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Photoshop Elements PRIMER
"...Get into top gear with Elements..." |
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| Instructor: Robin
Nichols Duration: 4
Weeks Cost: US$195 |
Overview Watch Robin's introduction
video
In this simply-written but comprehensive short course you'll learn a tremendous amount about this impressive, affordable and very professional photo-editing program.
Photoshop Elements PRIMER is an information-packed four-week online course taught by Robin Nichols, publisher of Better Digital Camera magazine. Even if you have only just bought Elements, this course is an ideal starting point. Comprehensive notes and suggestions are given on how best to set the application up, for PC and Mac, and you'll be completing impressive assignment-based challenges within weeks.
Photoshop Elements, now in its tenth version (for PC and Mac), is a real winner because the tools it contains are incredibly powerful, yet remain accessible, even for beginners. In this course you'll learn how to transform your digital photos into visual masterpieces.
Brief Outline
Lesson One: Organising Elements, setting the program up, all about Catalogs, Stacking, Version Sets, working with Albums, browsing your work. And then how to get impressive results using just Elements' basic tone enhancements.
Lesson Two: Advanced tone control. Looking at how to manually control everything you do to your shots, creating perfect color, working with Hue and Saturation, Color Variations, creating great sepia pictures and eye-popping black-and-white.
Lesson Three: Let's now get into retouching techniques. Learn how to fix up scanned 'heirloom' shots, advanced retouching techniques, removing objects from the photo, Clone Stamp operation, Healing Brush, the Recompose Tool and more. Working with the creative brushes, Burn and Dodge tools, new Smart Brushes and fantastic filter special effects. Plus, all about resolution, picture size and emailing.
Lesson Four: All about layers. Learning layer basics, shooting and making panoramas, troubleshooting. Working with the creative menus to manually, and automatically, make your own greeting cards, and digital photo book pages. Plus more fabulous special effects using a bunch of Elements filters and Guided Edit effects.
Course Outline:
Week 1: Setting up: Basic editing for impact
At the start of this lesson we take a very detailed look at how to set Elements up, arranging folders, naming files and sorting through your work for all versions of this software. We look at techniques for downloading pictures, organising files, basic navigation in the Organizer and Edit workspaces, how to find pictures, use the Organizer, change into different picture modes (i.e. Date View and Map View), working in full screen mode, side-by-side comparison, and more. Plus, we show you all about sorting shots using Tagging, Albums and Catalogs.
Once the organisational bit is out of the way we move onto fast fix options: Quick Fix, reading Metadata and more. Moving into Elements' Full Edit workspace, we check out the main points: the tools, palettes and other features. Learn about saving pictures in different file formats, and the benefits of each.
Week 2: Advanced Tone Control
If you are not already impressed with the capabilities of this great program, we now delve into the manual adjustment tools: Levels and the essential Shadows/Highlights tools. Controlling contrast and making subtle color changes using only single (RGB) color channels. Then learn how to 'save' grossly under-exposed (dark) shots.
Then learn how to use the Hue and Saturation and Color Variations tools. Change the color a bit, a lot, or over the top to get surreal color effects. Remove color casts, making great black-and-white, and creating sepia images.
Week 3: Retouching Techniques
Something that most photographers love to learn how to do, removing irrelevant 'stuff' from the photo to give it greater impact. In this lesson we look at using the Spot Healing retouching tool, the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools. Learn how to remove spots, blemishes, scratches, or an entire person from your shot! Pick up techniques for quality beauty retouching, as well as for removing entire objects from the photo. Includes tips for 'fixing up' scans of old family heirlooms. We also show how to change the resolution of photos so they can be easily emailed. Demonstrate the differences between dots per inch (dpi), picture resolution, document sizes and resampling techniques.
Week 4: Layer Basics, panoramas and cool special effects
Learn about the often confusing topic of layers, how they work, plus where, when and why you'd use them. The lesson describes in detail how you can then stitch a series of sections into an eye-popping panorama and use your new-found knowledge to fine-tune the results by adjusting individual layers. Or you can get down with Elements new 'auto' panorama features that give almost perfect results, every time. We then take this to the nest level, learning how to assemble photos, text, backgrounds and other features to make a greeting card using the automated 'wizards' available to all users (Mac and PC). Although the 'wizards' are obviously an easy route, you'll learn more if the projects are manually assembled. The choice is yours. We also look at creating some great 'arty' filter-generated special effects.
Course Requirement:
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 7/8/9 or 10.0 for PC or Mac.
- A PC or Mac with plenty of RAM (at least 4Gb RAM is essential, 8Gb would be far better) and a fast processor (Intel Core i5 or i7 CPU is recommended).
- We cater for users of Windows XP, Vista. Win 7 and Mac OSX+.
Instructor: Robin Nichols
 Like many photography teachers, I’m in the envious position of being able to combine one of my life’s passions, photography, with my job. And, even though I tend to spend way too much time in front of the computer, it remains one of the best jobs in the world...
Though born in the UK, I’ve spent the past 20 years in Sydney. I began work in Australia as a cameraman in the audio-visual business, then a freelance photographer. More recently, I worked as a contributing freelance writer for several photo-centric publications, then as a full-time magazine editor for more than eight years. For the past eight years, I’ve run my own publishing business, Better Digital Magazine, producing Australia’s best-selling specialist digital photo techniques publication: Better Digital magazine.
With this publication I’ve aggressively pursued the goal of producing clear, well-illustrated publications written in simple English and have continued to develop this plain-speaking style in other specialist magazines such as Better Photoshop Techniques and Digital PhotoART (a project-based publication with a distinct ‘scrapbooking’ style).
When I’m not travelling, writing for one of my publications or conducting photo tours and workshops, I teach digital photography and Photoshop Elements classes at Sydney University.
There’s nothing I like better than showing newcomers how to fine-tune their compositional skills and then how to get the best from the resulting digital files using a program like Photoshop Elements.
My work can be seen in Better Digital magazine, or online:
www.robinnicholsworkshops.blogspot.com
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