Sessions

From Surreal to Real: Building Composite Images in Photoshop

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Come along my creative journey as I show you the steps to bring to life a Surreal photo composite in Photoshop and teach you real-world photo compositing techniques.

Topics include:

  • Various ways of selecting your subject
  • Easy ways to remove the background from your subject 
  • Utilizing Layer Masks to blend two images together
  • The diverse variety of layer blending modes
  • Simple keyboard shortcuts to make working in Photoshop easier
  • Non-destructive editing utilizing Smart Objects/Smart Filters
  • How to make your image pop with Color Grading in the Camera Raw filter
  • Add selective contrast with Adjustment Layers
  • How to save your composite with Export As and Save for Web

You’re Just Not Efficient Without Adobe Bridge

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Most people think Adobe Bridge is just for photographers, but no! If you use InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop, you owe it to yourself to learn how this digital asset manager can make your life so much easier.

Adobe Bridge is just waiting for its chance to save you time by cutting through the clutter of files and applications. In this session, you’ll learn how to use Bridge to streamline graphics production workflows.

This session includes:

  • Using Bridge to inspect InDesign documents
  • How anyone can use Bridge for free
  • Use Bridge shortcuts to process many files rapidly
  • Hunt and gather project files and folders more quickly
  • Metadata: your key to smooth workflows
  • Batch processing the easy way

Spectacular and Easy Type Effects

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The human eye responds to seeing typography almost as powerfully as it recognizes human faces — but how you set the type, and what kinds of effects you apply can matter a huge amount. Let’s look at a number of awesome type effects you can create using Illustrator and Photoshop that will enhance your ability to capture eyeballs and attention.

From Sketch to Mockup: Designing in a Cross-App World

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Stop thinking about using “an app” and start thinking about using “the app ecosystem”! Join us for a fun and wild ride through the “cross-app world,” where you’ll get to see how to implement the power of working with Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign together in a practical and productive way.  Keep your focus on the design by quickly changing apps and managing assets with the power of the CC Libraries! Are you ready to empower your workflow? Let’s get started!

Topics include:

  • Building vector sketches in Illustrator
  • Creating dedicated libraries to store all your project’s assets in one place
  • Launching your favourite apps directly from the CC Libraries panel
  • Implementing the power of working with the Creative Cloud apps  together in your everyday workflow!
  • Creating a product mockup to professionally present your InDesign art

Remote and Virtual Workflows for Design and Creatives

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For many designers and creatives, working remotely, away from the office, has been really difficult… and remote/virtual will be an ongoing reality for many of us for a long time to come. Fortunately, there are editorial and review solutions that can make your life easier, and work flow faster.

The field of web-based collaboration and review is hot, hot, hot! If emailing PDFs out to remote clients and authors for review is slowing you down, you’ll be glad to learn about these newer, more streamlined alternatives.

This session includes:

  • Initiating and managing comment and review using Acrobat versus Creative Cloud services
  • Best practices for managing Acrobat comments
  • Discovering how InDesign’s Share for Review is better (and worse) than Acrobat
  • Using linked Word files for fast, round-trip copyediting with WordsFlow
  • When InCopy is the solution
  • Using Google Docs with InDesign

You’ll be so encouraged and energized by what you learn, that you’ll be fixing your own workflows as soon as you get back to your remote team!

Photoshop Features You Never Learned (but need to know)

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We all know that Photoshop is one of the most complicated, overwhelming, powerful apps on the planet… and Adobe just keeps adding more and more amazing features! That’s great, except most of us can’t keep up.

In this session, you’ll learn which new features from the past few years you need to pay attention to, which you can probably ignore, and how to get up to speed with the best practices for Photoshop workflows.

Textile and Fashion Design with Photoshop and Illustrator

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Do you need to design for fabric? Trying to create realistic textile or clothing? This session will act as a quick overview of the tools and skills you need to understand to be successful. Topics include:

  • Scanning, coloring, and rendering hand-drawn illustrations
  • Using filters and brushes to simulate textures such as linen, flannel, wool, denim, or fur
  • Manipulating patterns and textures with the Transform and Puppet Warp tools
  • Using Symbols for maximum flexibility

The Most Important Skill in Photoshop: Quality Selections and Masks, Part 2

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In Part 1 of this two-part tutorial, we learned the basics of making great selections (masks) in Photoshop. Now, let’s look at “next steps,” including:

  • How to end up with a great selection
  • The power of channels for making challenging selections
  • How to mask a mask

Advanced Pattern and Tessellation Tricks

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In Part 1 of this tutorial, you learned how to make basic patterns in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Capture. Now, it’s time to take it to the next level with tessellations (regularly repeating patterns)! Learn tricks of the trade by a professional with years of pattern-making experience!

  • Making seamless repeating patterns
  • Patterns that appear 3D
  • The 17 core patterns of the Alhambra palace
  • Random vs regular patterns

Photoshop + Illustrator + InDesign: How Three Apps Work as One

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It’s the ultimate Adobe power-trio: InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator! But you’ll never be efficient with any one of them if you don’t understand how they work with the others!

Topics include:

  • How to properly set up Photoshop and Illustrator files for InDesign
  • Choosing between layers and artboards
  • CC Libraries: the secret back door conduit
  • Best practices for managing vectors and pixels