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New video course just released: Photoshop – Up to Speed

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This new course helps you to get up and running quickly with Adobe’s powerful photo editing and management system. This handy step-by-step class starts from scratch, starting with basics such as getting your images into Photoshop and then moving on to more advanced features designed to help you to become more productive more quickly. 

In no time at all, you’ll be navigating the Photoshop interface, editing and creating Photoshop documents like a pro.  You’ll delve into working with layers and layer mask; creating selections; adjusting image exposure, clarity, vibrance and saturation; removing haze from images; adjusting shadows and highlights; changing color and adjusting white balance; removing items from photos using Content-Aware technology; using handy tools such as the Adjustment Brush, Graduated Filter, and Range Masking tools;  cropping and straightening images; fixing perspective problems; creating panoramas and merging photos using HDR; and much more. You’ll learn about Photoshop’s most popular and handiest tools allowing you to create some truly amazing images.

Who is this course for?

This course was created for people new to image editing as well as well-seasoned photographers and designers looking to learn Adobe’s powerful image editing application.  This course will also be helpful for those coming from a previous version of Apple Photos or those looking to delve more deeply into the Photos application.  

What does this course include?

  •        Step-by-step instructional videos that are easy to follow
  •        Downloadable lesson files allowing you to follow along with the instructor
  •        Support for any questions you may have

What You’ll Learn:

The Photoshop Environment. You’ll learn how to navigate the Photoshop interface and work with the various panels in the application, how to use the Tools panel, how to create and save Photoshop documents and how to use Photoshop Zoom Tool and Navigator panel.

Working with Color and Painting:  Next, we’ll take a look at the methods of working with color in Photoshop.  You’ll modify color using the Color Picker, the Color Panel and the Swatches panel.  You’ll also use the Brush tool, the Paint Bucket tool, the Gradient tool and the Eyedropper tool to change the color in a document. 

Editing Tools: Then, we’ll begin working with some of Photoshop’s editing tools, such as the Magic Eraser and Background Eraser Tools, the Clone Stamp and Pattern Stamp Tool, and the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush Tools.  You’ll lighten and darken images using the Dodge and Burn tools and the Sponge Tool.  You’ll also learn how to repair images and remove items from photos using Adobe’s Content-Aware technology.

Working with Selections: In this section, we’ll begin working with some of Photoshop’s selection tools, which allow you to select an area of an image for editing.  We’ll work with the Marquee and the Lasso tools, the Magic Wand tool, the Crop Tool as well as the Quick Selection Tool.  You’ll also learn how to feather and modify selections, make selections by color range and focus area and even save selections so you can use them again in the future.

Working with Selections.  Next, we’ll drive into photo editing beginning with quick photo adjustments.  You’ll then learn how to navigate Edit mode, where you’ll start by applying a variety of filters to your images.  You’ll learn how to adjust image exposure, contrast and clarity as well as tweak the vibrance, and saturation of your photos.  We’ll discuss how to adjust the blacks and whites, and how to remove blemishes, dust, sensor dots or unwanted items from your photos using the Retouch tool.  We’ll also go in-depth working with Color in which you’ll learn how to set the white balance in an image as well as how to change color using the Selective Color slider.  To help you fix those pesky image problems, you’ll learn how to crop and straighten photos, remove spots and other image imperfections, fix red-eye and even rotate images.  

Working with Layers:  We’ll then move on to working with one of Photoshop’s most powerful features: Layers.   Together, we’ll create, select, delete, link, merge and hide layers, as well as modify layer opacity and lock layers from editing.  Additionally, you’ll learn how to add adjustment layers, fill layers and how to align layer contents.  You’ll color code layers, rename layers, create layer comps and even auto-blend layer contents.

Adjusting Images: In this section, we’ll begin adjusting images.  We’ll resize images, scale and rotate them, skew and warp them, adjust image distortion and perspective, replace color in a photo and even convert a photo to black & white.  We’ll then work with Photoshop tools to adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, shadows, highlights and the color balance in a photo.  We’ll also take a look-see at some of Photoshop’s more advanced photo editing tools, such as Curves and Levels.

