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Cropping for Print

Lesson 20 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

Cropping for Print

Lesson 20 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

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Lesson Info

20. Cropping for Print

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Bootcamp Introduction

16:22
2

The Bridge Interface

13:33
3

Setting up Bridge

06:55
4

Overview of Bridge

11:29
5

Practical Application of Bridge

27:56
6

Introduction to Raw Editing

11:00
7

Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface

07:39
8

Global Tools Part 1

16:44
9

Global Tools Part 2

20:01
10

Local Tools

22:56
11

Introduction to the Photoshop Interface

07:13
12

Toolbars, Menus and Windows

25:07
13

Setup and Interface

11:48
14

Adobe Libraries

05:57
15

Saving Files

07:39
16

Introduction to Cropping

12:10
17

Cropping for Composition in ACR

04:44
18

Cropping for Composition in Photoshop

12:40
19

Cropping for the Subject in Post

03:25
20

Cropping for Print

07:34
21

Perspective Cropping in Photoshop

07:11
22

Introduction to Layers

08:42
23

Vector & Raster Layers Basics

05:05
24

Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

27:35
25

Organizing and Managing Layers

15:35
26

Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes

21:34
27

Screen and Multiply and Overlay

09:15
28

Soft Light Blend Mode

07:34
29

Color and Luminosity Blend Modes

12:47
30

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

07:43
31

Introduction to Layer Styles

11:43
32

Practical Application: Layer Tools

13:06
33

Introduction to Masks and Brushes

04:43
34

Brush Basics

09:22
35

Custom Brushes

04:01
36

Brush Mask: Vignettes

06:58
37

Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn

06:53
38

Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation

07:52
39

Mask Groups

05:52
40

Clipping Masks

04:11
41

Masking in Adobe Camera Raw

07:06
42

Practical Applications: Masks

14:03
43

Introduction to Selections

05:42
44

Basic Selection Tools

17:41
45

The Pen Tool

11:56
46

Masks from Selections

04:22
47

Selecting Subjects and Masking

07:11
48

Color Range Mask

17:35
49

Luminosity Masks Basics

12:00
50

Introduction to Cleanup Tools

07:02
51

Adobe Camera Raw

10:16
52

Healing and Spot Healing Brush

14:56
53

The Clone Stamp Tool

10:20
54

The Patch Tool

06:38
55

Content Aware Move Tool

04:56
56

Content Aware Fill

06:46
57

Custom Cleanup Selections

15:42
58

Introduction to Shapes and Text

13:46
59

Text Basics

15:57
60

Shape Basics

07:00
61

Adding Text to Pictures

09:46
62

Custom Water Marks

14:05
63

Introduction to Smart Objects

04:37
64

Smart Object Basics

09:13
65

Smart Objects and Filters

09:05
66

Smart Objects and Image Transformation

10:57
67

Smart Objects and Album Layouts

11:40
68

Smart Objects and Composites

10:47
69

Introduction to Image Transforming

04:34
70

ACR and Lens Correction

09:45
71

Photoshop and Lens Correction

14:26
72

The Warp Tool

11:16
73

Perspective Transformations

20:33
74

Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

09:27
75

Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface

05:06
76

Making Your First Action

03:49
77

Modifying Actions After You Record Them

11:38
78

Adding Stops to Actions

04:01
79

Conditional Actions

07:36
80

Actions that Communicate

25:26
81

Introduction to Filters

04:38
82

ACR as a Filter

09:20
83

Helpful Artistic Filters

17:08
84

Helpful Practical Filters

07:08
85

Sharpening with Filters

07:32
86

Rendering Trees

08:20
87

The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters

15:08
88

Introduction to Editing Video

06:20
89

Timeline for Video

08:15
90

Cropping Video

03:34
91

Adjustment Layers and Video

05:25
92

Building Lookup Tables

07:00
93

Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type

15:11
94

ACR to Edit Video

06:10
95

Animated Gifs

11:39
96

Introduction to Creative Effects

06:08
97

Black, White, and Monochrome

18:05
98

Matte and Cinematic Effects

08:23
99

Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades

12:20
100

Gradients

04:21
101

Glow and Haze

10:23
102

Introduction to Natural Retouching

05:33
103

Brightening Teeth

10:25
104

Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool

08:07
105

Cleaning and Brightening Eyes

16:58
106

Advanced Clean Up Techniques

24:47
107

Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization

14:47
108

ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits

21:27
109

Portrait Workflow Techniques

18:46
110

Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization

12:17
111

Landscape Workflow Techniques

37:36
112

Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

06:59
113

Composite Workflow Techniques

34:01
114

Landscape Composite Projects

24:14
115

Bonus: Rothko and Workspace

05:15
116

Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos

07:05
117

Bonus: The Mask (Extras)

05:18
118

Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR

04:54

Lesson Info

Cropping for Print

So the other thing that we're gonna talk about is cropping for, specifically for what happens in camera. And in talking about that, we're also gonna be talking about what happens in post, or in printing, I should say. So we'll close this down. So when we're cropping for print, there's a couple things that we need to consider. And one of the things that I want us to consider, here, when we open these up, just gonna open up these images. They're all DNG files. Is the difference between a Micro Four Thirds camera and a full-frame camera. So, you see this right here. This is taken, this shot right here, by itself, was taken with a full-frame camera. The same exact shot on the same exact tripod with the same exact millimeter lens was shot with a Four Thirds camera. So, in our cameras, we are doing some form of cropping. Because this is a Four Thirds sensor, we have to understand that that sensor is smaller than a full-frame sensor. So what it does is it, they say they there's a doubling fac...

