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Retouching Hibiki Bottle: Label & Sides

Lesson 27 from: How to Be a Commercial Photographer

Rob Grimm, Gary Martin, Aaron Nace

Retouching Hibiki Bottle: Label & Sides

Lesson 27 from: How to Be a Commercial Photographer

Rob Grimm, Gary Martin, Aaron Nace

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Lesson Info

27. Retouching Hibiki Bottle: Label & Sides

Lesson Info

Retouching Hibiki Bottle: Label & Sides

Well, you guys going to find is any time you're working with not your optimal exporters, owen optimal exposure is going to give you also your greatest color saturation anything above that are below that you're gonna get de saturation so it's just the way light works but any time you have something that's pretty dark into shadows and you just try to bring it up in brightness, you're not going to get any color because it didn't have the color to begin with. So if you're gonna do something like this, make sure that you also add your color back and so if you know bright cem brighton something up, you'll see this all the time and ads in magazines and stuff like we'll try to fade something to black and we're just alike dirty and mushy because they don't pay attention to color they're getting tone, they're getting something to come up but there's not color in it there's a very big difference exactly, so here we're just going to do the same I'm gonna grab a curves adjustment layer option comma...

nd g I'm gonna clip this to the other curves adjustment layer I don't want to lay your mask twice it just doesn't make any sense it's a waste of time so I'm gonna pull my red channel up and then pull our blue channel down and then I could just add that color back in and along these lines I can add as much colors I want I mean if if I wanted to go through this entire label and just like really pop it out we could do that too but so there's the before and after with that just hit the very agile looks like it's just kind of trailing off right here yeah okay cool is bring a little then and we're good and I'm gonna do that with my bottom layer and that's going to reactivate what's going on in my top layer without having to relay your mask it which is nice um never go so I'm pretty picky I mean you can see I want like every little detail done that is why you're the best there we go what do you guys think so good pat you know what's great perfect like it all right, so next we have let's just zoom out here the next level with we went and we didn't and that's what we just worked on so we're on one of the two on the front label one, two, six and one to eight so I'm gonna go ahead and bring these in one, two, six and one to eight and I'm gonna probably continue to groupies together so let's just hit command g and again erin's women so fast I don't know what the hell's going on I mean I trust him I know he's goes a buh buh buh bam like I can't I can't even think that fast crazy let's just keyword shortcuts I know it's I promise I'm not doing anything fancy here okay? So basically here we've got a couple different options with each of our labels and that's that's what? We're gonna go ahead and bring in here so this is going to be the right side labels I corrected and this will be the left side level let's go ahead and start with the left side level so later mask on their hit command I to invert that later mask and then we're just gonna paint this in so later masking you know, when I first started out in the photo shop I tried to get all of my layer masks like super refined like it was that was what I thought you needed to do. I was like, okay let's get, you know, get in here and make my layer mass is perfect using photoshopped more and more I realize that it's just most of the time it's just a waste of time to do that because you can use other tools to help refine your selections were refined your layers that are just going to it's going to basically do a better job in much less time and this is kind of what I mean here see the difference in that two I don't know if you guys can see that the label itself is actually darker there there's another really cool trick that I'd like to show you guys it has to do with how you can use each of the layers to blend with each other, so in this case I don't necessarily want this layer to make things darfur so you can see let's just let's just do a bad masking job, right? Terrible, terrible! There are a lot of things you can do to not have that option in this. What I'm doing is I'm lightning that one right there that's the whole goal, it's darkening the label so I've got on one side lightning, the one darkening the label if I could just click a button to remove all the darkening properties of this layer, I just have the lightning probably so there's a blending mode that lets you do that just go from normal down to lighten bam then you don't have to layer mask it because I just took away all the darkening properties of that layer will not darken anything now it's a beautiful thing it's just it's a tear to my eye why would I spend time trying to make a perfect layer mask on their way? It doesn't for it'sjust a smarter way to do it, so a lot of things in photo shop is like you learn all these tools but then it's kind of like thinking like okay what's the problem here I'm darkening something that I don't want to what's the way in which I can actually like so that we get around that shift clicking on a layer mask will turn that layer off and on so we can even bring back some this detail here in in this aged as well and uh here we go much better big difference so we want to do the same thing with this with twelve years with the twelve years yeah great so we're gonna put a leather mask on there I'm gonna hit command as well I'm gonna paint this in and on the off chance that we do have any darkening going on we're just going to change us from now for normal down the lights and again we've got the same thing in this case it's not quite working it's not working the same way exactly isn't working for the on the two for you guys okay? Yeah it's definitely helping on the two with passion on the two it works here right here between the years. Honestly, there are three four other ways to