Setup and Interface
Blake Rudis
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
Setup and Interface
So as I said before in the intro to this, when I opened up Photoshop for the first time and it had that new dialogue and it also had the recent files. For me, being rather more advanced in Photoshop, that's something that I don't necessarily need to open up every single time. So you'll see here in the general preferences, under options, I can say, "Show Start Workspace "When No Documents Are Open." I can click that and turn that off. And I can say, "Use Legacy New Document Interface." So that's what I was telling you before. When I said I like to open up my images like I did in Photoshop CS5 and CS6, that's a legacy way of opening up an image rather than the CC way of using the new image dialogue. Which, it looks completely different. The new image dialogue is pretty, it's fancy, it's got some templates there. The old one, which you'll see here in a second, is completely different. So if I were to press okay, and press control N, for new, that's what the new document looks like now. If...
you notice and recognize that this looks a lot like the image size dialogue. So for me, this looks like the image size dialogue, a dialogue that I use quite a bit in Photoshop. And when I'm opening up a new document, this is what I want to see. I wanna see the nitty gritty of what that new document is gonna be when I press control N to make a new document. So we'll go back to those preferences. Again, let's just get in the habit of using hotkeys and press command or control K. So now, if I go through this, this is gonna give me a lot of different things in Photoshop that will even help you set up your efficiency with some of the tools. So if we go to interface, I'm gonna talk about interface quite a bit here once we get done going through all of these inner workings, because I feel very strongly about this topic. And you're probably gonna see why in a second. So with the interface, we can set how large or how small we want the UI to be within the interface. You can make things larger. You can make things smaller. We can even change the screen modes. Some of these borders have drop shadows on them. Well, we can say we don't necessarily want that to have a drop shadow on it. Or maybe we want it to be a line instead of a drop shadow. We could do that as well. If we go into show channels in color, that's an interesting one. Where we were over in the channels before, and the channels were all black and white. If you pressed show channels in color, it will show you the red channel as a red color. The blue channel as a blue color. And the green channel as a green color. The other thing here is workspace. I like to have smaller tabs. Notice how the tabs on mine are rather large for the thing that says library and properties and history. I'll just click this box that says, "Large Tabs." And turn that off to make all those tabs a little bit smaller. Again, it's just about real estate. It's just about opening up a little bit more real estate in my work flow. In my work space I should say. I like this one right here, too. It's called enable floating window docking. The thing about this one, or open documents as tabs is what I should say first. You see how this image, when I open it up, it opened up as a tab along the top of my Photoshop? I think that's great if you're just working on one photo at a time. But when you start getting into compositing and moving one image on top of another image, this can be a nightmare. 'Cause then you've gotta pull them all away from the top and it's just a pain. So if you don't want that to happen every time you open up an image in Photoshop, you can just turn off open documents as tabs, and it will no longer open up as a tab along the top like you would see in some of your internet browsers. The enable floating window docking. That, we can just give you an example here. This is a floating window. Floating window docking is when I bring it up here and it docks up to the top. Notice how it's not docking up to the top right now. That's 'cause I turned that off. I turned that off, so that that can't happen. That's a personal preference all around. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't. I usually just leave, in that workspace, I will leave enable floating window docking checked, so that when I come here, I can actually move this and connect it to the top. For some things, especially when I'm using panels, plug-ins and panels for Photoshop, those panels sometimes get overridden by the document. So the document slides in behind it. Notice how now the document is slid behind the actions panel that we have over there on the right hand side. This is floating windows. This is floating window docking. A couple other things that are in here, too, that are really important as you go through, too, is tools. You can look at the types of tools and what they do, whether they have an animated zoom or a non-animated zoom. That animated zoom, it looks cooler, but it is actually more graphic intense. So if you don't necessarily have the graphics processor to handle an animated zoom, just go ahead and turn that off. There's an area of other things that you can do within here as well. The history log can be saved into the file as metadata or as a text file. Sometimes, you can keep that checked if you're doing some compositing work, but it will make the file size a lot larger. That's why, a lot of times, I just shy away from that. And just understand that when I'm working in the history, which I'll show you the history in a second here, the history doesn't necessarily get saved within that document. That I know that when I open up that document, the history's gonna reset. Which can be good and bad depending on how you work with your images. If you work very destructively, that can be very bad. If you work non-destructively, then you shouldn't have to worry about that. And that's the things that we're gonna be talking about throughout this course. File handling. Different ways to handle how files open and close. One of the things I really wanna talk about here is performance. Notice how here it says, "History States at 50." Well, right here, I have what looks like 29.4 available gigs of ram available in this machine. And I can actually allocate how much ram Photoshop uses over all the other programs in my computer. Now, if you've