This past weekend we closed the book on another amazing Photoshop Week from CreativeLive.  For those of you not familiar with CreativeLive, it provides free workshops broadcasted live from Seattle and San Francisco. There is always the option to buy the workshop if you can’t view the broadcast or would simply like to file it away for future reference.

Photoshop Week is six days of intense Photoshop learning with 12 hours of classes per day. This year many inspirational photographers and designers graced our screens to share their secrets and hints. Even the bits that were review were driven home in a fresh way.

For example, Aaron Nace (of phlearn.com) talked about identifying distractions in a portrait and how to go about fixing them. This is something I’ve always done with our landscapes, but he presented the task in a new way and provided a little more direction to the process by physically marking up the image to ensure that nothing got left behind.

Hover over the image below to see what distractions were targeted and fixed.

Taking me a little outside my area of experience was Matt Kloskowski and his workshop on Photoshop Restoration Rescue. I haven’t really ever had the opportunity to restore old photos, but his colourisation of a black and white photo prompted me to step outside the box and do one of my own! The only B&W photos I had on hand were those from my parents’ wedding. I didn’t think it was too bad for a first attempt!  🙂  In fact, when I sent it to my parents, my mom couldn’t figure out why I was sending it to her and she asked “Doesn’t it always look like that?”  Since her memories of the day are in colour, her mind didn’t question the change.  I guess this also means that the alteration was close enough to reality!

Hover over the image below to see the original B&W image.

In between all of the learning and demonstrations, we also were privy to nuggets of wisdom from these masters. Something that Chris Orwig said really resonated with me: “You’re never finished when you think you are.”  This was especially pertinent to me on that particular day since I had posted a photo to Facebook that I loved and was so happy with…until I kept working on it and realised that it was nowhere near what I wanted.  Now I’m pretty sure that it’s finished….but you never know!!

(The plug-ins used in the above photo are RadLab from Totally Rad and Perfect Effects from On1 Software.)

Now that Photoshop Week 2015 is over, I am inspired to create new images using the different techniques that I learned and I’m already looking forward to next year!!