I admit to being geekishly excited when a new course comes out — it’s like opening a present. I love to check out all the cool new techniques and plan how I’m going to apply them to my own projects. Sometimes, though, I work in the opposite direction and instead first look through my projects and think about what I want to do creatively with them, then find instruction on how to achieve that result. That’s where video2brain’s subscription service really comes in handy: I can explore the depth of the course library and find a course or specific lesson that will show me how to accomplish my creative goals.
For example, the other day I was playing around with some photos I took at my daughter’s birthday party. I like this picture of her cake (which I made and decorated myself, by the way, from scratch!), but in the original picture the cake is overpowered by a riot of color from the other things on the table — presents, toys, party favors, etc. I went to the video2brain courses page and found two Tim Grey courses that came out a while ago: Photoshop Black-and-White Workshop and Using Layer Masks for Image Editing in Adobe Photoshop CS5: Learn by Video (produced in partnership with our friends at Peachpit Press).
The Black-and-White Workshop teaches you how to create incredible black-and-white images from color originals, and I learned several different ways to apply a black-and-white effect to the image. I ended up first boosting the hue and saturation of the colors to make a better B&W image. I wanted to maintain the original color of the cake, though, and that’s where the Layer Masks course helped me make a layer mask to keep the black-and-white effects from affecting the cake. All in all, it was a fun project to do and I really enjoyed revisiting these two courses. I think you’ll find that just about any project you’d like to do will benefit from a perusal of the video2brain course library.
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