only got, let's say old school, four gigs of ram. I don't think they even make that anymore, but if you only had four gigs of ram and you jacked up to four gigs of ram, Photoshop is gonna be very intensive and take up all the ram on your machine. So everything else is ultimately gonna slow down. So what you wanna do is you wanna do a happy medium, usually something between 70 and 80 percent. If I'm doing a big composited document and I know that I'm only really using Photoshop, I'm gonna put that up to 80, 85 percent. And I might just do it just for that image that I'm working on while I'm working on that photo. Doesn't happen very often. So I usually keep that somewhere between 75 and 80 percent to boost up the amount of ram that my computer is now gonna be using for Photoshop. The other thing, too, here is use graphics processor. Some things you can only do in Photoshop with your graphics processor up to date. So along with using your graphics processor, make sure that the graphics processor that you have, or the graphics card that you have, has up to date drivers. If your drivers are not up to date, this is going to be, you're not going to be able to use things like the oil paint filter. The oil paint filter, I know for a fact, is one of those ones that if you're graphics card is not up to date on the drivers, it just will not run. It'll even pop up and say that you can't use this. It'll give you some type of a dialogue that you are like, "Wait a second, I should be able to do this." Make sure that, not only having a graphics processor on your computer, but also having that up to date is good to go. Another thing you're gonna see in here is the history states. That's got 50 history states listed there. Well, what that means is that, it'll record 50 things that happened in Photoshop. If I get to a point where those 50 things are beyond, it starts deleting the other history states from the very beginning. So if you go 55 states, the first five history states disappear. I like to turn this up to something like 90, 99. You can turn it up to whatever you want. But just know that it might slow down your machine as you do that. Because it's a calculation thing. All these layers are in place, so Photoshop wants to give you the ability to go back that many times to 99 different things that you might've done within your image. Or even more, for that matter. 99's a good number. If I make more than 99 mistakes in one shot, then there's probably a bigger problem than just my history states. Cash levels and cash tile size. These I usually keep set by default for whatever Photoshop has, but those can help you speed up your version of Photoshop. If we go ahead and press okay. We're good to go there. Another thing I wanna show you though, under edit and under keyboard shortcuts. Alt shift control K or command shift option K on a Mac. If we click that and open that up, this is an awesome place to go if you work within a collaborative group with a lot of people that use the same Photoshop, maybe, I don't know, a graphic design studio, this could be kind of fun April Fool's Day place to play around in. 'Cause you can change all the hotkeys to whatever you want them to be. Hotkeys are the things that I've been doing where I press control alt shift, and control and alt, and control and A, and shift and A. Well, one of the things that does not have a hotkey that you would think probably should have a hotkey is under layer and flatten image. We look next to any of these tools, they all have hotkeys. Well, flatten image, if we had things in here, so let's just put another layer here. Flatten image right here does not have a hotkey for it, so what I can do is I can go over to that edit and go to the preferences. That keyboard shortcuts, and I can find in here layer. So notice how this document area here, this dialogue area here that says, "File, Edit, Image, Layer, Type, Select." Mimics and mirrors exactly what's happening on the top of the menus in Photoshop. So if I go into layer now, you can expect to see flatten image. So if I scroll down to where flatten image would be. It might be pretty far down. Right here. This doesn't have a hotkey associated with it. But I can associate a hotkey with it. And look what Photoshop says down there. "This menu command and the panel menu layers, "flatten image must have the same shortcuts. "Changes will be applied to both commands." Basically, what happens is if something already has a shortcut somewhere else, you can override that, so I'd be careful with that. But you can create and customize your own shortcut for this. The keys that you can use are control and alt. Let's just say control E. If I press control E, notice what Photoshop is saying there right now. It's saying, "Hey, wait a second. "If you do this, merge layers is now "no longer gonna be merge layers. "It's gonna be flatten image." And then merge layers is gonna lose its shortcut. So we need to find something that we can use that is not being selected by anything else. Now, I've already done the work for you on this one, it's control period. Control period is not a hotkey that's been used anywhere else. So I know that at any time during my setup if I press control period, it's gonna layer down my images. Now, as an educator, that can be very difficult for me, though. Let's say I'm doing a tutorial or something like that, and I say, "Just press control period to flatten your layers down." Well, that's not the same across every version of Photoshop, so if I tell someone to press control period to flatten their image, it's not gonna work on somebody else's version of Photoshop. So I'll just go ahead and leave that the way it is. Press okay. And now, if I press control period I've got a flattened image. You saw that those layers just got combined and now that's combined. The shortcuts and the hotkeys are definitely important to know, but there's gonna be a series of hotkeys that you can create for yourself that can speed up your workflow as well. I do not recommend you taking away a hotkey from something that's already used somewhere else. I recommend trying to find a hotkey that works. And you might have to go through the paces to do that by pressing control and shift, and control and alt, and the other hotkeys to make that work.
Class Materials
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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