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 target 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 class will be delivered via Zoom Webinars. You'll need access to Zoom through a web browser or the Zoom app in order to participate.
• This class is exclusively available to CreativeLive subscribers. If you're not yet a subscriber, you can subscribe here.
• To reserve your spot, register using the Sign Up form and button above. Space is limited.
• A unique Zoom join link will be sent to registered subscribers, up to the maximum number of participants per class. You'll receive this link one hour before the class start time.

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.