Professional Photographers Guild of Houston

Workflow Basics includes a general overview of getting to know your camera and what it can and can not do. We will touch on how important it is to manage your data in the field to prevent data loss. Digital recording media types will be discussed as well as how to manage directories on your hard drive once you are back in the studio.

Next we will introduce the class to Adobe Bridge. We will cover how to setup the workspace, the functionality of Adobe Bridge, its usability.

After we have gone over Adobe Bridge we go into the Camera Raw setup, functionality, usability and learn how to adjust the brightness, contrast, levels and curves.

Once the class has a grasp of Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw we then move into where and when to crop, as well as how the proportions of cropping are important. From there we move into what is color management, its history, how to set it up and explain why it is needed. We will also cover the history of black and white images and cover the conversion techniques including lightness channel, channel mixer and Ansel Adams Style. Plus we explain sepia and duo-toning in this segment.

Now we approach the Actions which can be used in Adobe Photoshop and explain what they are, why they are needed and how to use them. This segment goes over image problems and how to adjust brightness, contrast, levels and curves. As well as covering how to handle digital noise, digital fill flash and too much flash in an image. In addition, dodging and burning, fixing lens problems and saving blurry images are all covered. The next step is learning how to get rid of unwanted elements in images such as removing spots and backgrounds. We also include learning special effects and how to apply a soft spotlight, how to do a soft focus effect, burn-in edge, and how to map an image.

The final phase of the class covers watermarking of images, custom copyright brush and print package layouts. Each class member will have the opportunity to apply what they have learned to on of their images and output the image to a photo lab for processing as well as an onsite printer.