Posts Tagged photoshop
Is it 'Shopped?
Digital Media Academy News + Events | May 1st, 2009 by Instructor
By Mike Johnson, Lead Digital Photography & Photoshop Instructor, DMA @ UC San Diego
Iain Macmillan had ten minutes one August morning in 1969 to take the iconic cover shot of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road. Out of half a dozen frames, number five became the cover. He used film and he didn’t have Photoshop. What would that image have looked like if he’d had today’s digital tools? Probably not much different.
Today, a creative mind armed with a digital camera and Photoshop are capable of creating virtually any image imaginable. But will others believe it? One of the greatest challenges for the photographer in post-production is to exercise restraint on the computer. As a judge of several photo competitions, the easiest images for me to pass over have been those that were over-processed in Photoshop. Likewise, there is no substitute for a good eye. Synthesizing a natural-appearing image from disparate elements is impossible without understanding the fundamental principles of photography and the behavior of light.
Two images of the famous crosswalk taken in April of this year; which one is real and which one was ‘Shopped? Click each for an enlargement.
In Digital Photography and Photoshop I, we’ll concentrate on techniques to ensure others will enjoy our images without bemoaning our clumsy use of either camera or software. Register now.
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DMA Digital Photography and Photoshop Courses Jump Starts a Photography Business
Digital Media Academy News + Events | April 1st, 2009 by Heather Kwok
Images Copyright Heather Reid Kwok Photography
In July of 2006 I spent two weeks at the Digital Media Academy immersing myself in the world of digital photography and Photoshop. Since Photoshop was not the most intuitive software to me, I was glad for the hands on training to get a handle on the basic and more advanced editing tools that it provides. The instructor knew his stuff! He was able to show us how to achieve the same result using at least three different methods and explain which method he thought was best which helped me grasp just how much Photoshop had to offer. It felt like drinking from a fire hose at times! However by the end of the week, everything would start to come together and it was amazing to see how much I had learned in such a short time.
The courses were a great combination of out in the field shooting and in the classroom learning Photoshop. I learned some valuable photography skills that helped me take better photos from the start and in the end saves me tons of time since getting the shot right the first time takes less time then trying to correct problems in Photoshop. The small class size made it easy to get personal time with the instructor to ask my questions and learn what I was specifically looking to learn in these courses.
After two weeks I had gone from never using Photoshop to using Photoshop to edit all of my photos. DMA’s courses allowed me to gain the skills and confidence to launch my photography business shortly thereafter. Without the DMA course I never would have gotten my business off the ground and running so quickly. Since the summer of 2006 my photography business has taken off thanks to DMA! It’s the best investment of time and money that I’ve put into my business and I recommend these courses for any aspiring photography who is looking to lauch or take their photography business to the next level.
A Closer Look at Adobe Photoshop
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 24th, 2009 by Ben
Hi! I’m Ben Jaffe, one of the instructors for Digital Media Academy’s Adventures Program. I want to give you a closer look at Adobe Photoshop CS4. We use Photoshop for image creation and modification in our Web Design class.
Photoshop is the industry standard for image manipulation and creation. It’s even become a verb! “That looks Photoshopped!” Usually we use that term to describe photographs that look like they have been modified. Photoshop is good for many other purposes too. In this case, we’re looking at a simple header for a website that we’ve created in Photoshop.
A header goes at the top of your website. Often, it is an image that includes elements related to the site. For example, if we are making a site about different kinds of ducks, we might make the header image look like a pond and put ducks in it!
On the far left of the above image, we can see our tools stacked vertically. We cover all the tools, but focus on the most important ones. On the right, we have several panes where we can modify the image in different ways. There are also pop-up windows that you can access in various ways, shown below.
This can all seem very overwhelming. Photoshop is an extremely deep application, which is why it is the standard for image manipulation in several industries (film, photography, print, etc). As complex as it is, with the proper guidance, it can be easy to learn even for young children. It’s much like a car. For example, you don’t need to know how to change the oil or replace the tires in order to get gas at a gas station. And you don’t need to know how to install a spark plug in order to change the oil. As with most things, people learn Photoshop modularly, piece by piece.
There are always different ways to accomplish things in Photoshop. Everyone I know takes a slightly different approach. We teach the kids several techniques for getting different effects, and with guidance from us, we let them take the route that is most fun for them. Your child can learn basic and some intermediate techniques in Photoshop, create graphics for an incredible website, build the website, and add animation, all in a week at DMA!