just take care of this but this is not a very hard masking job, so I'm just going to ask you and again that's I mean it's a very small percentage of the overall image so in some ways, it doesn't have to be insanely tight when your but we want those details to really come out exactly this I mean, it's important details. That's that's really? Okay, so how do you feel about the warning to there's? Still a little bit off from each other? Yeah. Do you want to solve that again? Yeah, we'll solve that ago. You want to use our spark of russian a different way? I knew he had absolutely cool, so we use our spark abroad. How many ways can we use a special brush? Every way you can imagine how many ways can we get into that you could use this sparkle brush to create new pours on a person's face if you wanted to if like if you retouch your purse faced imports were gone, you just did the same brush to get newport's back. Basically, what it does is it builds in variability too. You're to your brother, you can do anything you want with it. Think of it like if you're painting a wall like stippling yeah, it just it doesn't look like a smooth photoshopped brush. It looks like it's got texture. So here what we're gonna do is I'm just going to create a new layer and use my brush toole grab of color here and then I could just paint with these colors here, maybe we make this just a little bit larger and grab a little bit of a lighter color and, you know, kind of come in here, here we go gravel would darker color here and somewhere in here, I can grab white, so the goal here is just to make it not look like it was done in a photo shop and you're going through and you're grabbing different colors and applying them, you know, in kind of a random way so that they have that that blended random feel it's not just ok, we're going with one specific thing he's as lending them, which is going to give it that kind of random natural feel exactly and it's going to give it its gonna give it texture is going to give it life exactly, uh, and it's going to give it the same type of feel that you know, the already that this over here already has, right? Right? All right, let's see if we can use the sparkle brush twelve different ways today I'm I'm totally game twelve years, twelve sparkle. So this is what we just created new layer so that's what I just basically made with sparkle prussia it's just a bunch of different color that's in a random pattern thisyou khun see it but when I place it back over top of the two will put a layer mask on that just grab a late regular brush here come here painted in inverse earlier mass real quick and then I'll just paint this back on the two and what we've got is a random a random bit that actually looks like this too if it's too well defined in this case it is just a little bit too well to find you just had a papa gazi and blur on there and you're good to go papa ghazi in this case it's something that I used quite a bit so shift option command geez my keyboard shortcut for a gauzy and blur during the mass look atyou pat you can't run anything by these things man they're going to catch you there we go there and there's a question from the internet for you getty morris's wondering who is sweaty chicken and why did you steal his laptop that's a that's another not so no nickname of my there's quite a few people in the chat room wondering about that that's what he's thinking comes from something of that from gary and I and uh this is carey's laptop looking like a chicken which is a feeling that pretty as soon as you said that word gerry everyone's like oh that makes sense here is locked up okay now it makes sense no more explanation needed um so this is just, you know, part of this stuff I'm doing it for fun there's a million different ways to do this sort of thing and the other way I just want to show you guys the possibilities but you know that basically that sparkle brush right here how much improved way do we need to bring little sparkling toe one and aged just to hear you want to yeah, because they feel they feel divided now it feels last first is right I don't want them to feel you want it together I want to be unified togetherness. All right? So what we're doing is describing a couple of colors here and kind of painting these things in there's actually some really cool things you can do to build upon this sparkle brush you can go to your brush here you can turn on your color dynamics and I can turn on a brightness jitter which is going to make some of these a little bit brighter and some of these not as bright, which is, um doing nothing right now what I'm gonna do instead don't fail me now photoshopped let's try a foreground background jitter, which is going to turn some of these on and off all right, there we go, all right? So I don't know if you guys don't see that we just created new, um black layer and put that down. So now what I'm able to do is if if my foreground background color let's just say my foreground color is this color okay? And my background color is that color. What I could now do is paint with this sparkle brush and you can see the actual color is gonna change too. So the brightness so we're doing it randomly now. It's like complete sparkle madness, right sparkle world welcome to sparkles the saturation jitter weaken turn up and hugh jitters where you could like, turn onto hell rainbow sparkle way no rameau's far below yeah, now we're just getting ridiculous, but if you didn't want to do that, we're getting rid of this. Now, if you did want to do this sort of thing, that that's a not a horrible way to do it, so we're just continuing to build on that. If I like this brush, I could just right click and call this spark hold two alright, so basically, instead of, like trying to apply all that sort of thing, you know, after the fact I can just I can just add that extra level of variability they're into my brush, we can see it's getting a little bit too dark hair yeah, I can go in and change that about my brush if I want to or I could just change this from normal down to light it and you won't have that issue anymore you make it look ridiculously easy it is when you know what you're doing when you have been doing this for the last twelve