PHOTOSHOP WORKFLOW
Marilyn Ashley
For me, this trip was mostly about the social experience, but this trip also had a very large impact on my skill level and technique growth.
On Thursday morning I went to a class called Photoshop Workflow, and in that class we worked on the nine steps of workflow.
The first step included how to download and save photos, clear SD cards and how to input/name each photo. In this section we also learned that it’s always important to get second opinions on all of our work so that we know which photos are best for us to use in the future.
On the second step, we were reminded to always give credit to the photographer and it’s important to include a caption so when we go back to use the photo, it will give us all the details.
The third step was what I learned from most. It was how to level rotate and crop in Photoshop. I learned all these great tools, teaching me how to level images, rotate them to fit the horizon line, and how to crop an image so we don’t have too much unnecessary detail.
The fourth step was how to adjust image size. This was to ensure that the resolutions fit perfectly for whatever type of publication I would use in the future.
In the fifth step, I learned this really cool mechanism on how to adjust the brightness, color, and contrast by using levels in the image menu. There’s a way to open up a color histogram in RGB and that’s when we learned how to go through each channel and make adjustments so that a picture wasn’t too bright or too dark. But doing it this way made sure that the contrast and saturation of the image didn’t change with it.
The sixth step was how to clean up pictures that had damaged and scratched parts. We learned how to use the clone tool with small brush sizes and how to blend out the imperfections. My favorite tool that we learned was how to fix red eyes if the flash setting changed the color of the subject’s eyes. It’s called the red eye tool!
For step seven we learned how to add an unsharp mask so that the blurry/ unfocused details in an image were sharpened and more defined.
The eighth step was all about the different ways to change an image into a black-and-white image. There are different types of gray scales you can use depending on the RGB histogram, and we learned that there’s more than one grayscale to each image.
The ninth and final step we learned was to always save as! Along with this, I learned that when saving to different publications there are different types of saving methods. For websites/webpages you would save it as a PNG; to save it for later you save it in Photoshop; for yearbooks and newspapers you use JPEG.
In this class I learned a lot of things that I hadn’t learned previously, and it was some really great information. This class was definitely memorable and will help me when I edit/sort photos in the future.
Before we left, the instructor quickly taught us how to use the lasso tool to remove whole objects from an image. But he also made a strong point too. This technique was only to be used in artistic image creations and to refrain from using it in a journalistic photo. Journalistic photos need to be accurate, representative, and they need to tell the whole truth.
I think this class was the most beneficial class that I took, and gave me the most advice and help strengthen my skills for the future.