Editing one of Kamila's baby portraits using Aperture 3 and Photoshop CS5 - this photo made by iPhone 4It has been almost a year now since I met Kamila for our first 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lesson in downtown St. Petersburg. It has been good to see her increase her photography shooting skills. As such, our last two lessons have focused on editing digital photos. Since that last editing lesson she has also greatly upgraded her workstation with a 27" iMac! As I recommended she got Aperture 3 to use as her photo management system and initial editing app. We began the lesson with getting her RAW workflow as streamlined as mine is on Aperture 3, which mainly involved getting the import presets & meta data all set up.
From there I showed her my usual first editing steps in Aperture 3: straightening, cropping, and exposure tweaks, all only if necessary. We set up Photoshop CS5 to be the external editor for photos in the Aperture 3 library allowing us to actually work in Photoshop, but still all saves change the file within Aperture 3.
I am a big proponent of keyboard shortcuts, and before the lesson I sent Kamila my PDF of Aperture 3 and Photoshop most used keyboard shortcuts (get it here yourself!). Kamila took further handwritten notes to try and remember as much as I could teach her in our 2-hour lesson. I am confident that Kamila will get faster and faster at editing using the tips I gave her today and as she memorizes more of the keyboard shortcuts. For our next lesson we will move on to more advanced editing including selective edits, object extraction and lens distortion correction.