tor on your lenses, that your lens, that it was 24 millimeter, is it now 48? Well, it's not necessarily 48 millimeters. It's still a 24-millimeter lens, but the sensor, because it's smaller, is doubling the size of what it's seeing. It's zooming in a little bit farther into that, into what the lens is showing it. So, here's the full-frame version, which would be the closest that we can get to a negative, a 35-millimeter negative. And here's Micro Four Thirds. How this plays in is that every one of these cameras, and all these sensors, have a different aspect ratio for the size of the image that they shoot. Some of those aspect ratios are very helpful and conducive for print, and some of them are not. So here's a good example. This is a Micro Four Thirds image. This is an APS-C image. And this is a full-frame image. One of the biggest questions I get when it comes to cropping or when it comes to saving for print is, I get an email that says, hey, I just, I shot this image, I absolutely love it, I just uploaded it to my favorite place to print, and guess what, it's cropping all this stuff off. Why is that happening? What I see is what I want. Well, what you see and what you want are two different things. We can't always have that. So what we have to consider here is that when we crop specifically for print in mind, we can still use the crop tool that's in Photoshop to help us out with that. Because we're using things with a ratio. Now, these ratios here are four by five, five by seven, two by three, sixteen by nine. We can change this to whatever we want, though. So if you're about to print and your print is a 20 by 24, we didn't see 20 by 24 there, did we? No. So if we click here and go 24, tab, 20, that would be what would happen if I was to print this image this image as a 20 by 24. I'm going to lose something. I have to lose something. Now, you would say, well, why wouldn't you just go ahead and then just print it as a 24 by and maybe make that aspect ratio fit a little bit better? And I very well could. But let's say I'm doing a gallery exhibit and I want all of my images to be 20 by so that it looks like they're all part of the same portfolio where there's no differences and everything's perfect and level on that wall. 24 by 36 might throw off that 20 by 24. So now what happens, we don't throw it out and say, let's pick another image, we just see what can work for us with an 24 by 20 photograph. What crop can work for us? Where would it work and where can we still get a compelling image at 20 by 24? Now, that's with a full-frame image. If I were to look at this full-frame image in say, 8 by 10, okay? That's an 8 by 10 on a full frame. I'm losing some on both sides. My hardest transition actually came when I went from working with a full-frame camera or working with a Micro Four Thirds, I used to be an Olympus shooter, to going to a full-frame camera. I skipped the whole APS-C in between, I skipped that whole crop, and I went right to a full-frame camera. So if we look at this, this is an APS-C. And this is a Micro Four Thirds. Look at the difference here. Look at how much less is being cropped off at an 8 by 10 with a Micro Four Thirds. Look at how much more is being cropped off with a full-frame camera or even an APS-C, like we would see here. So, any time we're working with this, and this is not, I don't want you to think that this is now going to be an 8 by 10 image. It's not, okay? So we need to look at this. Let's look at this photograph. If we press command or control on our rulers, and we look at the crop here, we've got this set to an 8 by 10. You would think that when we are done with this, it would be an 8 by 10, right? Well, look at the rulers on the top. It's going from zero to just over 26, meaning that this is a little bit over 26 inches wide. And it's a little bit over, almost 17 inches tall. So if I were to commit