Laskevitch - Photoshop CC and Lightroom a photographers handbook

Many thanks to my students. I wrote this book to be a complement to the time you spend in my classroom. I hope you and the educators who use this book find it a means to great creative ends. There have been many of you whove shaped not only my teaching, but also my humanity. You make it obvious that I found the right career.

This book was written and built with Adobe InDesign. I am so grateful to Douglas Waterfall, InDesign engineer and architect, who is responsible for so much in the program that is wonderful, and Chris Kitchener, the product manager whos overseen the products great development for the last years.

Thank you, Bob Peterson, for being mindful of the better things in Life and inspiring me with your fine photography and humanity.

In fact, thanks are owed to all my friends and adopted family, for tolerating my neglect. Well talk soon.

To my wife, Carla Fraga, I owe more than gratitude. No one deserves such a wonder, let alone me. Thanks for letting me share your life.

Thank you too, reader, for choosing this book.

Steve Laskevitch

July 2014

www.luminousworks.com

In some ways, digital technology has fundamentally changed photography and printing. Photographers have almost unlimited options to achieve the precise image that they intend. Printing has become infinitely more flexible and pushed closer to the control of the image creatoryou. The level of control at our disposal now exceeds even some of the most powerful darkroom techniques used in the past. This power and flexibility is dazzling, even confusing, to many.

The Adobe Photoshop products are some of the most complex programs many of us will ever use. There is a reason Photoshop has become a verb. Despite that, my goal is to present them in a reasonably accessible way. Although we are provided with thousands of complex techniques for editing images, most users (and most images) dont need all of that complexity. In fact, only a few steps are needed to get the vast majority of images to shine. In this book, Ill introduce you to the processes that I and my students have found most valuable: from organizing a large image library, through editing density, contrast, and color, to more detailed processing like sharpening, basic retouching, and converting images from color to black-and-white. The workflow discussed is complete, but I will not discuss the extreme manipulations often considered Photoshop mischief.

In this books two main sections, youll find both the foundational concepts and vocabulary youll need to use the software discussed, and the pieces youll need to build your full photographic workflow from capture through print or online output. Lets get working.