 Using Type: Next, you’ll learn how to add text to your Photoshop documents using type tools.  Together, we’ll add type to documents, format characters, format paragraphs, warp text and create paragraph type.

Using Filters: Next, we’re then going to spend a good amount of time learning how to add special effects to your images using Photoshop’s extensive Filters.  We’ll start out by using some common filters such as the Blur filters, Brush filters, Noise filters, Shake reduction filters and Sharpen filters.  We’ll then move on to some of the more unusual filters, such as the Render filters, Stylize filters, Texture filters and Sketch filters.  We’ll also look at the highly versatile Liquify tools with which you can push, pull, rotate, pucker and bloat areas of your image, creating some quite interesting effects.  

Channels and Masks: Then, we’ll work a bit with Channels and Masks.  You’ll learn how to save a selection as a Channel and load a Channel as a selection.  We’ll then spend a couple of videos working with Channel Masks.  You’ll learn how to create them, how to reshape them and how to use them to blend images.  

Productivity Tools: We’re then going to change course a bit and look at some of Photoshop’s productivity tools.  We’ll add free floating text to our documents using the Notes feature, carry out an automated sequence of steps using Actions, apply actions to all of the files in a specific folder, as well as rename all of the files in a folder. Additionally, we’ll use guides, grids and rulers to help us align the objects on our document and we’ll work with quickly exporting our Photoshop files to a variety of different formats and dimensions.  

Editing Images with Camera Raw: Lastly, we’re going to take a deep-dive into Adobe Camera Raw, a filter for post-processing photos, which is organized into a logical and intuitive photo editing workflow so you’ll always know where to begin.  While using Camera raw, you’ll work with some basic adjustments such as lightening or darkening your images, adjusting contrast and clarity to add some pop to your photos and adjust and even change the color in your photos.  You’ll learn how to fix image problems and issues by cropping, removing spots and other unwanted items from your photos, fixing white balance problems and correcting perspective problems.  You’ll learn how to take average photos and turn them into something truly impressive by using Camera Raw’s advanced tools and brushes.  You’ll also learn how to create some professionally looking effects and add stunning finishing touches to your photos.

By the end of this course, you’ll be editing your images like a pro, allowing you to effectively and quickly move through your photography or design workflow with confidence.

Are you ready to begin your Adobe Photoshop journey?  You can check out the course here: Adobe Photoshop: Up to Speed link

 – Roger

How to create a Frame in Photoshop using the (somewhat hidden) Picture Frame Filter

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In today’s video, we look at how to add a frame to an image using the Picture Frame feature in Photoshop. Transcript is below.

Transcript

Today, we’re talking about a fun little feature that might not be on a lot of people’s radar and that’s the Picture Frame Filter. So stick around to learn more about it!

Well, hello friends! Roger here. So quite awhile ago, I was browsing through the filters in Photoshop and noticed one that I really hadn’t really noticed before and that is the Picture Frame filter. So what this does, is allows you to quickly frame an image in Photoshop so that it looks like a framed picture. And there are all sorts of different frame types available. So to access it, you choose Filter > Render, and the Picture Frame filter is the second option on the menu here.

So we’ll click it. And if you click the Frame drop-down list, we can see all the different frame types available. We see there’s 47 total. So we have some pretty far out frames here: Party, Big Curls, Romance, Tilde, Curly Dance. So the more traditional frames are located more toward the bottom of the list. So we have Rounded Corners, Art Frame, Dual Rounded Art Frame, etc.

And here we can set the margins, the size, the arrangement, as well as choose the color for the frame. So if I wanted this to be blue, …and now we’ve changed our frame color to blue. So this is one of those features that Adobe just kind of snuck in one day so not a lot of people know that it’s there because it’s kind of hidden under the Render category of the Filters area.

So let’s create a frame for this photo. But before I start from here, what I want to do, is create a new layer first. Creating a new layer before adding the frame feature allows you to easily resize the frame after it renders, using the Free Transform tool. So let’s create a new layer so we’ll choose Layer > New > Layer from the menu. And notice we could also use the Command + Shift + N or Control + Shift + N keystroke combination.