years of your life so easy even for twelve years I don't even know what I was looking at the number twelve and throwing it out that and I don't want to admit to everyone how much time I spent a photo shop let's just say it's been a lot why not your photo booth or photoshopped guru? Well, it does get me a lot of babes so theo who knew the photo shop waited to bring all the honeys teo knew right on there we go, eh? So, uh this is a classic all right? We're looking good. What do you guys think about the front label? Okay, much improved perfect. You guys want to you want to move on to the next section let's make the bottle bit sex here. Great. Um okay, so one forty and one forty one for uh right as we go on and uh yeah so we've got our different edge is going on here is well, uh so this guy we're just going to pop in did you want this is this your right edges my writing stuff one not the left one way like what's going on a couple things one it's really kind of showing those facets as they round around what is not working is the fact that it's really going yellow it's that thin spot of the glass so it's getting kind of hot kind of fast definitely want to bring the color into match what's going on with the rest of the bottle but it's nice to have those highlights there and I think quite honestly we've marked another one for the left side but this one might even be better it might be something we want to take it apply on the other side if we can apply the same yellow to the other side well not this yellow because we're gonna convert that yellow two more of you know of a of a smokey you know whiskey color but we might want to take these highlights and bring them in on the other side ok no problem makes sense yeah for sure so what we're gonna do the same thing we've been doing all the other layers I'm going to just sit shift option command am addle airmass hit command I to invert my layer mask and uh describe a regular brush here and just paint this white painted visible right there let's go ahead and get that they're on that even though we have another file for that I think yeah, I do like it reflected in there, so to me, you didn't get it. I do. Yeah. It's kind of cool. All right, so as far as that color being in their auras faras the highlight I like the colors run. All right, so let's see what we what do we want to do with the color here? You want to just tone this down a little bit? I would like to see it matched something more like that color that's down there as it gets up. You know, a little bit of that kind of yellow amber um it's still it's, mainly amber's on the brown side, but I don't want it to be too dark brown, orange like that. I think I'd rather see it pick up that kind of tone or even in there. Okay, that makes sense. It does. Now, this is something that you khun again do these things that a myriad of voices question from david davin I see who said that? Rob, you mentioned the legal issues surrounding portraying the product as it actually is. In a case like this shoot. Does that only apply to the actual liquid in the bottle? Not the bottle or labels, etcetera, he's trying to figure out where the line is, well, we are portraying this one we're using when I said we have to protect legally the way it is we have to use the real product we can't use something as a substitute which particularly back in the film days happen all the time you know, ice cream wasn't ice cream it was powder sugar in crisco and tons of food coloring so it's important to show the real thing um we can have a long debate about this we are showing the bottle the way it is we just happen to be going in and we are highlighting little details here there and everywhere and then we're building that together. Um, you know one thing that that's true about photography versus the human eye you're human eye as you move around something it adjust immediately very, very quickly your ivers is in constant motion so you can see details around the room or in a bottle very quickly where a camera iris doesn't work that way, you know, it's fixed so once you once you set the aperture it's kind of stuck there and it's not going to then adjust when it's looking at something else so we're kind of playing with that a little bit and that we're going through and we're looking at all the details and we're bringing out those details they exist there they just might not exist all in one single image, so we're stacking those images together some people say we're cheating, I don't think we're cheating in all this is this is photography this is working with our tools in order to make the best image that we possibly can, so hopefully that answers the question yeah, I agree you buy that? Yeah. That's perfect, yeah, I mean, I'd liketo add you're taking these pictures for a client, right? Like, okay, way want to highlight their brand the best we possibly can, we wanted really elevate it and look at, you know, make it look a cz best as it possibly can, so I don't I personally, I don't feel like we're cheating at all. I think we're enhancing. Yeah, I completely I mean, almost my entire job is, quote unquote cheating. I just like to say that it's not cheating. I just like to say that it's part of it, you know, perfect lighting is a tool, you know, great cameras, a tool photo shop is a tool, right? So because one of the things, if you want to keep going, that one of the things that stuff is the camera itself poses problems like when we're sitting here and we're adjusting some of what's going on with the reflective properties because of the way the bottle sitting and slightly canted it's slightly pitched in I can't make everything glow exactly the same right there's some things about it because of where the camera is the camera itself often creates a problem because it's a you know it's a black hole well, your eye doesn't do that your eyes not a black hole when it's you know it's not reflecting a black hole back into into the bottle so we've got to compensate for that would compensate for the fact that we're trying to recreate something that is mohr like the human eye then mechanical and cameras are mechanical, so I'm kind of walking the balance between those two and really trying to push it more into the human