PhotoArt: Fay Sirkis at The Institute

I spent an amazing week at the Lepp Insitute in Los Osos, California, at Fay Sirkis' "Impressions of Art" workshop/seminar. It was total immersion in Photoshop and Painter X in a workflow to convert your photographs into paintings. It was glorious. I have not a single artistic brain cell, but this gorgeous lady from New York seems to have given me a stem cell transplant (now that it's OK to do that again) and I was amazed at what we produced.

So, what happened? Fay walked us through her vision, sharing examples of her work along with their backstories to get our brains atuned. Then we started through the workflow for producing photorealistic images which first entails taking the image into Photoshop, retouching blemishes, treating the skin, a whole special section on working with the eyes (as Fay keeps reminding us, they are the "Gateway to the Soul".) We learned her "sandwich technique" for making adjustments. And once that was all done and we were swimming in layers, we flattened and caught our breath.

While I am familiar with Photoshop and did install Painter X on my workstation along with a Wacom Cintiq 21ux, I had no clue how to use Painter. Not a problem. Fay pulled up Painter and gave us a guided tour through the places we would need to go. But I have made this sound too trivial ... it is not! Fay spent many hours explaining and demonstrating where the various tools hide, what they do, their differences and similarities, how to customize them, arrange workspaces, palettes, panels and save them. And then she pulled her example images in and acquainted us with her workflow for photorealistic painting, step by step, with prepared student notes. And then she set us out to work on our own images all the while moving slowly from student to student giving intense personalized attention to everyone.

It is the way at The Institute to have open lab from 8:00 to 9:00 am each morning, class from 9:00 to 5:00 with breaks and lunch, and open lab again from 7:00 to 9:00 pm with assistants available to untangle our misunderstandings, find the tools we have hidden from ourselves, demonstrate the techniques that we missed because we were overwhelmed with information, and generally make sure that we are in control of the programs at our individual digital workstations which drastically reduces the class time needed to help less adept classmates the following day. It is a marvelous system.

The next major topic revealed a workflow that allows Painter to assist in jump starting our painting exploration. This is a fairly well developed set of ordered tools for enhancing target images, using the painterly tools such as brush styles and adjustments, creating an underpainting and then augmenting our hand painting enhancements.


So, what did I do that so overjoyed me? I took the picture of Anna, my daughter, from my previous blog entry, and turned it into a photorealistic painting which has been printed and my wife will have matted and framed for Anna's Grandmother. It is the image above. I also created a painting of Tom Jones from a concert capture of mine. I'm not sharing that image for now but I have included a detail in which you can see the brush strokes and style below. I have some project plans that I may reveal as I move forward.



Finally, we learned some additional critical printing preparation steps for enhancing the painterliness of our work and made a few prints. And then Fay explained many, many marketing tips and processes from handling the work in the presence of clients to titling, signing and numbering limited editions: the Ka-Ching portion of the program. It was surreal and filled with Fay's personal experiences and emotions.

Now, you may not be able to venture out to the West Coast to attend a Lepp Class with Fay, but there are other options. She has two tutorial DVDs available including the one I bought: produced in conjunction with Kelby Training. She has two more coming, one of which will be of particular interest to animal/pet aficionados. She is also touring with a number of other teaching Pros this year so you might want to check the Kelby Training website for that.

As always, I want to be clear that I am not affiliated with Lepp Institute as other than a normal student. I am also not affiliated in any way with Fay Sirkis or Kelby Training and receive no compensation or gratuity for sharing experiences. I should also disclaim that I have purchased wine made by Hal Schmitt (one half owner of Lepp) for my wife for Christmas but I am not reviewing it here or elsewhere.

Travel safe!

Dwight

The Institute: Photoshop 2 with Hal Schmitt

Just got back from my second introductory Photoshop weekend with Hal Schmitt at Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging ... to be known simply as the The Institute at this time ... and I am stoked! It was beyond my greatest expectations. Not only did Hal march us through all the major layer operations but he made them part of a solid digital photography workflow that can be the foundation of whatever additional post processing one might do. After showing us Levels, Hal worked our butts over and over on Curves! Anyone who thought that Curves was just too complicated for the average guy (or gal) just never sat through Hal's workshop. And I don't just mean seeing it in action, but taking advantage of all the more subtle uses including use of the clipping display, white balance, selective curves, the appropriate blending modes and combining with the automatically available mask and on and on. A little overload for some folks but this isn't supposed to be the introductory class ... that was last weekend!

So, I drove up to Los Osos yesterday and today, about 75 miles each way and arrived to excellent coffee and super donuts ... I'm partial to those glazed cake donuts and cinnamon rolls, sigh. The group this week was also much bigger with a wider range of experience and focus. Unfortunately no other concert shooters but mostly landscape and bird shooters, plus Greg who wants to do his own product shooting for his furniture business ... a really nice group augmented by Miss Leah in her "Little Black Dress" who is auditing as a member of The Institute staff.

So, as with each of the previous classes I have taken with The Institute I am overjoyed and feel that I got a lot more than my money's worth and more than I expected ... and I have pretty high expectations of this place. Hal ended the day after I left but the last thing he did while I was there was to run us through one of the new powerful tools in CS3 the Photomerge ... mind numbing but a feature I wouldn't have thought to investigate. The great thing about Hal is he gets his hands dirty ... really dirty actually ... and has personal experience and lots of opinions (but not those ugly religious level ones) that he will debate.

But here's the really impressive thing about Hal from this weekend ... he made a statement based on what he had been taught about a feature that didn't jibe with my experience, so I asked about it ... data saved in jpeg files. Well, we hit a break and Hal went out and tested it and when it turned out to be as I had suggested, he immediately corrected himself. It is very impressive to work with instructors who don't let ego constrict their openness to student knowledge.

Again, my disclaimer from last week: while I am very pleased with my experiences at The Institute and am sharing that with you, I am not in any way associated with them other than as a full paying student and I receive no consideration (other than being the target of extra abuse) for telling you about them. I strongly urge you to consider them if you are in the market for any digital photography education ... sign up for their newsletter as they are adding new classes and other opportunities as they move forward ... I hear they are partnering with some well known field photographers for photo-safaris to amazing locations!

And finally, if you are a NAPP or NANPA member they give a steep discount!

Be Safe!

Dwight