【一月一故事】9月: BCPA‘s Photoshop Class for Beginners

April (柴锋)

<h3>On Sep. 30 and Oct. 1, 2017, BCPA hosted a 2-day entry-level Photoshop (PS) training class. It was the first time that BCPA offered such an intensive PS class for photo post-processing. </h3> <h3>The class, taught by&nbsp;Mr. Daryl Luk, focused on key concepts and practical skills of PS. </h3><h3>Daryl is an experienced photographer and two times president of BCPA. He has been using Photoshop editing his photos since 2009.</h3> <h3>More than 10 BCPA members with no or a little PS experiences signed up for the class. They were eager to learn.</h3> <h3>It was a hand-on class. Students were requested to bring laptops with PS installed. </h3> <h3>Daryl spent a lot of time and effort preparing for this class. He provided a handout with detailed instructions and some sample photos to the students. </h3> <h3>Daryl started the class with an introduction of the user interface in PS and ACR, and the most commonly used tools such as crop, brush, stamp, selection etc.</h3> <h3>Then he explained several fundamental concepts in PS and ACR including layer, layer mask, histogram and filters. Some of these concepts could be confusing yet Daryl managed to demonstrate them in a way everybody could understand.</h3> <h3>Then the class moved on to the basic operations. In this section, the students had the chance to learn step by step how to crop, resize, transform and straighten a photo; use different ways to sharpen a photo; different ways to reduce noise; different ways to create vignette effects; add a signature in a photo; clean up dirt spots and remove unwanted objects from a photo.</h3> <h3>The last section of Day 1 class was about contrasts. The teacher taught students skills and tricks to adjust a photo to balance its contrast and use different ways to add dodge and burn. </h3> <h3>The second day's class was more fun as students could practice what they have learned from the previous day while learning more advanced skills.</h3><h3>The second day’s contents were divided into 3 sections: color, black and white (B&amp;W), and portrait. </h3> <h3>The first section of Day 2 focused on colors adjustment. Students learned to use different ways to change color tone; to make vivid colors; to create Instagram effects; to create dreamy effect; and to create soft sunlight effect.</h3> <h3>After that, students were taught to convert images to B&amp;W using different tools, to create split tone images using gradient map and ACR, and to create B&amp;W image with accent color using color range. <br /></h3> <h3>The most exciting part of the course was the last section: portrait. At the end of this section, the students mastered skills to whiten teeth, smooth skin tone, remove wrinkles and blemishes, increase eye contrast, and more interestingly slim a body.</h3> <h3>After the 2-day intensive training, all students were very happy about the useful skills they have learned, and thankful for Daryl and BCPA for providing this learning opportunity.</h3> <h3>Some of the students already asked when will the next class be offered.<br /></h3><h3><br /></h3><h3>Stay tuned! BCPA will offer more classes to its members next year.</h3>