Tutorials
CCM online Photoshop tutorial – Script
Introduction 1:30
Piece to camera
When you flick through the pages of a magazine, scroll through someone’s blog or browse the thumbnails on Youtube or Netflix, There’s a very good chance you're looking at images that someone has had to create. Meaning they are images that started life in one format, and through some creative editing, they now appear in their current situation.
There’s also a very strong possibility that those images were created in the world's most popular raster image editing software… Adobe Photoshop.
- https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/correio_da_bahia_newspaper_theres_no_reason
- https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/lead_digital_protect_the_future
- https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/sea_you_tomorrow_masks_alive
- https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/dadada_production_greetings_from_home
Video to include a slideshow and description of images with different levels of complexity in their editing, from basic adjustments to elaborate compositions.
What is a Raster Image? 2:00
So you’re probably wondering … “What exactly is a Raster Image?” … It’s an image that is made up of pixels, and they are sometimes referred to as bitmap images.
The more pixels an image has, the bigger and more detailed the image is.
Demonstrated using video pixelation effect
Your phone, tablet or digital camera all create raster images. Any of the photos and graphics you download from the internet will almost always be raster images.
Now there is another type of image, known as Vector images that are constructed using points and calculated paths and curves, but we’ll be looking at them in more detail later on when we start work with Adobe Illustrator.
Now… when you’re looking at images on the internet or on your phone or tablet, they generally always look pretty good unless they are a particularly low resolution. Resolution is a term we use to help understand the quality of our images, particularly for printing, and we often hear resolution being used to describe how good a camera might be. For example, the new iPhone 12 has a 12-megapixel camera. The Sony A7 III has a 24.2-MP sensor, and the Canon 5D mark iv has a 30.4-MP sensor.
Include a demonstration of resolution to size comparisons
https://toolstud.io/photo/megapixel.php?compare=video&calculate=uncompressed&width=1920&height=1080
I’ve included a couple of links in the accompanying text that gives you guidelines for how big you can print images at a given megapixel. These days, all modern cameras whether they are stand-alone or integrated into a phone or tablet are generally more than capable of capturing images suitable to fill an A3 page.
Beginning photoshop
When opening photoshop for the first time, you’ll be presented with the photoshop home screen.
The home screen now includes an excellent learning section that is well worth exploring to supplement the information presented in these videos.
The home screen also lets you access files from your creative cloud storage or lightroom catalogue under the “your work” header.
The video includes these areas being highlighted, with a pop-out text description
We’re usually interested in opening an existing image or creating a new one.
Let’s start by opening the image I’ve provided. If you haven’t downloaded it already, pause the video and download it to your desktop. There’s a link in the accompanying text.
Interface
Let’s take a look at the photoshop interface. Before we begin, I’ll get you to reset your workspace to “Essentials”
Demonstrated. Window –> Workspaces –> Reset Essentials
I’ll explain more about workspaces later but for now, it means we’re all working on an identical version of the interface.
The photoshop interface can be divided into 5 sections.
Video highlight each section, pop-out text
Options Bar –The Options bar is located at the top of the application frame. It contains options and settings specific to the tool we’ve currently got selected.
Tools Panel – This is the strip of icons on the left-hand side of the screen. Each icon represents a different tool. Photoshops built-in tooltips will tell you about the tool if you hover over them. You’ll notice there’s a small in the bottom left corner of many of the icons, this is an indication that there are more related tools associated with this tool. Clicking and hold on the icon will activate a pop-out panel with the additional tools.
Panel Dock – Panel Dock is the collection of panels on the right-hand side of the screen. We can use the named tabs to select the panels we want to access. There are far too many panels in Photoshop; it displays them all at the same time. We can find more panels from “Window” in the menu bar.
Document Window – The Document window is where the image being created or manipulated sits. Multiple document windows can be open at the same time. They can be docked to the application frame and we can navigate between using the tabs at the top. We can un-dock them by dragging them off the frame.
The top of each window has some really useful information about the document, including its name, its colour mode, bit-depth and whether or not it has been saved.
Navigation
Before we start creating in photoshop we need to get comfortable navigating around our documents.
Zooming
Zooming in and out, lets us focus or attention on a smaller section of an image. Using Command + or Command - we can zoom in and out. We use the scroll wheel to do the same thing if we hold option while scrolling.
If we zoom in far enough we’ll start to see the pixel grid.
Moving around
While we’re zoomed in, we’ll need a way to move around to other areas of our document. You’ll already be familiar with using the scroll wheel to move up and down in the document. The scroll bars can also be used but the best tool for moving around a document is the hand tool.
The hand tool is available in the toolbar, however the preferred method for accessing it by holding the space bar. Using this method means we can quickly access the hand tool and return to the tool we were using when we’ve finished changing position.
It’s worth remembering the shortcuts because they definitely make working in any of the Adobe software a lot quicker.
Layers
Layers are one of the features designers now expect to see nearly all the software they use. It’s a concept that is now ubiquitous across a wide variety of software.
Demonstrate physically using objects and sheets of paper (maybe Southpark style scene)
So… how do they work
- Image layers
- adjustment layers
- Layer styles
Transform
- Scale, Rotate, Skew, Distort, Perspective, Warp, Rotate, Flip
- Free Transform
- Content-aware scale
- Puppet Warp
Activity – Sky replacement with day to night layer adjustments
Brushes
- Tools that use brushes
- Selecting and modifying brushes
- Loading downloaded brushes
- Creating your own brushes
Activity – Paint clouds, smoke, leaves or footprints – into a scene using custom made brushes
Working with Colour (including eye dropper)
- Colour picker
- Background vs foreground colour
- Eyedropper
- Swatches
- Gradients
Type tools
- Type tools (horizontal and Vertical)
- Character and paragraph controls
- Warping
- Rasterizing
Selections Basic
- Selection tools Lasso and Marquee
- Selection tools object and quick selection, magic wand
- Saving and loading selections
- Colour range…
- Focus Area
Healing and cloning tools
- Clone vs Heal
- Blemish removal
- Duplication of elements
- Cloning between layers
Activity – Removing objects from a lawn for real estate, skin retouching. Removing an object from the background of an image.
Layer Masking
- Painting a mask
- Selections to mask, mask to selection
- Quick mask
Activity – Create a floral (or another object) typographic composition.
Found object robots – collect element using your camera and combine them in photoshop to create a robot