Digital Distressing Monday evening 6:30 - 9:30 $80  
  Mike Jennings    


Student Level:Intermediate**
Type of Workshop: Instructional and Project

 
 

    You will learn how to use Adobe Photoshop to take ordinary images and chew them up in evocative ways. Sophisticated conversions to black and white, sepia effects, torn edge effects, dust and scratches, vignetting at the edges, applying subtle blurs, adding film grain, and simulating old color film stock. To do this, we will be learning to use Photoshop features including Duotones, Layer Masks, Adjustment Layers, Smart Objects, Smart Filters, blur and noise filters, selection tools, transforms, Blending Modes, Custom Brushes, Curves and Levels adjustments.

    Materials fee of $10 payable to Instructor at class time includes:
    Use of A scanner
    A USB flash drive containing my "digital distressing toolkit," including exotic textures, grunge layers, custom brushes, course materials and other useful goodies. The flash drive and its contents are yours to keep and reuse as you like.

    Supply List:
  • A Mac or Windows laptop or whatever computer you can carry with you. It should have at least 1.5GB of RAM and have been manufactured in about the last four years or else you will be very frustrated in this workshop. It should have Photoshop or Photoshop Extended CS3, CS4 or CS5. If you don't already have one of these, see "PHOTOSHOP NOTES" below. You must use a mouse in the class, even if you are comfortable with the trackpad or other built-in pointing device. I will have a spare laptop or two but you will need to contact me in advance.
  • Some photographs you would like to distress. I will have a scanner but it will save time if you can scan them at 300dpi before class. Less time scanning means more time distressing, for everyone in the class.
  • If you have a graphics tablet such as the Intuos series or the Bamboo Fun, this would be a good class to use it in. This makes working in Photoshop more natural and less frustrating and fiddly. I will not be teaching how to make the most of these, however.

How Savvy are you ?
To make the class run smoothly, it is imperative that all students have a certain level of familiarity with the computer, and with Photoshop. For example, you should be comfortable with the common skills listed below. If you're not comfortable with these before the class, please don't sign up or get basic training in advance, otherwise you will find the class very frustrating.

** Intermediate user who has taken one of my other Photoshop classes, or intermediate-to-advanced Photoshop user. You will need to understand layers, layer masks and blending modes to some degree; I teach these in all of my full-day classes.

You must be comfortable with the following:

1) Saving a file somewhere on your hard drive or USB flash drive and finding it later from within Photoshop

2) Selecting everything in a Photoshop document and copying it, then pasting it into a different Photoshop document

3) Comfortability with terms such as palette, dialog, menu, cursor, window, dock, font, document, tab, drag and drop. Mac users should know what I mean when I refer to the Finder and the Command key.

4) Basic familiarity with common Photoshop tools such as the Move tool, the Brush tool, the Magic Wand, the Lasso tools, the Eyedropper, and the Crop tool.

5) Photoshop's foreground and background color controls.

6) You must know how to find out and communicate which version of Photoshop you have.

Visit http://www.dearhubby.com/savvy.html for more detailed information and pointers to internet tutorials.

Photoshop Notes:

If you do not already have Photoshop, you can download a trial version for free from Adobe. Note that it expires after 30 days so wait until just before the class before installing it. Tip: You can hit up any students that you may know and purchase Photoshop for $300 instead of the $650 retail price.

The handout will make mention of Photoshop Elements where possible, but I will not be referring to it in class, and many of the features I rely on are not available in Photoshop Elements 7.0 or earlier. If you intend to use Photoshop Elements, the handout is designed so that you may use the trial version of the full Photoshop, and then after the class you may "translate" from Photoshop to Photoshop Elements where applicable.

I will be monitoring the Art Unraveled Yahoo! Group, particularly for messages with "Photoshop" or "Digital" in the subject lines. If you would like to contact me directly you may do so at mike [at] hannahgrey.com.

Questions? Email Mike at mike@hannahgrey.com
Website: http://www.dearhubby.com