So we have a new blank layer. I’m just going to name this “Frame” and then click OK. So now we’ll choose Filter, point to Render, and then choose Picture Frame from the menu. So again, we can choose what type of frame that we want. I think I just want a standard, basic, boring Art frame. So I’m going to choose that. And what would be a good color to go with this image? Let’s go out there — let’s go with Magenta. Then I’ll click the Close button on the Colors window.

So we get an idea of what our frame color would look like before we render it. And again, we can choose the margin, so how far out. And again, you can always transform the frame later on. You can use the size so this gives us the thickness of our frame. So if we wanted to go super thick, we could go like this. But I think I’m going to leave it….maybe….let’s go about 16 or so. And this looks good, so then we’ll click OK.

So now we see we have our frame and our frame’s a little bit too small for our image so let’s transform it. So I’ll hold down the Command + T keystroke combination if using a Mac or Ctrl + T if using Windows to activate the Free Transform feature. Now I’m just going to click and drag on the edges until the frame is the size that I want. And we’ll drag down a little bit. . And there we go.

And you can also add some effects as well by double-clicking on the layer. Um… what do we want…let’s try adding little Drop
shadow to this….gives it a little bit of depth here. Let’s add a little Bevel & Emboss too. So there we go. That looks good. And I’ll click OK.

So there is our framed duck with its purple frame. So if you liked this video, please click the Like button below as that really helps our channel out. And again, I thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate all of your support. And I’ll talk to you all in the next video. Roger and Out!

How to create a Web Gallery using Lightroom Cloud

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In today’s Lightroom Thursday video, we look at how to create a public Web Gallery using the Cloud version of Lightroom. This has become one of my favorite features of Lightroom Cloud. Transcript is below.

Transcript

So today, we’re going to create a public web gallery using Lightroom Cloud and you might be surprised just how easy it is. So stick around!

Well, hello friends! My name is Roger and today, we’re going to work with a Web Gallery. So in the Cloud version of Lightroom, you can create a public Web Gallery of your favorite albums and images that you can share with others.

It’s easiest to first create one or more albums in Lightroom that contains the images that you want to use for your gallery. And you can have a gallery of more than one album of images. So galleries are a great way to share photos from a specific family event, for instance. Or images from a vacation.

So I have several albums of images here. So once we’ve added the images that we want to use, in the appropriate albums, we then need to navigate to lightroom.adobe.com. So let me switch to Safari and I will navigate to that website. So that was lightroom.adobe.com.

Then we want to click the Shared icon — and that’s over here in the left panel bar — and then we want to click Gallery.

So here, you can modify your gallery settings by adding your name, a description of your gallery, choosing whether to allow downloads, comments and likes, as well as choosing which metadata to display. So right now, we see that I have two albums added: the summer-vacation album and an album named animals. And to remove an album from your gallery, just click the little minus icon and that removes that album from this particular gallery. So now our gallery is empty.

So let’s add a folder of images. So to add an album to gallery, we click the Add Albums button. And here’s a list of all the albums that we have in Lightroom. I want to add the Animals album so we’ll select animals and then click “Add Album.” We see that that album has now been added to our Lightroom gallery.

Let’s add another one. So we’ll click Add Albums again and this time, I think I’m going to click that “!For Instagram” album. So now that one is selected in addition to the animals album. Then we’ll click Add Album. Now both of those have been added to our gallery.

Now you can also choose a custom cover image for your gallery. Right now, I have an image of a little dog, here. So to choose a different image, we click the Browse button. Then, we navigate to the location where the image is located. I have an image on my Desktop here named Duck so I’m going to select that and then click Choose. It takes a moment for it to update — and now the cover image for our album has now been updated.

So once you’ve added your albums to your gallery and updated any information, you’re ready to preview your gallery. And to do so, we click the little link on the upper-right corner of the window. And this is the link that you’ll share with others; and the easiest way to do that is to click the little clipboard icon and that copies the link to the clipboard. And then you can paste it in an email or a text message or even on a website. So let’s click the link to have a little look-see at our gallery.

So in the left pane here, we have all of the albums that make up this gallery. So if I only wanted to see images — let’s say in the animals album — I would click animals. Now we’re only viewing images from that album. I could also click the !For Instagram album and again, now I’m viewing images from that particular album.

