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
Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes
When I'm doing my color grading, I often refer to the color wheel quite a bit, and this is a download that you can get. This is the color wheel that I've created that I use on a lot of my images as I've said before. When I'm looking at color grading, I'm considering a couple different things. I'm considering what am I going to do to the dark areas of my image? What am I gonna do to the light areas of my image? And what colors am I gonna use? Because color is gonna play a huge role in what the viewer is going to see in the end result. So a lot of the times, I refer to the color wheel. I don't guess, I don't play games with the color. I look at the color wheel. As a traditional painter, this color wheel was always next to me while I painted. It helped me mix my colors and all kinds of crazy stuff, so bringing that in to my photography world, I have a color wheel, even though you'd think, "Blake, you've probably memorized this thing by now." Yes, I dream about it, I sleep about it. This i...
s my life, but I still have one printed out right above my computer screen at all times. So when I'm thinking about color grading, especially when I'm thinking about color grading in terms of the adjustments that I want to use, when I want to manipulate the highlights in one area, but also manipulate the shadows in another area, it's what we call split toning, and you probably see that in Adobe CameraRoll. This is a more crazy approach to it, I guess if you want to say, in Photoshop. But I look at the color wheel and I say, "Okay, if I want to make a unified image that has unified color and unified shadows and highlights, I'm gonna use the things that I know create unity and harmony in an image." And that's typically going to be things that are across the color wheel from one another. That's a very harmonious way to introduce color to make the viewer not want to run scared. You want to run scared, color grade your images from '70s posters. That will make your viewer run scared. The colors that they used were just wild, all over the place, that almost seemed to have no rhyme or reason. Well, when we color grade using things that are compliments, or even analogous colors, analogous colors would be things on the color wheel that are closely related to each other, that are within three, I would say, of each other. So this would be a good analogous color scheme. This would be good analogous, good analogous. But when I want to create a little bit of dynamic transition between the highlights and shadows, I'm gonna use compliments. So I bring this up and I show this to you because we're gonna get into the color dodge and burn, and with the color dodge and burn set, we have a blue layer here. So I'm gonna change this blend mode to color burn, which, as we said, is going to bring along that color, but add a lot of contrast with it, right? So this is essentially burning my image with the color blue, and it's a very dark color blue that it's burning my image with. If I were to just come down here, as I said before, and drop the opacity, it's just dropping the intensity of the calculation that's happening. Whereas if I were to go and drop the fill down, the fill, what you see here, is as I drop that fill down, it's protecting any areas of white in my image. So when we're talking about burning, you know, this is burning the entire thing with blue. It's all getting really blue, crazy blue, really dark, so much so that even these areas of white have turned solid blue, which is not what we want when we're burning, 'cause when we're burning, we typically want to focus on our shadow areas. Unless you're manipulating it with your own dodging and burning by your hand as an artist, we want to make things darker, we want to make them darker. We want to make lighter, it's lighter, right? So if I drop this fill down, watch what happens. Incrementally as I drop it down, it's starting to protect the areas of highlights and transition its way down into areas of dark, so much so that when I drop this fill all the way down to here, it's now basically protecting my mid-tones all the way to my highlights, and this is the only thing that's getting the darkness. On the flip-side, we have the color dodge. If we were to bring this fill up to 100%, that color dodge is not just affecting what's happening with my highlights, it's also affecting what's happening over there with my shadows, so if I were to go ahead and drop down this fill, it's going the opposite direction, see that? Because those blend modes are opposite each other. They do the opposite of what the color dodge will dodge, color burn will burn, and it's just opposites. So on that note, if we go ahead and add a image here, let's go ahead and go and add that solid color fill with that dark blue layer. I'm gonna go ahead and change this to color burn. With that set to color burn, if I drop this fill, you'll start to see some of those highlight areas starting to poke through, right? So much so that if I keep going all the way down, all the way down, all the way down, I am now applying that color burn to just basically the shadow areas, slightly transitioning into the mid-tones. If I drop this fill even further down, to say something like 10%, it's very subtle. The thing is, what I want you to get from Photoshop is that we are not a hammer. We're not a jackhammer, okay? We don't want to take our image down. We want to make subtle effects that will subtly build up and create the look that we want. If you want to go in there and try to just jackhammer into Photoshop, it's not gonna work, okay? So with this set to color burn at 10%, if I were to flip this over, and go to color dodge, it's now going to add that blue to my white areas. But what I want to do is I want to leave that at color burn, and I'm gonna come up here, and I'm gonna add a new solid color fill, but again, good practices, let's call these shadows or shads for short. I'm gonna add a solid color fill, and I'm gonna select a yellowish kind of tan color, 'cause this blue and tan's a beautiful color combination when you're color grading, it's absolutely gorgeous. Change this to color dodge, drop the fill, and now you see that I've got a really nice ... Darker areas are more blue, and the highlight areas are more cream. So if I were to also come up here to-- Let's just drop this, bring this all the way back up. This is color dodge. If I were to bring the opacity down, it doesn't have the same effect, because what is the opacity doing here versus the fill? The opacity is setting the intensity of the calculation. The fill is setting the calculation. So if we come back down to our fill, and we drop that fill down to about here, and then we drop our opacity down, look at that. We can get a really good calculation, and then just drop the intensity of that calculation. And they work hand in hand, so now if I come down here and I drop the fill, you're gonna see that slight application of that color. But there's more, always. The great thing about color fills is that any time now, I can change these colors. Let's say I want to go with more of like a green and magenta, so I'll use magenta for my shadows, and I'll double click here, and use green for my highlights. It's a different look. It still looks good, it's just a different look. Let's change this to cyan, 'cause again, the color combinations of cyan and red work very well together. Again, it just works so well together. But we can also do something analogous. Analogous would be maybe changing this to orange. And now we have an orange and red kind of color scheme all happening on the image really quickly and pretty easily.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
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.
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.
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!!!!