by Ben Willmore | Aug 20, 2015
Hi gang! I just wanted to post a mini update on where I’ve been, and what’s coming up. The annual Photoshop World Conference & Expo just wrapped up in Las Vegas. As usual, it was a great event, loaded with lectures, workshops, demos and other fun stuff related to photography, Photoshop and other photo-related software. I was really excited to be able to teach two classes on Adobe Lightroom this time around. I just love Lightroom! It’s so powerful and is where I spend most of my photo-processing time, by far. The classes I taught were “Up to Speed with Lightroom 6/CC” and “Organizing Photos with Lightroom.”
If you love photography and have never been to Photoshop World, I highly recommend it. It’s not only full of educational events but the KelbyOne team really puts together a fun learning environment, hosting parties and other after-hours shenanigans.
The entrance to the conference & expo at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
My image, featured in the Epson booth at the trade show.
Upcoming training events
I’ve got two classes coming up at the end of the month, and the great news is that they are both online classes, and they are free to watch during the live broadcast! As with all CreativeLive classes, they are free to watch during the live event, and then you can purchase the course to download or stream at your leisure and get access to the class handbooks and other bonus materials. The two classes are one-day each and cover photo restoration and the latest Creative Cloud updates to Photoshop and Lightroom.
Here are the details:
Photoshop Mastery: Retouch & Restore | Aug. 27, 9 am-4pm PST
Class Description:
Photographs are among our most treasured possessions, but not every photo was shot under optimal conditions or preserved in an ideal way – making photo restoration a big business opportunity for skilled photographers and retouchers.
If you want to answer every, “can you fix it?” with a resounding “yes,” Photoshop Mastery: Retouch and Restore with Ben Willmore is the class for you. You’ll learn:
- Advanced color correction and enhancement techniques
- Retouching and scratch removal strategies
- Detail enhancements
- Folds, scratch, mildew, ink and water stain repairs
- Reconstruction of missing pieces such as torn corners and rips
- How to make fix faded images and make skin tones more lifelike
You’ll learn what actions to take, the optimal order to perform them, and which tools are right for the job. Ben will share time-saving tips and offer insights on the corrections that create the biggest impact.
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Photoshop & Lightroom Creative Cloud Additions in 2015 | Aug. 28, 9 am – 4 pm PST
Class Description:
Technology is always evolving – make sure you keep pace with it. Join Ben Willmore for Photoshop and Lightroom Creative Cloud Additions and get up to speed on 2015 updates from Adobe.
In this comprehensive class, you’ll learn about all of the changes Adobe made in 2015 and how to integrate them into your daily workflow. You’ll learn about:
- Raw high dynamic range
- HDR + raw panoramas
- Dehaze Adjustments
- Retouching tool changes
- Face Detection and Recognition
- Blur Gallery changes
- Rendering trees and flames
- Local adjustment additions
- Radial and gradient brushes
- Hidden and hard to find additions
If you’ve watched any of Ben’s previous courses, this will be a great way to update your knowledge and ensure you know about all the latest features.
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More to come!
by Ben Willmore | May 7, 2015
Hi gang! I know I’ve been away from the blog world for a while, and that’s because I’ve been on an extended international trip with VERY limited internet (more on that later). I did, however, want to pop in to share a bit of news.
I’m excited to announce the launch of a brand new seminar tour that will be kicking off later this month. It’s called the
Photoshop and Lightroom Creative Integration Tour, hosted by the fine folks at KelbyOne. This will be a full-day seminar that teaches you how to best integrate Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop.
Here’s the official description:
Ben Willmore is back with a brand new tour for 2015 that shows how best to integrate Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. He’ll show you how to take best advantage of the new features in Lightroom 6 as well as how to move beyond its limitations by taking advantage of Photoshop’s advanced image processing features. You’ll learn how to get the most out of Lightroom by utilizing many hidden features that require the intimate knowledge that only an expert can provide. He’ll share the best methods for organizing your images, show you how to push your image optimization abilities beyond what you thought was possible and then show how to best integrate Photoshop into your workflow. Ben has been using both programs since they were introduced and is known for pushing them beyond what they were originally designed for to get more out of them than what anyone else can teach you. Don’t miss your chance to learn from a digital imaging legend… you’ll be amazed at what you can learn in just one day!
