Doing photographic portraits, while rewarding, can also be a challenging skill to master. To do it professionally can take years to perfect and having the right post-processing skills and enhancement techniques are a must. In Beyond Skin: Going Deeper With Photoshop CS3, Lee Varis uses Photoshop CS3 to bring out the best in photos of people, faces, and bodies. He examines tone and contrast, color correction, retouching, and much, much more.
Your trainer for this library is Lee Varis. Lee Varis is the owner of Varis PhotoMedia, and has worked with photography and computer imaging for the last few decades. He combines digital and conventional photography with computer graphics to create images for use in advertising, commercial graphics, and multimedia. Lee's work has been featured in movie posters, on video box covers, CD covers, and in numerous brochures and catalogs.
Lee has developed a unique approach to photography that takes advantage of certain idiosyncrasies of digital capture technology to create impossible lighting effects. Lee has written several books, including Skin: The Complete Guide to Digitally Lighting, Photographing, and Retouching Faces and Bodies (Sybex) This library is divided into 29 lessons in two volumes and runs four and a half hours. I will break this review down by functional areas. You can see the full lesson listing at the bottom of this review.
Volume 1: The Basics
"The workspace" begins the lessons by showing you around the Photoshop CS3 environment, how to arrange and make custom palette arrangements, customized menus, and other tips to make your use of Photoshop much more comfortable.
"Curves" is sometimes considered one of the least understood tools in Photoshop, yet it is one of the more important image adjustment tools. In this section the instructor begins with a grayscale image so you only focus on tone and contrast and not with color. Next you add color to mix. Here you work with threshold adjustment layer to set black and white points to make your balance adjustments. You then move on to using the same techniques for working with skin tones. Once you get the contrasts, then you work for the most important color in the image; the color of skin. Finally, he finishes up with some speed techniques for streamlining your work.
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