Creative Photoshop Skills

12 week online course.

This online course is suitable for beginners and intermediate Photoshop users allowing you to fit your learning around your lifestyle and busy schedule! You can work at your own pace and interact with your teacher and other students as part of a shared online learning environment and experience.

Why are these skills so important?

Editing an image is how photographers have historically been able to ‘tell their story’ and express their emotions. Increasing your post production skills with Photoshop will enable you to express your own unique vision of the world we live in.

Another great benefit – as a PSC student you can subscribe to Adobe CC at a discounted student rate. You can do this through the PSC student portal once you have enrolled.

Learning online

At PSC our teachers are committed to assisting you in your learning throughout the online course.

The assignments you submit will assess your technical understanding of how to best edit images in Adobe Camera Raw and the full editing space of Photoshop CC.

Your teacher, award-winning photographer and digital artist, Cyndi Briggs will offer advice on the optimum capture workflows, as well as post-production editing techniques so that all students achieve a higher level of craft and become better photographers.

Course requirements

You will be required to capture images using the RAW file format using a DSLR or Mirrorless camera system. You will need access to Photoshop through the Adobe CC. A tripod and flash is also recommended, but not essential.

In this course you will learn how to:

• Transform a simple snapshot into a professional quality folio photograph using some simple camera settings and a professional post-production workflow.
• Develop images to communicate a ‘sense of place’ and express your vision.
• ‘Double-process’ a RAW file and combine the two versions in the main editing space of Photoshop using layers and layer masks. By double processing a RAW file, it will extend the visual possibilities so that you can optimise both the highlights and shadows of the RAW file, without compromise.
• Capture a portrait image with the optimum background tone so that you can quickly composite this image with a new background, with the minimum of fuss. Photoshop’s blend modes play an important part in this technique and the ability to composite models with long flowing hair, is the 'holy grail' of compositing techniques.
• Preserve the shadow of an object and transplant it to a new location to create a realistic composite image.
• Create a fixed position composite image from multiple images, modifying the content and/or lighting in each image allowing you to extend your creativity to illustrate complex ideas.
• Inject drama in a flatly lit image to extend your ability to create stylised signature grading treatments. This technique also introduces, what is perhaps, the most significant new feature to be found in Photoshop CC – The Camera Raw Filter.
• Colour grade an image by carefully controlling the colour palette to emulate analogue photography. These skills will enable you to convey a particular mood or feeling to your viewer. Many of the colour grading techniques emulate old film or film intentionally processed in the wrong chemicals (cross-processing). Some of the techniques, however, are purely digital and seek to limit or restrict the colour palette to create a signature style for your images. You will learn how to remove the clean and clinical nature of digital files.