I recently attended Heather Lahtinen’s Advanced Photoshop workshop. If you haven’t visited Heather’s site or blog yet, do it…she’s awesome, and she’s as friendly and professional as she is talented. I thought it might be useful to write a review on the workshop for other photographers thinking of attending, and even though Leeann Marie already did a great job, I wanted to give my perspective too.
The one-day workshop was held at Heather’s beautiful home, and focused on advanced Photoshop techniques and best practices. It was a small group (I think 5 of us total) which I personally prefer, as it allows more of your questions to get answered and allows the content to be a little more tailored to what you’re looking for. We covered a lot of topics, including layers, masking, portrait and skin retouching, body sculpting, and the use of actions and various shortcuts to streamline your workflow.
One of the big takeaways for me was how Heather approached skin retouching, and specifically dodging and burning. Although Photoshop provides dedicated dodge and burn tools, they must be used directly on the image layer, which results in “destructive” editing, which just means you’re editing the image itself. Heather showed us that you can do the same thing (and do it even better) through the use of adjustment layers and masking. By doing it this way you have all of your adjustments on separate layers that don’t affect the image layer itself, and since they’re separate layers, you can mask away and fine-tune those adjustments later. Heather showed a bunch of other retouching techniques too, and we built a very useful action that quickly sets us up for retouching other photos. We also dove into the warp tool and liquify/spherize filters, which were new to me and are simply fantastic for body sculpting.
Actions were a big focus of the day too, and we built a handful of really useful actions that will come in handy including the retouching action I mentioned above, an awesome action that reduces redness in skin tones (which I’ll be using A LOT), and various creative actions for black & whites, vintage-y effects, etc. I was also introduced to droplets, which I had never heard of but will be using all the time.
Although I learned a ton and was shown better and faster ways of doing things, I felt like much of the content was a review of what I already knew. Because I’ve done a lot of photo-editing and website design before, I was fortunate enough to have had a decent amount of Photoshop experience prior to this workshop, so I already had a good grasp on some of the basics that were covered. For example, I already knew most of the keyboard shortcuts and terminology, and have worked with layers, masks, and adjustment layers before. That said, I was doing a lot of things the hard way, so it was good to see quicker and better ways of doing certain things, and I did learn a lot of new stuff. If I had one critique of the workshop, I’d say that it could’ve probably moved at a quicker pace, but I do understand that the other students may not have had the prior experience, and from the instructor’s perspective I probably wouldn’t have gone much faster either. Heather also offers private one-on-one consultations which in retrospect may have been a better fit.
My vote? Definitely recommended. Heather truly is a master of her craft and is a fantastic instructor. No matter what your skill level is, you’re guaranteed to walk away with a better understanding of Photoshop and great ways to increase your efficiency with the tool.
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