element that makes it that doesn't make sense to me it does not make sense to, you know, make some I mean, we're just mean there's a lot of times again this is not the we would have a perfect product to shoot during me and like we would put the label on ourselves, right? Sure it's pristine, but I mean, you can't do that in every circumstance. You know, we call it truth in advertising because we are combining multiple things in order to get it to be as nice as possible or, you know, some people say it's hyper real I think we're making it as pleasing as possible one thing we're not doing, we're not taking a person's face and we're not removing all the wrinkles and changing their high color and, you know, puffing up their lips and completely cosmetically that teo you know, so there's debate there what was cheating or it's not but you know he's a lot better um I personally feel like I'm doing everything I can to make the product absolutely shine and look the best it can dave said thank you that you answered this question let's go perfectly healthy so there are a lot of ways to do this I'm just going to try a few and we'll see what one's up working so the easiest way to try anything is I could use a drink usually usually like curves there are levels adjustment layer is they usually we're all star officer so I'm gonna grab a love adjustment layer basically here what I want to effect are the highlights of this layer so here in the levels adjustment layer we have two different uh sliders we have input slider which affects your basically the input so you can make your whites whiter you could make your darks darker you also have your output slider which makes your bites darker and your darks later so they kind of do the opposite you can also work with in your different color channels to do the same thing so if I want to make my lights which is what I want to go into perfecting to this darker color I could do so within my levels adjustment layers by using my output levels and I can also change the color by using different color channels within the output levels at the same time that's it's a similar way to how you were affecting color in the curves only now you're selecting a different tool which is the levels tool you have to have an effect on color yes there again they're multiple ways to do is the same type of thing yes and instead of with the curves you're mostly affecting your mid tones here right in this case I'm goingto do you want to you want to grab the end point yes exactly so I'm just gonna give it a shot I'm going to bring my red channel down blue channel down a little bit and our green channel down and what we're gonna wind up eventually getting is something that's a nice combination of color that it should only affect our light tones here we go now also keep in mind what we said about er saturation there we go we could make this visit now this is clipped I'm still going toe make sure that it's not gonna be visible on my layer mask which you khun begin to this inn a myriad of ways but in this case I'm just going to use a regular old uh later mask to do so here we go so if we wanted even darker we could do that too but the reason I'm not just grabbing this rgb because it makes the darker b can you see how graze it out it looks like it's looks horrible I mean so it by doing dog meat uh doing it within your different color channels you can effectively change the color as well has changed the saturation the exposure of the same exact time uh so it's just gonna wind up giving you a much more natural look there we go we could use a little bit more with needs more red it wasn't my memory that are looking a lot better no I think it was a great man like amazing here we go let's just mass that in a little bit better so and you can see the great thing is it's not really affecting our dark's right it's mostly targeted here on her lights and the reason is because here in this level's adjustment layer I'm grabbing from the right side and if I start grabbing from the left side you can see it's starting to really mess with our dogs as well it's all perfect done so it's it's really important here that just kind of play around levels and curves adjustment layers or some of the most powerful tools and photo shop and just getting a pretty good hold what these top slider does with the bottom slider does and how to use them it's really going to just make your job a photo shop a lot he's here all right how we looking how we looking there is there anything else you don't like that had to that you want to bump that up for ours which want the highlight is it uh I think it's probably around find okay perfect uh also keep in mind that that affects our colored changed this sorry that affects the color changes but saturation is usually tied to color in a slightly different way so if sometimes if you get the right color range but saturation isn't there yeah usually you could do that with a huge saturation lighter so we wanted to bump up the saturation in this case no, I think you think so well appear well you actually show me what you want to do and then I'll tell you if I like well it's just it's totally up upto us at this point we can lower the saturation which is kind of like going to draw less attention we can increase the celebration of his much okay so we like to kind of like right where wass perfect. So these air just other options here we can also do sleight hugh shifts while we're there but I just want to show there's there's multiple ways to do whatever you want to do but it sounds like this layer is just not even necessary to lead it out okay perfect let's uh let's take a look and see what we had for our left edge I think you could use a little bit more yellow don't you yeah here we go okay, so for our left edge that wasn't it we had another file for it it should have some of that that yellow glowy stuff going on one thirty four all right let's pull that so we'll take a look at it but I think we might like the right edge better yeah see that's got a chunk taken out of it that was coming from again if you guys remember I can take care of that chunk it's breaking up in the middle because you do that only fun okay you take care of the children the chunk is coming from the