To view a specific image, I could click directly on the image and we get a bigger version of it — it fills up our screen. And here we have a couple of options. We can click the little three-dot menu in the upper-right corner of our screen and that allows us to download the image to our computer. And that will only be allowable if downloads are enabled for this gallery, which I do believe we did enable them.

You can also view information about an image. This tells us what camera this was taken with and that’s because we had the metadata option displayed so we see some various metadata about this image — such as the camera, our camera settings, etc.

This icon underneath the Info icon displays all comments that were left about this image. And right now, we don’t have any comments. And we can actually leave one. “Great cats!” and now we have a comment added to the activity area of this image.

So let’s close this.

You can also display the images in an album in a slideshow by clicking the little slideshow button. And notice that after so many seconds, it switches from one image to the next and we can just tap Esc to exit the slideshow. Again, you can click “Show All” to display all of the albums that make up your gallery.

I think I’m finished with this gallery so I’m going to click the little “x” on the tab here to close the tab and that brings us back to our main Lightroom window.

Again, you can share this gallery by just copying this link to the clipboard and then sharing it any way you like.

So did you like this video? If so, please click the “Like” button below as that really helps our channel out. And that about does it for this video. I thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate all of your support. And I’ll talk to you all in the next video. Roger and out!

Lightroom Thursday: What’s New in Lightroom Classic 9.3?

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Adobe recently updated Lightroom Classic (now 9.3) and in today’s Lightroom Thursday video, I talk about some of the new features. Transcript is below.

Transcript

Hey friends, Roger here! And welcome to Lightroom Thursday where I offer a tip or technique on using Lightroom every Thursday. And for this week’s Lightroom Thursday, I’m going to talk about the recent new features that were added to Lightroom, which is now version 9.3. So if you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, you’ll be able to update automatically from the Adobe Update app here. Of course, I no longer have that listed because I’ve already updated.

So a lot of cosmetic changes in this version of the application. To start out with, is we have new icons, and we can see that the Lightroom Classic icon is now a rounded icon and has LrC. Same for Photoshop as well. Photoshop was also recently updated. We also have a new cloud icon on the right side, which lets us know our syncing process.

So here we can see what is syncing — how many photos are syncing to Adobe Cloud. We can see that I’m in the process of syncing right now. And this sync option used to be over here in the left side of your screen — the upper-left side of your screen but now it’s over here. So let’s go to the Develop module here. And under Tone Curve, we see some cosmetic changes. It’s a lot easier to switch between the RGB Channels here. And we can see the different channels are designated by colored dots.

The leftmost icon here is the parametric curve and the next icon is the point curve. And the same thing for the HSL/Color on the color tab here. We have the colored dots. And there’s a new color picker on top here. And we no longer have the targeted adjustment tool because now you just select the color and then modify the Hue, Saturation and Luminance of that color. But we do still have it for the HSL panel.

Speaking of Targeted Adjustment, a wonderful new feature is the Hue Adjustment feature. So when you’re in the Develop module and you go to the Graduated Filter, Radial Filter or the Brush Tool, you can now selectively adjust hue…and this is a biggie! So this image here that I have on my screen, I’m going to activate the Graduated Filter tool so I’m going to click on that. And then I’m gonna move the Temp slider to the blue area. And now I’m going to click and drag down. So this new area right here…Hue… you drag the slider to fine-tune the Hue adjustment.

And notice that as I drag, it’s only affecting those colors that I selected. And if you’re using the Targeted Adjustment Brush, it would only affect the areas the you painted. So notice that as I drag to the right, the color brightens. We get some magentas, pinks. And if I drag to the left, you get more cyans and greens.

Now notice that the colors change very quickly as I drag. But you can fine-tune the adjustments by clicking the “Use Fine Adjustment” checkbox and then dragging. And then notice that the colors change a lot slower as I drag. So this allows for a much more granular control over the hue of the targeted area. Let me click this image here. I’ll drag the temp slider to the left and then add a Graduated Filter to the image.

And I’m going to uncheck the “Use Fine Adjustment” checkbox. And notice that as I drag, the hues of the orange color are changing, whereas in the last image, it was just the hues of the blues. So this is a feature for which people have been asking for a long time so a very welcome feature to Lightroom.

