lecture: Intro to Photoshop 3

In this live lecture, we started out by being brought through a few more of the tools in photoshop.

Adjustment Layers

A breed of non-destructive image editing tool that works both on individual layers and a stack of layers. Non-destructive meaning, possessing the ability to edit and discard adjustments at any time.

Brightness & Contrast — Adjusts highlights & shadows.
Level — Adjusts levels of highlights, midtones, & shadows.
Curves — Adjusts an arbitrary amount of points which correlate to highlights, midtones, & shadows of an image.
Exposure — Adjusts highlights (exposure), midtones (offset), & shadows (gamma).
Selective Colour — Adjusts the raw values (RGB/CMYK/etc) of a selected colour only.

Filters

A group of Destructive (but sometimes Non-destructive) image editing tools that work on individual layers. Destructive meaning, permanently modifying the raster data of an image, without the ability to edit and discard it afterwards.

Adjustment Layers vs Filters

Adjustment Layers

100% non-destructive
Exists as a layer
Able to affect a stack of layers
Consists mainly of colour adjustments

Filters

Only some are non-destructive
Exists as an property on a layer
Able to affect one layer (but you could create smart objects and go from there)
Consists many more advanced adjustments

tutorial: Demo for project[1]

Firstly, a brief reiteration of composition was in place. We were instructed to try to use the Rule of Thirds as our primary alignment aid, and the Golden Ratio was ideal but optional.

Then, straight jumping in to blend modes, things started to become spicy. The main important point to using blend modes was to make sure the colours were still nice and visually appealing. To undeep-fry the colours, we could use curves to offset the contrast change as an artifact of a blend mode.

A super cool thing demonstrated was applying blend modes to adjustment layers, mixing all the concepts together. It produced pretty cool results and very much tickled my 2nd neuron.

The methods for effectively stacking blended layers, as well as per layer adjustment layers were shown.

Another *chef kiss* piece of advice, is to keep things simple, reduce amounts of layers by flattening multiple blended ones. Going from whole frames, to individual items; going from simplistic standalone layers that don't mess around with each other, to layers that mix together via blend modes, adjustments, & filters to create something more cohesive.