So far, here are the cities we currently have on the schedule:
- May 29 – South San Francisco, CA
- June 19 – Seattle, WA
- August 4 – Kansas City, MO
- August 6 – St Louis, MO
- October 19 – Houston, TX
- October 21 – Colorado Springs, CO
- October 26 – Los Angeles, CA
- December 9 – Fort Lauderdale, FL
- December 14 – San Diego, CA
I’m really excited to get back on the road again with KelbyOne, and am even more excited to bring you this fun and exciting new content! I hope to see many of you at one of the upcoming shows.
Click here to learn more and find out where to register.
More to come!
by Ben Willmore | Jul 20, 2014
Hi everyone! I wanted to give you all a heads up that tomorrow morning kicks off my 3-day online class, “Post-Processing for Outdoor & Travel Photographers” at creativeLIVE. I’ve spent the past week hunkered down in preparation and am on my way to Seattle today. As with all creativeLIVE classes, they’re absolutely free to watch while they’re live. If you want to watch at your own pace and get all the bonus material (including the course handbook), you can purchase the class for a discounted price while it’s live.
The classes run 9 am-4pm PST on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (July 21-23), and they will be rebroadcast in the evenings as well. In these sessions, I’ll be teaching both Photoshop and Lightroom. Here’s the course description:
Spend more time actually taking photos
It’s time to make the images you capture as you travel or explore the great outdoors even more jaw-dropping. Join photographer and image editing expert Ben Willmore to explore the Lightroom and Photoshop tools that will optimize your images to really make them shine while keeping them easy to find and organized.
In this course, you’ll master the post-production process every travel and outdoor photographer needs to know. From panorama stitching to HDR to fixing distortion in architectural images, you’ll dive deep into the editing tasks best performed in Photoshop. You’ll adjust and optimize your images – even if they’re overexposed, underexposed, or have color or contrast issues.You’ll also learn how to organize your images with Lightroom make them easy to find by location taken, subject, or date. Ben will cover specific tips on uploading and organizing while you are still on the road that will save you time and make things easy when it is time to edit. You’ll also develop an editing workflow that helps you retouch quickly and efficiently.
If you’re ready to spend more time outdoors taking stunning photos and less time stuck indoors processing (or finding!) them, this is the course for you.
And finally, I’ll leave you with some fun before & afters to give you an idea of some of kinds of processing we’ll be doing. Hope you’re able to tune in!
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by Ben Willmore | Jul 24, 2013
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been posting a lot of images that I shot in Glacier National Park. I thought you all might like to see what the “before” versions looked like before I made my edits. Use the sliders on the images to see the before & after versions.
Enjoy!
* Drag the slider handle to see the before & afters *
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This image was difficult to capture because I had to have my tripod planted right at the centerline of the Going to the Sun road at a skinny spot where nobody could get around me. There was also no shoulder at all on the edge of the road… just a tiny stone wall and then a huge drop off… that meant that I had to keep popping back and forth between the stone wall/ledge to let a car go by and the centerline of the road to get the shot. Using the manual focus tilt/shift 17mm lens made it a more laborious process as well. Finally, the sun was shining directly onto the falls, which made nailing the exposure that much more difficult (I prefer to shoot waterfalls while they’re in the shade).
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This was optimized from a single raw capture. The contrast range is somewhat extreme, which made it essential that I shoot in raw format to capture the most information. There was a real delicate balance in trying to achieve good contrast while retaining shadow detail in the lower portion of the image. It was processed using only Lightroom. If I were to further refine it for printing, then here are a few things I’d do to finish the image: 1) remove tiny glowing edge in the U-shaped area of mountain near the center of the image. A curves adjustment layer and mask would do the job. 2) Darken the dark areas of the mountains on the right half of the image above the large shadowed area that dominates the bottom of the photo. Another curves/mask combo would do it there as well.
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I love when the sun just skims the top of the trees here in Glacier National Park. Underexpose enough and that’s all you’ll get… where the sun kisses the landscape.