I hope to see you this summer!
-Ben Jaffe
A Closer Look at Adobe Dreamweaver
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 24th, 2009 by Ben
Hello! I’m Ben Jaffe, one of the instructors for Digital Media Academy’s Adventures Program. I want to give you a closer look at Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. We use Dreamweaver for creating the web site layout in our Adventures Web Design class.
Dreamweaver is what we call a “WYSIWYG Editor” (stands for “What You See is What You Get”). This means we get to see our design as we create it. Before tools like Dreamweaver, we had to write HTML markup to create web sites, and didn’t get to manipulate it graphically. Here’s the Design view in Dreamweaver:
The Properties bar (across the bottom) is where we set up links, text styles, bold, italics, and change the sizes of items like images and tables. The panes on the right are for managing files, uploading to our website, and managing the CSS. When we edit in Design View, Dreamweaver is actually writing the HTML code for us.
At the very beginning of the class, we teach the kids some basic HTML. We actually build a simple webpage, coding it by hand! This helps the students understand what is going on behind the scenes, and how to fix things manually if anything goes wrong. It’s good to be able to look at the code to see what’s really going on. This is Dreamweaver’s Code View:
That HTML code is what our computers actually download when we are browsing the web. They read the code, and render out a graphical page for us to read.
After covering HTML, we talk about site design, then start on our own websites. As we create graphics in Photoshop, we integrate them into our sites. We also create a Flash animation, and add that to our site. Some students might even build a Flash animation to use as the header. (The header is the bar across the top of the page, with the website’s title).
After we build our site, integrate our graphics, and add our Flash animation, it’s time to test our sites and upload them to the internet. We test the links on our pages to be sure they all work, and upload their web pages to DMA’s web space, for friends and family to see.
After this course, your child will know how to use Photoshop, how to make simple animations in Flash, and how to put it all together into a web site. At the end of the class, the students go home with a web address for their website, and a DVD with all of the original files they used to make their content. This means that if they get access to the software (perhaps through their school), they can continue work on their web site!
I hope to see you this summer!
-Ben Jaffe
Technology at the forefront of Life Long Learning
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 22nd, 2009 by Lara
Janet Armstrong is a high school teacher at Adrian Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California. She recently attended CUE (Computer Using Educators), where she learned of DMA. Seeing the importance of technology in today’s world and the importance of keeping up with and teaching the latest technology to her students, she is going to take a DMA course this summer to advance her skills. The following is her views on technology in the classroom:
Schools have seen the need to educate students to make appropriate, efficient, and productive use of available technologies. At the same time they are compelled to reduce the digital divide that exists between higher and lower socioeconomic groups of students, giving them all access to the same tools. Consequently, as the tools advance, educators must be at the forefront of life long learning.
Life long learning is a phrase that has been buzzing around academia for the last decade. It’s a mindset educators must have to stay connected to the ever-evolving technology that seems to grow exponentially each year. Teachers and administrators MUST stay abreast these advances or they will quickly find themselves fossils.
Skills once reserved only for high school students are more appropriate today for middle school students. This has created the opportunity to expose high school students to cutting edge technologies that are fun, interesting and highly engaging. At Wilcox High School in Santa Clara we are opening two new digital media courses that will employ the use of Adobe CS4 products to teach web design, digital image editing, digital storytelling, and publication design. To be a proficient teacher I must become a proficient user of these tools. This summer Digital Media Academy at Stanford will prepare me to be such a teacher. The Introduction to Web Design with Adobe CS4 – Dreamweaver, Flash & Photoshop course will enhance my current skills as I learn the latest version of these programs to design lessons and activities for my students.
Life today is complex and diverse. As never before, communication involves the constant use of visuals, sound, and action. The digital age is here and education has the responsibility to prepare our children to use the tools today and into the future. Thankfully, the Digital Media Academy is available to assist with this process.
Janet Armstrong
Adrian Wilcox High School
Creating "Red Carpet" for the Sonoma Film Fest
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 22nd, 2009 by Phil Gibson
By Keith English -- Animation Director, Screaming Pixels and DMA Instructor.
Thought you might be interested in a project we have just delivered to a client which uses a lot of the tools you can learn, or might have already learned at Digital Media Academy. “Red Carpet” will be running before every movie at the upcoming Sonoma International Film Festival April 1-5th 2009. The main purpose of openings is to list sponsors before each movie and our quest is to make that repetitive experience as enjoyable as possible, especially when some of these run over 150 times during a festival.