Another new feature is the Adaptive ISO Preset. That is to say, a preset that will adapt to whatever ISO your camera was at when you took the image. So for instance, I might want to apply a different level of sharpening if I took an image at ISO 100 compared to an image at ISO 1200.

So how this works, is you select the images — and the images need to be at different ISOs — then move your mouse cursor over the word “Presets” – and again, we’re in the Develop module — and when you see the + symbol, click +, Create Preset and the new feature is down here below under the ISO Settings area.

And then we click the Create ISO Adaptive Preset and then we click Create. So I could just call this “ISO Preset” here. So if you want to delve deeper into the ISO Settings Preset, click the Learn More link and that’ll take you to a Webpage where you can delve in a lot deeper. So I’m just going to cancel out of here for the time being.

Another new feature is when you’re in Crop mode. Many of you know that you can tap the “o” key on your keyboard to browse through the various overlays. Well, Adobe has added a new overlay called the 2 x 2 Grid Crop overlay And that’s this one right here. So this is helpful for pointing out the exact center of your image. So many people may find this quite handy.

And the last feature I want to talk about is the Export feature. So let’s go to the Library module here. Now when you choose File > Export, we can now batch export to multiple file types and to multiple locations. So I have a couple of presets here: Facebook Preset and Instagram Preset. So once I click the little checkbox, we see that the button in the lower-right corner of the window changes to Batch Export. So when I click it the Batch Export dialog displays.

And notice here I have my Facebook Preset and Instagram Preset, and I can choose a different folder for each of these presets. So for my Facebook Preset, I’ll choose my Desktop folder and for the Instagram Preset, I will choose my Documents folder. And once I’ve set the location for my exports and then the Export button becomes activated and then we can carry out the export. So this comes in especially handy if part of your workflow involves exporting images to a variety of different formats. So again, the Batch Export feature.

So did you like this video? If so, please click the “Like” button below as that really helps my channel out. And as always, I thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate all of your support and I will talk to you all in the next video. Roger and out!

Lightroom Thursday: How to Change Colors in Lightroom

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In this video, I look at how to change colors in an image using Lightroom’s HSL/Color panel. Transcript below.

You can change the individual color in an image from the HSL/Color/B & W panel. From the HSL and Color sections, you can adjust the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance of a specific color. Both of these sections do essentially the same thing – they simply feature a different way of accomplishing it.

From the HSL and Color panel, you choose the color you want to modify and choose what you want to change:

Hue – Changes the actual color.
Saturation – increases or decreases the intensity of the color.
Luminance – changes the brightness & darkness of the color.

Now I’ll click the lily.dng image (the image of the white lily).
Next, I’ll click the words HSL/Color/B&W in the right pane to expand the panel.

So I want to Display the HSL section so I’ll click the letters HSL as shown below.
I think I’m gonna drag the Green slider to the right to +20 as shown below. This changes the hue of the “greens” in the image.

Now I’ll click the word Saturation on top of the panel to switch to the Saturation section.
Here, I’ll drag the yellow slider to the left to -20 as shown below. This decreases the saturation of the yellows in the image.

You can also use the Targeted Adjustment tool to change a specific color. With the tool activated, click on the color that you want to change and drag to the left or right to change it. This comes in handy as the color green in an image can contain both green and yellow. Likewise, the color blue can contain both blue and aqua. This way, you’re only changing the color that you’ve exclusively targeted. The Targeted Adjustment Tool exists in the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance panels under HSL as well as the B & W panel.

So let’s click on the word Hue to switch to the Hue section.

Now I’ll click the Targeted Adjustment tool icon as shown below to activate it.
So with the Adjustment tool active, I’m going to click on the lily pad on the right side of the image and drag to the right until the lily pad is a greenish-yellow.

I think that’s about it for now.  As always, I thank you so much for watching, sharing and liking my videos.  I really appreciate all of your support. 

And speaking of liking, if you liked this video, I’d really appreciate it if you’d click the Like button below as this really helps me out.  Also, please consider subscribing and then clicking the bell thinngie.  This way, you’ll get notified any time I release new videos.

So that’s a wrap!  I’ll talk to you in the next video.  Roger and Out!

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