Liberal Studies This Week

Sharing your experience as an online student

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If your family is like mine, you’ve reached the time of year when your picture will be taken as often most celebrities. You can’t fix an awkward facial expression but you can really tweak most photographs so that they look like a professional took them. I’m pretty good with Photoshop and nearly everything I learned came watching the Photoshop Workbench.

The workbench is a regular series in which Mark Johnson takes a photograph and makes it better. What I like about the series is that it doesn’t feel like a how-to or instructional series. Instead, it’s like watching over the shoulder of a really talented guy at work. As you watch the videos, you may not ever need to do exactly what he does to a specific picture, but watching him will demystify the tools so that you feel comfortable playing with them yourself.

You can find his website here. Yes, there is an ad for his DVD on this page (I bought it a couple weeks ago even though I’ve already watched most of them years ago, so yes, they are that good:) If you scroll down though, you’ll see the workbench videos.

If you are brand new to Photoshop, I would recommend some of his earlier videos. They are hard to find so here is a direct link. This is a 9 part Photoshop 101 and some of them are pretty techie but I’d recommend parts 6 through 9 – part 9 is really great.

What’s that, you don’t have Photoshop? It’s too expensive? Come on, it’s only a thousand dollars! That’s a reasonable price to pay for professional looking snapshots but, it you don’t have the money to spare, remember that you are a student and can get big discounts on software. The thousand dollar Photoshop is only $176 if you buy it from the U of I.

If even that is too much money, you can download GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) here. This is an open source photo editing program. It doesn’t work exactly like Photoshop but many of the underlying concepts are the same.

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