This spot was produced using Maya, RealFlow and Shake (which could have also been done in After Effects if necessary), plus of course Photoshop to create a lot of the textures we needed. We were first given the poster, which the client had designed in Sonoma and although they gave us a carte blanche, from that point on it was obvious it needed to be styled as an art deco piece. 
To give it a poster-like look we rendered using only a 20 degree angle of view camera, so that it was almost orthographic with only a tiny amount of perspective, and then added a paint, cartoon and film grain filters all mixed back into the original so that everything was kept subtle.
The character models were built to be almost comic-like, flat and graphic, and the last thing we did was to take off the specular highlights on their eyes to flatten it a even more. The sets were also designed to be slightly exaggerated, especially the car of course, which is just the front end of a car. We only built just as much as we needed for each shot.
The champagne was created using RealFlow. The bubbles were from Maya’s underwater Paint Effects, painted onto the interior bottom of the animated glass, which had its visibility turned off, and then those bubbles rendered, taken into Shake, color corrected, then warped with a filter to look like they were inside the liquid, rotoscoped out to be seen only in the area of the liquid and finally layered over the glass as a “screen” to combine the lighter areas of both the original image and the bubbles.
The flash bulbs were created by rendering the two finished characters separately (as they were massively different scales), then rendering them again with an all white version of each character with a single spotlight ahead of their faces for the complete sequence. This created a grayscale image of each face front lit and black on the back of their heads, which when applied as a matte to a brightness node in Shake would brighten just the front of their faces.
Their eyes were tracked, again in Shake, and a 2D flare added to the front ofeach eye. So now we had two complete sequences, the first with their normal face renders and the second with the flash on the front of their faces continuously including a continuous flare. Now we just used a “mix” node in Shake to dissolve between the two sequences every time we wanted a flashlight to go off. 3 frames up for the flash and 10 down for the bulb fading.
Only the bottoms of her dress and bottoms of his pants used Maya’s nCloth, with all else being regular polygonal geometry modeling. The hair on both characters was created using Joe Alter’s Shave plugin in Maya, but without any dynamics on it. Everything was rendered using Maya’s software renderer except for the champagne liquid and glass shot for which we used Mental Ray in Maya as it’s much faster with refractions. The project, from conception to delivery, took just three weeks.
Cody Westheimer, a very talented LA composer created the music for the piece. Well actually, that is where we really began, with the music and then everything was animated to that. Hopefully in the end it looks and feels as though it was all created together.
If you have any specific questions I would be happy to answer them. And my advice to all of you who want to work in this business? … really learn the tools and then … BE PROLIFIC.
Watch the video here:
Why take a live-instruction web design course?
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 9th, 2009 by Instructor
By Mike Johnson, Lead Web Design Instructor -DMA @ UC San Diego
With so many web sites, video tutorials, books and pay-to-view resources covering just about every aspect of web design, why invest in a week-long instructor-led course? Ask yourself: when was the last time you threaded 40 to 80 hours of focused hands-on study into your busy schedule? Who did you turn to when you hit a snag? Moreover, how did you decide which resources would most effectively equip you to build web presentations for your organization, clients, students or customers?
When you attend Introduction to Web Design wth Adobe CS4 – Dreamweaver, Flash & Photoshop at DMA this summer, not only will you begin to get your head and mouse around these three power tools, your instructor will focus on helping you leverage your existing creative skills and learning style to complete a significant project. DMA instructors purposely schedule one-on-one time during each day to individualize your experience to the greatest extent possible. Two years ago, an accomplished artist and college instructor found herself uncomfortable with Dreamweaver as a creative canvas but she was an Adobe Illustrator expert. We strayed from the script and used Illustrator as her starting point, then easily brought her work into Dreamweaver where she gave it legs for the web. As Adobe continues to integrate its professional applications, students have become better able to approach web design from whatever angle their past experiences bring them. Whatever your background, there is an approach that will work for you. Warning: once you begin enjoying the heft of your favorite digital tools and techniques, you’ll want to spend another week with Advanced Web Design Techniques with Adobe CS4. Click here for course information or register now.
Going to the CUE Conference & Training with my MacBook Air!
