Lessons from the Rabbit Hole: Advanced Compositing & Prop Design with Karen Alsop

This session is exclusively available to CreativeLive subscribers. If you're not yet a subscriber, you can subscribe here.

Tumble down the creative rabbit hole with world-renowned Story Artist Karen Alsop and transform your composite photography from flat to fantastical. In this hands-on CreativeLive masterclass, you'll step into Karen's studio to master the delicate balance of tactile art-making, precise photographic capture, and cutting-edge digital editing.

Whether you want to build rich, narrative-driven worlds or seamlessly blend disparate elements into a single believable scene, Karen breaks down her end-to-end process—from raw clay to the final polish.

This class includes a dedicated 30 minutes of Q&A directly with Karen Alsop.

What You'll Learn

• Focus Stacking & Focus Shift: Capture intricate real-world props with absolute edge-to-edge sharpness, ensuring every element stays pin-sharp from front to back.
• Artisanal Prop Creation: Follow Karen behind the scenes as she crafts custom, wild-clay pottery tailored specifically to anchor the story of her visual pieces.
• Anthropomorphic Animal Photography: Watch a live studio shoot with Miso the rabbit. Learn how to photograph subjects from multiple angles to pose, build, and composite a believable, human-like character portrait.
• Advanced Extractions & Edge Refining: Master modern cutout techniques to clean up tricky textures, such as fur, and complex silhouettes without losing crucial detail.
• Horizon & Perspective Manipulation: Re-engineer your photographic background by shifting horizons and vanishing points to seamlessly fit your narrative vision.
• Mobile-to-Desktop Workflows: Shoot everyday objects on your phone, then use Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Firefly to isolate, enhance, and transform them into dynamic scene elements—for example, turning a static gas lantern into a glowing light source.
• 3D Scene Integration: Turn a simple photo of your favourite armchair into a fully shaded, perfectly scaled asset ready to drop directly into your canvas.
• Dynamic Lighting, Dodging & Burning: Paint with light, wrap environmental tones around your subject, and use targeted dodging and burning to integrate every piece into one cohesive, atmosphere-rich world.

Who It's For

• Photographers, digital artists, and compositors ready to move past basic photo manipulation and master the art of storytelling, practical prop design, and advanced Photoshop compositing.

How to Join

• The live Zoom session for this class has ended, and registration is closed.
• This class is exclusively available to CreativeLive subscribers. If you're not yet a subscriber, you can subscribe here.

About the Instructor

Karen Alsop is an internationally acclaimed Melbourne, Australia-based photographic digital artist. Expanding on two decades of photographic and graphic design experience, Karen brings photography and art together to create stunning artworks that tell a story and take the viewer into another world.

Specializing in Portrait Art, her digital portraiture captures the personality and character of her subjects by placing them within a visual story highlighting their interests. Karen uses the power of Photoshop to composite multiple captures together, making the impossible possible within her art.