Course Information

Duration: Three-Day Course
Platform: Windows and Macintosh
Fee: $2150 CDN (+GST)
A non-refundable deposit of $750 (Cdn funds) is due at the time of registration.

This class is limited to seven people.

*As of January 1, 2008 all Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash courses will be on version CS3 unless otherwise indicated. If you are currently are using previous versions you can still benefit from attending this course.
Please contact DPA for more details or to have an instructor contact you.

Course Overview

This is a demanding Adobe Photoshop seminar directed at those who are serious about improving their colour images on the printed page. The seminar is sharply focused on image enhancement and colour correction, emphasizing the use of input/output curves to improve image quality. The use of special effects will not be covered.

This is an intensive course in which five days of material are covered during three long sessions. Days One and Two begin by 9:00 a.m. and end at approximately 8:00 p.m. Day Three begins at 7:30 a.m. with an estimated finish time of 6:00 p.m.

Course lectures and discussions are followed by hands-on, work sessions. During these sessions, all participants are assigned a set of images to improve using a fully equipped Power Macintosh in a networked environment. The resulting images are then compared and critiqued. These images are typical of those encountered in professional work and represent a variety of requirements. This course will appeal to professional retouchers, photographers, art directors, and anyone involved with image manipulation. Familiarity with Adobe Photoshop is a prerequisite for this course, but as this is a concept-based course, expertise in the program is not.

Although specific course curriculum can be modified to meet the needs and demands of the participants, the regular schedule is as follows:

Course Content

Day One: Concepts and Curves

• Objectives of colour correction
• How humans perceive colour
• Differences between human perception and that of a camera
• Limitations of the printing process
• Introduction to Input/Output curves
• Setting proper numbers for highlight, shadow, neutrals and fleshtones
• Identifying the main interest area of an image
• Enhancing contrast in local areas
• Finding areas of colourspace that are not used efficiently
• Influence of curve shape on reproduction
• Unsharp masking defined
• Adobe Photoshop method of USM and its variables
• Application of USM in selected channels or locally
• Relation of resolution to unsharp masking

Day Two: CMYK and Other Colourspaces

• Role of black ink and GCR
• GCR and UCR differentiated
• When is GCR appropriate?
• Anticipating press problems
• Role of unwanted colour; how to generate a stronger, unwanted colour
• Channel blendingRGB, HSB and LAB: when to use them
• Retouching advantages of LAB
• Creation of masks with LAB
• Use of curves in LAB

Day Three: Putting it All Together

The majority of the day is spent working on images in Adobe Photoshop that illustrate the points covered by the course. The lecture/presentation portion of the day is programmed by the class: each student submits one topic or question, and these topics form the core of a two-hour presentation by the instructor.

About the Instructor: Dan Margulis, a veteran prepress manager, is author of the classic guide to colour correction, “Professional Photoshop”, and of “Professional Photoshop 6”, which is distributed to each student in the class. His column, “Makeready”, focusing on production issues, appears in Electronic Publishing magazine.