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Now it's very possible that many if not most of you have never really used
Photoshop before, or you are not very comfortable inside the program. You've
poked around, you've tried a few things but you haven't been very satisfied by
the results. That's really of course, the idea behind this entire series, this
Photoshop CS4 One-on-One Series is to bring you totally up to speed and believe me
by time you are done, if you put in the time, you are going to be extremely
well-versed in Photoshop and very comfortable with the program.
But you may not be that way at this point, so what I want to do is kick things
off by giving you a sense of what a professional level image editing
application in general and more specifically what Photoshop can do. What kinds
of image editing miracles it's capable of pulling off, and this is a pretty
big one, as you are about to see. So unlike every other chapter in this series
where I ask you to work along with me if you can, if you are a premium member
or you have access to the DVD and you have the Exercise Files then go ahead
and open them up and work along with me. In that way you are going to gain the
best experience out of this series. This time though, I just want you to sit back
and relax. You can open the images, they are all found inside the Exercise
Files folder, but I would rather you didn't do that. I'd rather you just watch,
because I am going to be working through this project fairly quickly and I
am not going to give you the detailed information you would need in order to follow
along. All right, so here is the idea. We are starting
up with this image here. It's a photograph of the Stanley Hotel, very posh
and very well known in the state of Colorado and there is a few things just kind
of wrong with this image in general. The composition is really not tremendous
and the lighting is terrible and the color is drab and I am shooting the
image out of a moving car. I am actually the passenger in a moving car shooting
this image, I believe through a shut window because we have this dark sort
of shadow over here on the right-hand side of the image. It's a little
bit of vignetting. A beautiful photo, right. I mean normally it's a kind
of thing where I would just go, you know, and throw it away or at least ignore
it. The problem is I wanted this very photo. I
like this composition for where I am going. I am sort of evaluating what I want
to do with this image when I was shooting it. I want to turn this image into
something very, very different because you can see this hotel here is not
very remote. It's right next to this commercial real estate here and also it's
not particularly scary. It should be both remote and scary, because this hotel,
the Stanley was the inspiration for Stephen King's famous, The Shining, both the
book and the movie and everything, were modeled after this hotel.
Now if you think of the movie with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, you will
recall that the hotel is actually a character that drives jack Nicholson insane
and causes him to kill everybody around him and Shelley Duvall in particular
had options. If this was the hotel, this was really it and he was asked to be
caretaker of it, then Shelley Duvall could run over here to the Safeway, which
would probably be open, but if not she could go over to the KFC, I believe they
have longer hours and if she was really hard pressed and needed just a break,
she could go over here to the movie theatre, right? But just a lousy image,
it's not the least bit frightening. What I am going to do over the course of the
next few exercises is I am going to bring in this image right here, these rolling
hills, and I am going to place them in front of the hotel in the foreground.
So it's going to feel remote and we are going to apply a few other changes
as well and we are going to finally get this dramatic composition right here,
which you can see is stunning, right. We have great colors, we have great lighting,
the hotel is potentially scary, even though we are seeing it not in the winter
but in the summer. And we have got this great lettering, just a dynamic composition
in general, which is possible thanks to the power of Photoshop
and I will be showing you exactly how I assembled this composition, starting
in the next exercise.