back of the bottle there is an inn boss on it and uh with black label would would be so that's showing up and it's kind of chunking out our highlight all right so we've got our layer back in there uh the next thing I want to do it I'll just make a new layer and we can do this in many different ways I'm gonna grab a stamp visible which was just shift option command e and then I'm going to kind of just grab a selection out of it nick man jay so what I've got is in place I've got a new layer that's just this right now, if I change this layer blending mode, so this is this is our new layer here. If I change is player blending mode from normal down to lights and it's not gonna do much, but if I bring it right down there, it's basically going to give us exactly what we want so it's gonna, like, changed the whole chunk dynamic there and it's not going dark in anything as well. So if I wanted to, I couldn't bring this in a cz well, this is let's just say we didn't have the opportunity to, you know, to have that to fix that junk, too. Yeah, if we didn't have the we didn't have the right side. This is something that you can do relatively quickly and easily and on top of that, just kind of like fix it up, you could then go in here and a clone stamp just to make it because I was what do you do? I mean, I don't know a lot of people see it, but right now it looks like it's duplicated during me and like, yeah, yeah, yeah he's gonna fix it? Yes, you can just kind of go in here and add a little bit more random variation, which is kind of what I'm doing watching unesco just adding this little bit of random variation is just gonna help it out, and I'm just doing that with, like, a simple clone sam tool so you can see just in, like, two seconds that that kind of does it? Yeah, you know, there's also, you guys, another way to do it or not? So again, we'll just start off with same technique. I'll just select this out hit command j on that, delete that layer change this from normal of light hit command t transform my layer and then instead of a stretch drive, I'll just rush it all the way down here. And, uh, there we go. We'll put a layer mask on this and then paint this back visible there. So there's, yet another way to basically do the same exactly like that, like, like, like, more cool three lines of the bottle. Yeah, so we can see that, you know, in a pretty short period of time, we've got two different, you know? What do we want to carry it down all the way down on the left side? We convey I kind of like the fact that on the right side or it's next to the glass it's not gonna carry because the glasses they're breaking it up, but I think it might be kind of interesting to have it carried down more to a website. I think I'd have to do a little grady in so it didn't get quite as hot down towards the bass, but I like carrying it down, okay? And in that case, what we're going to do is a curves adjustment later, but we don't want to just bring sometimes remember, like what we were saying earlier is, um, we are gonna clip this down, but I don't want that to be visible every everywhere, so what we're gonna do is just have a visible down there on the bottoms were using a clipping mask in conjunction with the layer mask so relatively quickly we've got to completely separate options feels different ways of doing these things, and if you guys wanted to, you know, in two seconds, also we could just to the exact same thing here on the right side as well, to just kind of drag that down as well, change that from other lytton or screen let's just delete that layer, and then we can see how that looks a cz well but later mask on there. And this is just options on your right you know, this is not saying that this is something that we need to do but I'm bringing that down it's just not that hard to do I mean I don't mind that the only thing I don't want it either I actually I kind of like it so I'm wrestling with the only thing I'm wondering I mean you may have gotten to this point but I mean so then you go back in and fix us where it's stretched dreaming the highlight up top on the shoulders yeah you might not want to stretch up there yeah yeah no problem at all simple layer masking their yeah I like it you like it yeah like it's better we'll get rid of the original variation there too yeah stuff was a little too leo it's feeling all sudden because they're on both sides is starting to feel pretty yellow okay on dh that's again not well I'm just going to solve that in a completely different way we'll just go to our yellow in a huge saturation adjustment layer discarded that and I can just change the oh wait you a little bit hit command eye on there and uh make sure you just mass this in we're taking the yellow were actually selecting the yellow out with this you saturation adjustment there and I'm bumping the hew closer you're switching the tint of yellow more towards red exactly it's exactly what we're doing house outlook for you guys look, I think it's better cool so that's not good that's why I'm gonna lower our intensity it's still gonna be bright but it is going to have that color shift in there yeah, I think that looks pretty good, right? Sweet and there we go. So there's a reflection so really easily weaken now um there we go, hold alter option and look at her background there that's all we've done for the top label the front layer label where's every time I say the types that get their clothes never go. So this reflection one of these labels in here oh, yes. This is one of those layers we brought in it that we didn't want abusing there got it that's what's coming at us. So just the reflections here, just the front label there and just the top table there and alter or option click here we can see those three changes of women. Not bad. No, not at all for a morning's work job. Hey, erin. Uh, sean clark is wondering if you were backing up as your editing. Yeah, totally. While rob was talking earlier I went ahead and saved this out and I also do in cia six and cc they had the ability to lie say while you're yes plus, remember arming our machines? This is gary's machine, so we've got carbon clopping carmen copy cloner running so it's back. It should be back in everything up this week.

