Advancing Photoshop

The Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne)
02-03 June 2012
10-11 November 2012

This advanced course showcases sophisticated Photoshop editing techniques, production strategies and visual problem solving. It is designed for professional photographers, artists and advanced nonprofessionals who want to extend their appreciation, understanding, and imaginative application of Photoshop to profoundly enhance their imaging outcomes. The aim is to inspire creative, innovative, productive and efficient image editing solutions. Topics covered include:

Independent Tone and Colour Correction
• RGB colour: Editing errors and curves that don’t work
• The advantages and problems of working in CIE LAB
• Dividing and conquering Photoshop
• Separating luminosity and chromaticity solutions
• Minimising quantisation errors

Blending Mode Power Editing
• Understanding Photoshop’s Blending Modes
• Intensification and reduction – Lighten, Darken, Screen, Multiply
• Editing tone and colour – Color, Hue, Saturation, Luminosity
• Variable contrast controls – Soft Light, Overlay, Hard Light
• Layer stacking and alignment – Difference, Subtract, Add

Creative Image Editing
• Making it believable – illusions and lies
• Photorealistic – image capture and extraction
• Advanced selection and processing techniques
• Advanced sharpening – darken/lighten, hi pass, and deconvolution
• Real time editing of large image files via low resolution proxies

Advanced Image Masking
• Luminosity and chromaticity masks – fine detail masking
• Layer Styles masks – split luminosity masking
• Blending Mode masks – tone equalization masking
• Photographic masks – subtractive and additive masking
• Calculations/Apply Image masks – colour contrast masking

The course is presented through a series of practical applications, analytical demonstrations and critical observations of Photoshop techniques and processes. Therefore a working knowledge of Photoshop is assumed. While the course focuses on the production advantages of the most recent version of Photoshop, the knowledge, techniques and distinctions can also be successfully applied to earlier versions. Detailed course notes are provided.