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 2nd, 2009 by Philip Harding
Written by Jaime Walden of the John Lennon Bus
Hello Blog,
Today is a wonderful day. Thanks to the Digital Media Academy, I will now be traveling in style with my new MacBook Air. Or, as Brian calls it, “Our first MBA!” MACGyver and myself will be taking our first trip together to Palm Springs, CA for CUE 2009 March 5-7. Over the course of our days there, we’ll be conducting a high school recording session and video premiere, giving tours, and holding “Ask the Expert” video production, web design, iLife, and special effects demos with the Digital Media Academy at our booth. Stop by and say hello, MACGyver and I will be the two smallest ones there.
On Mama’s Jukebox: Elliott Smith – “Ballad of Big Nothing”
DMA Returns to CUE March 5-7 with the John Lennon Bus
Digital Media Academy News + Events | February 27th, 2009 by Phil Gibson
Every year since 2002, DMA has presented hands-on sessions at the annual Computer Using Educators Conference in Palm Springs. The thing I appreciate most about this conference is the reception we get. Every year, hundreds of teachers from across California visit our 60-minute hands-on sessions, getting a taste of our 5-day immersion courses. While there is only so much you can learn in 60 minutes, I am always amazed at how much content our instructors cover, and how much people take away. This year, we will be doing sessions Thursday through Saturday in topics including Final Cut Pro, Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop and iLife. And, for the first time, we will be joined by our new partner, the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus.
The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is a non-profit 501(c)(3) mobile audio and HD video recording and production facility. Since 1998, the Bus has provided free hands-on programs to hundreds of high schools, colleges, Boys and Girls Clubs, music festivals, concerts, conventions and community organizations. Working together with some of the biggest names in music, the Lennon Bus encourages students to play music, write songs, engineer recording sessions and produce video projects using the latest audio, video, and live sound equipment. As a partner and sponsor of the Bus, DMA trains and supports the Lennon Bus staff, ensuring they are up-to-date on the latest digital media applications. In the summer, we co-teach (in collaboration with Lennon Bus staff) a summer computer camp course for teens called Music & Video Production at seven prestigious universities across the country. We also exhibit alongside the Lennon Bus at various national conferences like MacWorld and NAB.
At CUE, (in addition to the 60 minute hands-on session) DMA will offer short software demos, followed by Q & A, in an area adjacent to the Lennon Bus in the Exhibit Hall. It is a great opportunity for teachers to interact with our distinguished DMA teaching staff in a more intimate setting. We will be utilizing content created on the Bus in the demos.
If you are attending CUE this year, there will be lots of surprises, including an “special” invitation to attend DMA this summer at a discount. Hope to see you there!
Kids Learning Pro Web Design at Age 10! Technology Classes + Computer Camp for Kids
Digital Media Academy News + Events | February 18th, 2009 by Philip Harding
“Wow! That animation looks great! Ok. Now we’re going to take the animated Flash movie you just created and you are going to import it into Dreamweaver on your web page. Let’s all do this together! Ready?”
I am right in the middle of another great Digital Media Adventures course for kids at Stanford: Web Design and Flash. We are taking an in depth look at the Adobe Creative Suite applications: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver, and Adobe Flash. We are on the third day of the five-day course at Stanford University. My class just got back into the classroom from playing a crazy game of Slaughter Ball. It sounds scary, but it’s a lot of fun. Sort of like Dodge Ball. The kids in my class are a little out of breath from playing ball, but that’s to be expected at a summer camp. They came running in and jumped (literally) in their seats excited about their Flash movies they created just before the break.
While the kids are experiencing all the fun of a summer camp, they are also getting an unbelievable learning experience. That’s what makes this the full summer computer camp experience. They are learning the same pro applications we are teaching across the Stanford campus in our adult web design courses. The professional Adobe applications like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash are the real deal! The kids pick up the technology so fast. That makes it really fun to teach. It’s interesting how much better kids interact with technology they have grown up with their whole life.
Earlier in the week, the kids in my class had already designed and created their own logo and company business card design. Their custom business card had their picture from a photograph taken in the class. The graphics and effects they created turned out amazing. They had learned the ins and outs of the Adobe software and were creating a matching website to go with their cards and logo. They were now adding an animated movie they created in Flash to spice up their website design.
In the next three classrooms I can faintly hear the other Adventures classes. The kids in 3d video Game Design course are screaming about some new level they created trying to destroy their enemy. From the Robotics and Programming class I can hear cheers of two robots racing. I see the Film, Digital Movie Making and Effects class go by with all their cameras, mics, lights, and scripts to go act, film, and direct their next scene. I wish I’d been exposed to this when I was this age! This computer camp is the real deal.
