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
Perspective Cropping in Photoshop
The next thing that we have is actually a really interesting thing in the crop tool that's more of, I'd say an effect, but a very helpful effect. It's called perspective cropping. And perspective cropping, this can save, we'll just say the word "wonky" a wonky image. I like the word "wonky." If we go into cropping and we open up the perspective crop, I've got two images here for you that we can use this on. This happens to me a lot. I like to visit museums, and I like to photograph the images, the paintings that I see specifically, the quality of light, just to see what painters did. They didn't have necessarily the light source right in front of them. A lot of times they were just painting from memory. But to see how they control light from their memory, it's absolutely brilliant. So I do a lot of this stuff. I was at the Louvre; I shot this photograph. And I don't like the fact that I had to position my body in a weird angle to shoot this painting to not get a glare on it, right. So ...
when we look at this, it's offset. It doesn't look right. And the perspective is totally warped on this photograph. Well, there's a really cool tool in here called the perspective crop tool. And the perspective crop tool can be used in one of two ways. You can either click and drag and make a selection and then edit it later, which I'll show you on the next image. Or you can find very distinct points on an image that you want to be magically fixed with a perspective crop. So if we click right here in this upper left-hand corner and then we click over here on this upper right-hand corner and then we click down here on the lower right-hand corner and then over here on this lower left-hand corner you can see that we don't have the exact same stuff that we had going on with the regular crop tool. And more specifically, we don't have the option to delete or undelete the cropped pixels. So just know that going into this. You can turn on and off the grid if you want that grid on and off. I prefer to keep the grid on because it helps me keep my straight lines straight as I'm doing this. And then we also have resolution here. This data that's coming in here with these dimensions here, I would just ahead and make sure that they stay the same when you're doing this. Because if you did change this from 300 to 50, it will alter the image size. So it's not just a temporary crop like you'd see with something like the regular crop tool. If you change the resolution at this point it will alter the resolution in your image because it's incorporating image size in with this perspective crop. But the cool part is after I've laid those constraints down and I press enter, if we zoom out here, look at that. It automatically assessed how the perspective was warped in the image and it made it perfectly straight. How does this help you? It's a picture of a painting. Well, there are times where I take pictures of my pictures or I take pictures of maybe my pictures in a gallery and I wanna make sure that that is set up correctly. What we need to make sure, though, is that the perspective crop, if we are talking about that in terms of, let's say a gallery, here's another one of my favorite museums, Nelson-Adkins Museum in Missouri. If we look at this, the perspective is warped. I shot it with, I believe it was a 10 millimeter lens on a full frame camera. So you can see that that floor is really warped. Things are starting to warp in from the top, and it doesn't necessarily look right. It doesn't look correct as you would see it with your normal eyes. So if I take this perspective crop and I try to do the same thing that I did before and just pick a point like this and do this, I'm just gonna show you what happens if I press enter on this. Look what happens. If I press enter on that-- let me go ahead and delete that. It's gonna crop it to exactly what I told it I wanted it to be cropped to. So we have to keep that in mind. In the other example, that worked out perfectly fine. That worked out great, okay. So I'm just gonna make sure that resolution is set to zero there. I don't wanna change the resolution on this. So what I need to do now is I need to constrain what I want the actual crop of this image to be. So I said before you can either click on points and if you know the exact points that you need those to be, you can click on those points and go from point to point to get your perspective crop out. But if you don't necessarily know those points, one of the best ways to do this is to make the constraints of how big you want the image to be first, then set that perspective crop. So if you tried to do this the exact same way you did the other one because you saw that, oh, I want that back area to be perfect, well, it's not gonna work that way. So what we need to do is just click and drag, and this will pull out an entire rectangle for us, perfect rectangle. But from here, we get the option to manipulate the handles on this and push and pull the angle at which this is gonna come in. So I like this line right here. I'm gonna go ahead and move this over to that line right there, perfect. And pull it right up to that edge right there. I like this line that's happening down here, so I'll make sure that this line right down here and this line right here are perfect. I've got this side down. Now I'm gonna hop over to this side. I'll click on this, move this right to the bottom line that I have on the same side on the other side. Right to here, there. And then again up here, right to there. And now, if I commit to this and press enter, it automatically crops it and fixes that warped perspective for me. It's a really awesome tool to use when you're working with warped perspectives form wide-angle lenses. I work a lot with 10 millimeter lenses. It's my favorite lens of choice now. Once I got that and put on the Sony full frame, it just makes everything just look wild and epic. But at the same time, it has this drawback. What are the drawbacks? Things that are far away are really far away. And also, areas that should be straight up and down are warped into oblivion. So I know we covered quite a bit here. We talked about the composition basics, understanding why we do what we do when we are cropping. I can't just sit here and tell you about cropping without teaching you a little bit about composition and composition comprehension first. Because I wouldn't be doing you justice in order to understand why it's important to crop and not to be afraid to crop. A lot of times we have this image and it's my precious. We don't wanna crop it, but it needs that crop. So we talked about composition comprehension there. We talked about cropping in Adobe Camera Raw and identified some of the limitations. And those limitations being things like the inability to fill in areas outside of the area that we cropped. We then moved into Photoshop. We talked about regular cropping. Cropping for composition in mind. Cropping to fill in some of the areas where content is not. And then we moved into cropping specifically for a subject where we shot an image that needs a crop because we have to crop something else out. And then we talked about cropping for print and how aspect ratio and image size are in relationship to one another, but not necessarily a direct resemblance of one another. We also talked about perspective cropping, so it also fixes some of the warping while it does the cropping.
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!!!!
Student Work
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