Photoshop Fling 5 Seminars

The conference fee is $925 and includes access to all Photoshop Fling 5 courses below. There will be, however, two concurrently running tracks. All classes are half day (3.5 hours) unless otherwise noted.

The next 40 people who book this mid-winter Caribbean delight will receive a FREE copy of the current Adobe Lightroom, a $299 retail value. Get the goods — book online or call us now to get the Adobe app that converts the skeptics.

COLOR CORRECTION

Taking Color Out, Putting Color In
Speaker: Deke McClelland

Color and luminance are the two main ingredients of a photographic image. And even though they are as thoroughly blended as flour and water in a mixer bowl, Photoshop lets you separate these ingredients cleanly, as if the twain had never met. The result is that you can mix any of several black-and-white variations, infuse an image with color, and modify different ranges of colors independently to get just the effect you want. In this session you'll learn:

• Why every digital photograph starts out as a black-and-white image.
• Why every raw photograph produced by a digital camera and Camera Raw is color.
• How to blend a custom monochrome image using the improved Channel Mixer.
• How to gain even more control over the process using the new Black & White command.
• How to achieve the highest degree of control possible using Camera Raw 4.
• Ways to balance gray values with the Curves command.
• When it can be useful to add spot colors to an image using the arcane Duotone command.
• How to edit ranges of colors independently using Hue/Saturation and Camera Raw.
• How to colorize an image with Split Toning and the often overlooked Gradient Map.

Correcting Everything in Camera Raw
Speaker: Deke McClelland

Photoshop's color correction features are a powerful but random bunch. Randomly organized, randomly implemented, randomly suited to photographic images. Do you start with Levels? Can you apply Hue/Saturation and Variations, or should just one suffice? Should you always use adjustment layers or are there times when flat adjustments are better? There are a lot of theories out there, but one thing's for sure: Photoshop isn't going to help you. It just lumps all the color commands in the Adjustment submenu and leave chance to sort them out.

Compare that to Camera Raw in which every option is prioritized, every modification is dynamic, and the original image is never harmed. It is in many regards like having Lightroom built into Photoshop. But unlike Lightroom, it ships with Photoshop for free. And in Photoshop CS3, Camera Raw 4 (or ACR4 as many call it) can open any image, raw, TIFF, or JPEG. You'll learn how to:

• Open any image in ACR4.
• Navigate inside the ACR interface.
• Correct temperature and tint.
• Adjust exposure, brightness, and contrast.
• Boost the saturation and vibrance of an image.
• Use the best Curves function in Photoshop.
• Selectively correct hue, saturation, and luminance.
• Convert an image to black-and-white.
• Apply spot corrections with the retouch tool.
• Save presets and batch-process a day's shoot — all without opening a single image in Photoshop.
• Open a Camera Raw image as a smart object, so you can return to ACR anytime you want.

Color by the Numbers: An Introduction to Curves
Speaker: Dan Margulis

Proper numerical values don't guarantee a spectacular image — but lack of them does guarantee a second-rate one. This session is accessible to beginners, but it explores how the pros identify target values in each image, and then write curves to achieve them.

• Identifying the proper endpoints.
• The RGB/CMYK connection.
• How to play detective, to uncover the clues as to what a particular color must be.
• Identifying and establishing neutral points.
• How to identify areas of impossible color.
• Taking contrast to the max — and then dialing it back down.
• Curving once for color, once for contrast.

Advanced Color Correction 1: The Magic of LAB
Speaker: Dan Margulis

When Dan Margulis's landmark book on LAB was released in 2005, it quickly became the #1 bestseller in the entire computer field, as the world discovered that this arcane colorspace could be exploited by nonexperts. Today, LAB's power in creating believable separation of colors has made it the venue of choice for many outdoor photographers. This session explores not only the basic structure of LAB and its common uses, but expands into several advanced retouching areas.

• The basic AB color correction and its variants.
• How to identify the kinds of image that can only be handled satisfactorily in LAB.
• The power of Blend If in LAB.
• The decisive advantage in retouching.
• Advanced curving to isolate objects without formally selecting them.
• Advanced blending using the A and B channels.

Advanced Color Correction 2: Every File Has Ten Channels
Speaker: Dan Margulis

Channel blending is widely understood to be the deepest and also the most rewarding method of color correction. This session concentrates on luminosity blends in its first half, and then progresses to several powerful, bleeding-edge blending tricks that are not documented anywhere.

This advanced session presupposes at least rudimentary knowledge of the Apply Image command, the function of layer masks, and the basic structure of LAB.

• The art of converting color to grayscale — and its application to the correction of images.
• How to examine RGB channels for blending opportunities.
• Generating a false black channel for blending use in RGB.
• Overlay blends using LAB channels.
• Using channels as layer masks or to mask other blends.
• The mighty Multiply mode.
• A suggested blending workflow for faces.

ADVANCED TOPICS & TECHNIQUES

Is it Real or is it Photoshop?
Speaker: Bert Monroy

Bert Monroy is considered one the world's leading Photoshop painters. In this class he will teach you many of the techniques he has developed in the creation of his internationally-renowned work. Whether you want to add some missing detail to your photograph or create a scene entirely from your imagination, this class is the one that must be taken.

Bert will show you how to use filters in ways you never thought possible. He will show you how to take a blank screen and create imagery that will force the viewer to question whether the image it is real or an illusion.

• Understand what makes good balance and composition.
• Learn how to develop a concept and carry it through to the finished product.
• Learn the basics of perspective, shading, and lighting.
• Gain an in-depth understanding of the power of Photoshop.

This class promises to be not only educational but inspirational. You will be left with the motivation to take Photoshop and your imagination to heights you never thought possible.

Smart Sharpen, Smart Objects, and Smart Filters
Speaker: Deke McClelland

When they were introduced in Photoshop CS2, the Smart Sharpen command and smart objects were altogether unrelated features. In CS3, they remain very different functions. (And just how "smart" they are, I leave you to judge.) But the new smart filter feature brings them together, along with a host of other dynamic filtering effects.

In this session we'll see how to make the most of these always powerful, sometimes complicated, occasionally downright mysterious features. You'll learn how to:

• Correct for lens blur and camera movement with Smart Sharpen
• Create the rough equivalent of a focus adjustment layer with High Pass
• Avoid noise enhancement with the Emboss filter
• Place or create a smart object
• Apply nondestructive transformations
• Create duplicate layers, all of which can be updated at once by changing a single smart object
• Recall Camera Raw settings from a placed "smart photograph"
• Apply smart filters to a layer
• Filter multiple layers at a time
• Mask one smart filter effect independently of another
• Apply a filter to live, editable text
• Predict when smart filters are your friends and when they're a waste of time
• Sharpen vintage photographs with a custom edge mask, with and without smart filters