In her fourth video, Artistic Portraits In Photoshop, Susi Lawson continues her work of teaching new techniques for transforming photographs into works of art. In this video you will be primarily looking at the portrait through the use of Photoshop.
Along with winning Best of Show in the 2007 Photoshop User Awards, and first place in the Portrait/Wedding category of the 2008 Photoshop User Awards, Susi Lawson has continued to add to her awards with first place in the 2008 "Just Print It!" Moab paper contest and first place in the WPPI Kodak Award Photography Book in 2009.
Artistic Portraits In Photoshop contains 19 videos covering 11 lessons that detail how to work with Photoshop to create artistic portraits. It covers techniques of working with brushes, painting portraits, and how to use photos to begin your work as well as how to create brushes in Photoshop. It comes on three disks; two of the disks contain the videos, and one has the necessary images so you can follow along.
The training begins with Introduction to Artistic Portraits in Photoshop. This provides a fundamental layout of what you will be taught in this series. It provides an overview of the techniques that you will need, and tells you where to find the training files as well as how to get help if you find yourself confused.
Lesson 1, Overview of Basic Tools is a brief overview of some of the skills that you will need to have in order to work with this video. The instructor covers how to work with layers, blend modes, opacity, dodge and burn tools, brushes and brush dynamics, channel mixer, levels, as well as several other tools in the toolbar.
Lesson 2, Custom Hair Brushes now gets into creating your own custom Photoshop brushes. In this lesson you will focus on how to create brushes for hair. She begins by building a simple brush and then shows how to make it look more realistic through the use of brush presets. Then she shows how to implement the brush so that you can use it in your art work.
Lesson 3, Paper Flower/Paper Flower Details takes an image of a girl and a photo of a pattern captured off of a paper bag and merges them into a portrait. In this lesson you will learn how to merge two images, work with the marquee tool, and the transform control. Then you will work with brushes to lighten up the girl's skin, highlight her hair, and lighten up the image.
Article comments
1 - Jeff Hansen
Michael couldn't have said it better. I too, highly recommend all of Susi Lawson's video tutorials. Take your photography to the next level with these excellent educational videos.