Living In Layers - The OFFICIAL Layers Magazine Blog

KISS When Working Images | Premiere CS4 Tutorial

CATEGORIES: Living In Layers | RC | October 07, 2008

Happy Tuesday everyone! So yesterday I was really excited to catch up with a good friend of mine, Luke Minogue. After losing touch with Luke for some time I was able to reconnect with him, only to find out he’s now a 1st Lt. of Company A, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division serving out in Iraq. To know Luke is to know that he is just a powerhouse of energy and commitment (on a lark, he ran up a 10 story building, only to repel down the side of it), but this all pales in comparison to the size of his heart.

This is a great article on what he’s doing out in Iraq

I asked him to send a picture of himself working and he obliged sending me what I can only describe as a Call Of Duty style shot (ok.. in my defense.. I can find a Call of Duty reference on pretty much anything). The Photoshop Guy in me thought I could go through 100 steps to do all of this crazy stuff to it, but then I thought - Keep It Simple… Seriously..

I was reminded of a conversation that I had not too long ago with someone about Photoshop and what constitutes advanced and professional. Someone had discredited a class because the tutorials didn’t seem advanced enough. When pressed on the issue, the person wanted a tutorial that involved over 50 steps, and hours worth of work.

Want to see more of this tutorial? Click on the jump to read more!

The point here is that at the end of the day, Photoshop is a Tool. While it’s very fun to use and play around with it, sometimes what you need to correct is simple. Matter of fact, Adobe has made it a business to go out of it’s way to make it take less steps.

So here we have a quick pass we did on the image. What did we do:

Quick Levels adjustment to get rid of a green cast on the image and increase contrast.
Red eye tool to fix the eyes.
Copy to New Layer and run Unsharp Mask
Hide everything with a Layer Mask and only bring in certain portions of the image to be sharper.
Crop out guy on left’s leg
Burn in edges (you could also use the Vignette under Filter>Distort>Lens Correction

Could you spend more time working the image? Of course. However, there are times when speed is key - like when you’re doing 600 of them.

Sometimes, the best way to show your understanding of a tool is by showing a little efficiency and restraint. Safe journey home, Luke.

If you guys want.. drop in and leave Luke an Encouraging Message on Facebook!

Premiere Tutorial
So this week, we have Franklin McMahon talking about Premiere Pro CS4 talking a little bit about Lift and Extract in Premiere CS4. Click on the link below to get to the video.

Lift and Extract in Premiere CS4 - Franklin McMahon

That’s it for today everyone. See you guys back here tomorrow morning!

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