to this and say, this is the 8 by 10 that I want, and press enter, it is an 8-by-10 aspect ratio image, but it is not an 8-by-10-inch photograph. So when you send it to your printers, this, you could still send this to your printers, and it would print just fine on an 8 by 10 photograph. How we know that this is not an 8 by 10, other than looking at the rulers, is if we go to Image, and we go to Image Size. This image size is telling me how many pixels wide my image is, but I can change that at any moment and change that to inches. So this is still a 22 by 17 image. It's still a very large image, it's still 300 resolution, it has not been changed to 8 by 10. The only thing that has changed in this photograph is that we are now able to print this in a good, comfortable 8 by 10 aspect ratio with this size image. If you were to physically still see this photograph, it would still physically be 22 inches wide and we know that by using the image size pane. So if we went, if we just press Okay on this and commit to this, we're not changing anything, okay? The same thing is true with any of the images that we do. If we do something like a four by six. This is a perfect four by six because an APS-C camera and a full-frame camera are both a two-to-three ratio, which is the same thing as a four by six. So this four by six would be perfect. But does that mean that we have a four-by-six image? Absolutely not. Because if we press command or control R, and look at our rulers on this, it's almost 20 inches by almost 13 inches. So that's one of the hardest things to wrap your head around when it comes to cropping, especially when it comes to cropping for print. Because what I do is, I don't leave my images up to the printer to crop my photograph. I crop it here in Photoshop first. So when I want a four by six, I come into Photoshop, I ensure that I have four by six selected, so that I know that this is the four by six that I'm gonna receive. Or the 8 by 10, or the 20 by 24, or whatever image size that might be. Because when you send it to the printers, they might give you a thing that you can use to move the crop around, but it's not nearly as effective as what you can do here in Photoshop. Especially when you can change the size of things. And also, it doesn't give you the grid lines there. If you were to go to your favorite printer, upload your image, it's gonna say, it's gonna crop in like this, well what are you losing? You're losing a lot of the ability to see the golden ratio or the triangles, or the rule of thirds. They don't necessarily have those on those printing websites or whoever you might be printing through. So the thing to take away here is that this is not a direct correlation to image size. This is just changing the aspect ratio of the current image that you're working on.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Bootcamp Plug-In
Textures
Clouds
Painted Backgrounds
1 – Intro to Photoshop Bootcamp
6 – Intro to Raw Editing.zip
11 – Interface and Setup
16 – Intro to Cropping and Composition.zip
22 – Intro to Layers.zip
26 – Intro to Layer Tools.zip
43 – Intro to Selections.zip
50 – Intro to Cleanup Tools.zip
58 – Intro to Shapes and Text.zip
63 – Intro to Smart Objects.zip
69 – Intro to Image Transforming.zip
74 – Intro to Actions.zip
81 – Filters.zip
88 – Intro to Editing Video.zip
96 – Custom Effects.zip
102 – Natural Retouching.zip
107 – Intro to Portrait Workflow.pdf
110 – Intro to Landscape Workflow.zip
112 – Intro to Compositing.zip
115 – Rothko and Interfaces (Bonus Video).zip
33 – Intro to Masks and Brushes.zip
106 - Frequency Separation.zip

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.

Robert Andrews
 

Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.

Esther Gambrell
 

WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!

Student Work

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