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Just another waterfall from Glacier. This is a panorama stitched from five captures. I had to keep the exposure consistent, so I pressed the * button on the back of my Canon 5D Mark III to lock the exposure settings before swinging the camera to make the pano. I shot this 1/4 second exposure at f16 and ISO 50. I’m assuming I had my neutral density filter on the lens, but I don’t know for sure.
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This bus is from the vintage fleet that Glacier National Park uses for public transportation. The most difficult part of this light painting was dealing with all the black areas on the vehicle. Those areas either absorb all the light falling on them and become a black hole, or reflect light of a certain angle back into the camera like a mirror. I had to light the black areas from odd angles to pick up the texture of the material, or light the ground surrounding it to get an interesting reflection. The same is true of the front bumper, which would have come out black had I not strategically lit the ground and other areas to produce a nice reflection to define its shape. It doesn’t really get dark until close to 11pm this time of year in Glacier. That’s why I chose to capture this image in a barn where darkness could be achieved while the sun was still up.
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We took an hour long cruise on Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park in this 1929 wooden boat. I thought an antique treatment was appropriate. This isn’t a “true” before and after image because the color version is a merged panorama where I made pre-merge adjustments. This slider shows the before and after of the vintage effect I applied using OnOne Software’s Perfect Photo Suite 7.
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I love when the sun just skims the top of the trees here in Glacier National Park. Underexpose enough and that’s all you’ll get… where the sun kisses the landscape.
This isn’t a before and after. It’s just a fun gif I made out of two waterfall images.
by Ben Willmore | Jan 22, 2013
Many thanks to the creativeLIVE team for snapping this photo of me on set.
Hi gang! I just got back from Seattle, where I had an excellent time teaching two online courses at creativeLIVE. I taught a 3-day course on Lightroom Mastery and a 1-day class on Photoshop Mastery: Advanced Masking. If you’re not familiar with creativeLIVE, I highly recommend checking them out. They broadcast live training almost every day, and while its live, it’s completely free to watch. If you decide you like the class, you can purchase it to either stream or download the videos to watch at your convenience. You also must purchase the class in order to get all the course materials. Folks who purchase my Lightroom and Masking classes actually receive a special bonus, because as I was teaching, Karen was following along, creating comprehensive handbooks to go with each class. The Masking handbook is 18 pages long and the Lightroom handbook is 50 pages long!
For more information on the classes or to purchases a course, check out the links below:
Lightroom Mastery
Photoshop Mastery: Advanced Masking
While we were up in Seattle, we got to meet up with my friend Erica Gamet, who also happened to be in town teaching classes at creativeLIVE! Her iBooks Author and InDesign classes were broadcast on the days following my courses. It was nice to be able to catch up with her in such a fun environment.
Me, Karen and Erica hang out after my creativeLIVE classes wrap up.
New Seminar Tour!
And now for some more training news. I’m happy to announce the launch of my new seminar tour, Photographic Artistry with Adobe Photoshop! This will be a full day seminar packed with Photoshop techniques designed to give your photos a creative edge. You’ll learn how to transform a collection of ordinary photographs into seamless, stunning composites. Learn how to remove difficult objects from complex backgrounds, add dimension and depth to your 2D images, master 3D photographic effects, discover the power of Photoshop’s Blending modes, and so much more.
The first two tour dates are March 19 in New York, NY and March 20 in Washington DC. For more information check out the seminar page HERE.
Mastering HDR & Lightpainting
Finally, while we’re on the training topic, there’s still room in my 5-day workshop on HDR & Lightpainting, coming up March 11-15. This will be an intense double feature of a workshop, covering two of my favorite photographic techniques. Once you feel comfortable with those two specialties, then you’ll be able to expand your shooting range beyond the standard golden hour and capture idealized images regardless of what time of day you encounter an interesting subject. This event is being held by the Light Workshops in Los Osos, CA. The gang at Light is great to work with, and students always receive hands-on, one-on-one instruction during these training events. For more information or to register, click HERE.
That’s it for now, everyone. During the next week, we’ll be hanging out in the Eugene, OR area nailing down the layout for the interior of my vintage bus. The shop that’s working on it is making progress every day now. If you’d like to follow the updates, check out the Creative Cruiser Facebook page HERE. More to come…
The entrance to the conference & expo at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
My image, featured in the Epson booth at the trade show.
