Image Editing Lesson 1 : Layers

On request I’ve made some Image editing tutorial videos and this is the first in a series of at least five. Lesson one is an introduction to using Layers. Layers are essential to the construction of drawings and can be used in a similar way when building up effects onto photographs. They make it much easier to come back and change or redo image effects later by leaving each stage intact – a process called non-destructive editing. Anyway, here’s the video from youtube, I hope you will bear with me and keep watching, it gets much more useful after a bit of a slow start I know that – and your comments and reviews are very welcome both here and on the youTube page.

The software I’m using is called Seashore and it’s an open source image editor for Mac using the native Cocoa interface, so it feels like a proper Mac application, not a migrated one.

You can download this free software from Seashore at Sourceforge. If you find that iPhoto doesn’t do all that you want and photoshop is just too big and cumbersome then Seashore could be the image editing application to get you started on acquiring some really useful skills.

The next four tutorials will cover:

• Using the clone tool effectively
• Selecting colours and applying changes
• How to photograph a ghost
• Subtle use of tinting

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