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
Brush Mask: Vignettes
Let's take a look at some practical applications of how we can use masking. So, one of the ways that we can use a mask here is with something like a custom vignette. So, with a custom vignette, vignettes are things that you can find in things like Adobe Camera Roll, lightroom, just about every program or plug-in that deals with photos has something to do with a vignette. You can always do something with a vignette. But a vignette in itself handled just by a slider works from the center of the image and works its way out to the edges of the image. It doesn't give you a whole lot of leeway outside of that. So with your own custom vignette, you can apply exactly what you want your viewer to narrow their vision down into. So I'm gonna do this custom vignette in two different ways to show you the difference between something like a pixel based vignette and a adjustment layer based vignette. So I'm gonna add a new layer here, and I'm gonna press shift F and that's gonna get us to our fill di...
alogue. And in that fill dialogue, I'm gonna change this to black and just press okay. So by default, we have a flat, black layer that is actually a pixel based layer filled with black. It doesn't look very good right now and definitely does not look like a vignette. So I'm just going to drop the opacity a little bit to control this layer a little bit. Now it's starting to look like what a vignette could look like. And let's go ahead and, go ahead and change our blend mode. Let's see if soft light will work. That's a pretty interesting vignette. It's a different type of vignette. So, if I click on this layer, well just call this Pixel Vignette. If I can spell it correctly. There we go. We're gonna add a layer mask. You add a layer mask by pressing this button right down here that actually looks like a white sheet of paper with a hole in it. It almost actually already looks like a vignette for us. So if I go to my brush, I definitely don't wanna use my dog paw brush. So I'm gonna go ahead and go up here to my brushes and change this back to the default of the soft edge brush that I have there. Now, this soft edge brush is set to 15 per cent and a size of 200. I can change that at anytime. If I press the right Rakiki, it's gonna make that brush bigger. If I push, press shift and left and right Rakiki, that is going to change the hardness of this. So this was set to 50 per cent. If I press Shift and left Rakiki and move it all the way down, and now we go to that brush preset, notice how the hardness is set to zero. I'm all about efficiency in speeding things up. So these hot keys are definitely helpful. Shift, shift and left Rakiki adjust the hardness, left or right Rakiki alone adjust the size. So I'm gonna make this brush rather large and notice how I'm clicked on the mask and my brush palette over here is black and white. But when I click on this layer, it's set to blue and white. Well, Photoshop is smart enough to know you don't wanna paint on a mask with blue because blue doesn't control how a mask works. So right there, I've got black and white as my presets when I click on the mask. So all I have to do at this point is just start clicking on this and now I've got my own, custom style vignette because what I'm doing there by painting with black on that black layer's mask, I'm telling that vignette, when I put that black hole in the middle of that mask, it's saying that this portion, this painted black here, will no longer affect the underlying layers. So it's allowing those underlying layers to show through that effect that we have. Looking at a mask, everyone will see what it looks like with it turned off and we don't wanna delete it. If you press Shift and click on that mask, it's going to temporarily cancel it out. And you can see by the red X on there that it's not necessarily gone; it' just temporarily missing. If I click on that, Shift-click on that again, it's going to release it. If I press Alt or Option and click on that, It's gonna allow me to see exactly what that mask is doing to my photograph. Alt or option click on that again, and now I'm now released from that. So that would be a pixel based vignette. I think I even spelled that wrong, didn't I? Yeah, so it's a Pixel based vignette. That's a pixel based vignette. Let's look at something like an adjustment layer based vignette because they are very different. Refer to come up to a solid color fill and fill this with black. We now have a black color fill. It's different because it's not a pixel based shape fill. If we were to press V for the move tool on this and move this around, notice how it's not going anywhere. Because as I said before, an adjustment layer is a calculation based layer that knows no balance outside the canvas. The difference with this mask is that this is a pixel based mask. If I move this, look at the difference. See the sides? That's why typically, if I'm gonna do anything with these vignettes, I'm not necessarily going to do the shift F5 in fill because if ever need to move that layer, I might get this little hard edge look that's going on here because when we Shift F and fill that canvas, we're just filling that layer, that pixel-bound layer with black. When we use an adjustment layer, we're telling it that we know no balance. Just go wherever you want with that black area. Let's go ahead and drop that opacity a little bit, drop this down to about there. And then we'll go ahead and click on our mask and if I paint with black, I'll make my brush a little bit smaller, there we go. We're now revealing what's happening underneath on a pixel- on a adjustment based layer rather than a pixel based layer because it knows no balance. If we ever need to move that, so if we were to press V and move this, all it's going to be moving is our layer mask and not necessarily the data that's creating that vignette. Along with masking, along with these vignettes, one of the great things that you can do is, have you ever seen an Adobe Camera Roll where it says Protect Highlights in a vignette? I think that's a really great thing to do because what's happening right now with this vignette is we're getting what's called tone-compression happening in those the stain-glass window above there. And if I wanna reveal those highlights through there, I don't necessarily need to tediously go in there and mask all those because as we learned before, we have that beautiful thing called Blend F. So if I double-click on this vignette, I can look at this image, look at my vignette and I ask myself, what do I want to protect in the underlying layers? Well, I want to protect the highlights in the underlying layer from being affected by this vignette, so if I pull this and move this over, you start to see that that vignette is now going to apply itself to the rest of the image but it's going to very handsomely make sure that our highlights are protected from that effect. So that' would be what I consider a really awesome vignette in Photoshop very quickly and easily made using just a, either a pixel based layer or that adjustment layer.
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!!!!