Class Materials

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Example_Production_Book-RGG_Photo.pdf
Photo_Assistant_Guide-RGG_PHOTO.pdf

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Digital Swag Bag.pdf
Day 1 Presentation Slides.pdf
Day 2 Presentation Slides.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Totoo
 

I have gratefully been watching this tutorial for free online, and as always CreativeLIVE has done an awesome job in bringing one of the best instructors of the trade and his creative team to help us improve and enjoy a higher level of understanding and performance in the skills we would like to achieve. I am humbled as always and ever so grateful. I would love to purchase the course myself, but since I live abroad, it is practically impossible, I hope those who can, would. I would just like to add one of the most interesting things I have learnt from this course is the careful attention these guys are paying to minute details and the amount of patience it takes to achieve their goals in each project. Stay inspiring, Totoo in China

Ivan
 

Outstanding course! I'm a former creative director, now photographer full time and have had the unique experience working with studio photographers for commercial products in the past. This course is right on and very close to my experiences, and now that I'm behind the camera, it's nice to see some of those trade secrets revealed. Commercial work is fussy and you often have to sweat the details, but the results can be astonishing and rewarding. Rob and Gary do an excellent job explaining the ins and outs, without any pretention or hold-back on secrets. Something that's always annoyed me in the past, photographers never liked revealing their process. It's great fun watching Rob and Gary work a shoot, and Aaron Nace is beyond amazing in his retouching skills. I don't expect to break into this field, but I wanted to learn how things are done, for my own personal projects. I particularly enjoyed learning how they get the look of ice, ice crystals, and frost on the sides of glass bottles. I purchased several items from Trengrove, as they suggested. Their acrylic products are not cheap, but the quality is amazing and I'm very pleased and looking forward to experimenting. Thanks to all at Creative Live, RGG studios and Aaron Nace for this presentation.

Doors of Imagination Photography
 

This course is outstanding. I would consider it an advanced level. Having a good understanding of the technical aspects of photography and lighting is recommended. Rob Grimm takes you into two real product shoots. These were not canned demonstrations, but the real thing including working to get the lighting setup just right. The postproduction section with Aaron Nace was enlightening. This does require a good preliminary understanding of Photoshop. It was amazing to watch them build the final images for the client in real time. This is by far my favorite course to date.

Student Work

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