in a second. What I'm concerned about right now is just getting those teeth whiter. You don't want to drop the saturation all the way down to something like negative 100, 'cause what that's doing is it's making them look unnatural. So, here's a story for you. When I was getting, I have a bunch of teeth in my face that are not real. Just a gee-whiz thing about Blake. Happens to all of us as we get older. Our teeth start to break and I'll do all kind of crazy things. So as I'm at my dentist's office, and he's looking at my teeth and what colors he wants to use to put in my mouth, he's not saying, well, I'm gonna use white. He actually has a palette that has multiple different colors of yellow on it, and he'll take that palette and put it up to the other teeth in my face and say, okay, well, these teeth are this shade of yellow, so I'm gonna go ahead and use this shade of yellow to make your new teeth. So, even when a dentist makes our new teeth, he's not using or she's not using pure white in order to put that in there, 'cause it would look really funny if these two teeth that are fake right here end up being, bling, bright white next to all these yellow teeth. So, don't be ashamed to let some of that yellow shine through a little bit there, okay? Again, some people will say, just make 'em white. Well, it doesn't look natural, it doesn't look normal. So what I need to do is I need to actually separate this mask and make it black, so that the effect is not gonna be taking effect, because now I'm gonna use, basically, like a paintbrush, or a toothbrush, and brush in my teeth. So, press command or control I, and now we'll see that you can definitely see the difference there, how much more vibrant those teeth are without being pure white. They don't need to be pure white. Press command or control I on that, and if I press B, for my brush tool, and use the color white on that mask, I can start bringing back some of that color, white color on my teeth, though I guess I should say absence of color. That's what we're going for. And then... That's what we painted in. Before, after. Before, after. Now, if we go up to the eyes, the eyes might have some yellow in them to, so we could just come up here and just paint in some of those areas in the eyes, just really delicately and really lightly. Having a WACOM tablet when you're doing retouching is amazing, 'cause you can get really light, really pressure-sensitive, and you're basically painting on a face. Again, very subtle changes to the teeth. Notice how, when I wanted to whiten the teeth, I didn't just add a white layer and put white on those teeth. We're using hue/saturation. You can also use something like selective color. If you went into each one of those individual colors in the selective color, you could remove some of the blue, or you could add some blue to the color yellow to brighten those teeth up as well with selective color, if you wanted to do it that way. Again, there's many many different ways that you're gonna see to do this. If we were to go ahead and go into the reds, 'cause we did see some reds in there as well, see, there's a lot of presence of red, there we go. That looks natural, let's keep that. So I might drop that saturation a little bit, bump that up. Especially because what I'm doing here to the eyes and to the teeth at the same is actually really helpful. We don't want the eyes to be unnaturally white and the teeth to be unnaturally white separately. And also, what it's doing there as well is, because I'm moving the reds there, it's taking some of the edge off of the veins in my eye by dropping those, a little bit of the saturation out of those reds and making them a little bit whiter. I don't want to go that white, because it looks unnatural. Just something right about there. Before, after. Before, after. Now, if we zoom out, that'll be the true test. If it's like, bling, you can definitely tell. When you're zoomed in that close, it's kind of like, it's very difficult to tell just how white those things are, but as soon as you zoom out, you can definitely see it. So, on, off. Looks pretty good. If I don't want to go back and tinker with those effects, I could just lightly blend that in using something like opacity. Just come down here to opacity, drop the opacity to about 90%, and let a little bit of that color shine through underneath. If it's looking a little overly white in those yellow areas, just drop the opacity a little bit. And that looks good, but I'm gonna drop it a little bit more. That looks good.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Robert Andrews
Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.
a Creativelive Student
Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.
Esther Gambrell
WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!