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Free photo editing tutorial for beginners at Udemy


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Hi everyone,

 

I've just released a series of 10 videos at 5 minutes each about the absolute basics of image editing at this link: https://www.udemy.com/enhancing-photos-for-complete-beginners/?src=sac&kw=enhan

 

This is not a course about how to use any one bit of software. It just covers the basic processes & in what order you would do them with just about any image editing program. The majority of the videos use Photoshop Elements but I also use Affinity Photo and Pixelmator.

 

*Ahem!* - this course does not recommend any one bit of software over another. The very basic stuff I show was selected because the course is for those people who come to an advanced image editing program with all it's buttons and don't know where to start. It aims to show you what sort of things you should be starting out with. It's for people who have said something like:

 

 'I want to improve my photos. I've looked at one or two programs like Photoshop but all of them are just a confusing mass of buttons. Where do I even begin to understand what to do?'

 

All the processes I describe can be done in Affinity Photo, and it naturally leads into 2 of the Affinity Photo courses I have at Udemy - the Five Steps to Better photos course and the Solid Foundations course. Oh; and did I mention it's free?

 

Right, with that course released I can get back to doing the Affinity Photo 1.5 update videos for the other courses at Udemy. Thanks for your time & I hope the lessons prove to be of use to as many of you as possible.

 

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One week later and there's over 1000 students signed up. I was chuffed to bits and with it being Christmas I thought I'd give a little gift. I've added 4 more videos on the end where I take a photo (which you can download and follow along with) and develop it so people can get comfortable with the workflow.

 

It is a general course and not software specific, but I use Affinity Photo for 2 out of the 4 videos so a beginner can see some examples of how you might go about developing a photo. It's still free and I wish you all a peaceful Christmas, and may the new year be the one we hope for.

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Thank you Simon.

 

You've done a lot to make photo editing accessible for anyone willing to learn. Your 3 Affinity Photo courses on Udemy (Solid foundations, Raw Processing and Tips and Tricks) are excellent (which I've said elsewhere before) and made getting up to speed in AP painless. Courtesy of those courses as well as the vast number of excellent free 'official' tutorials by James Ritson (on the Affinity Photo site) I have a better grasp of this complex subject than I ever had in years of poking at Photoshop.

 

BTW - nice job on the V1.5 updates. You really helped clarify things with HDR and Focus Merge in particular. The tips you give on using macros are outstanding too. Being able to 'publish' the sliders for quick access for a series of commonly used adjustments is a life saver. Years ago I was shooting and uploading hundreds of sports images (sometimes daily) - knowing this technique would have saved me vast numbers of hours.

 

Thanks again,

 

Ed

 

(I'll stop now - all these superlatives are making my head spin! :)

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I added this topic to my bookmarks. The teaser got me hooked, and my knowledge with photo editing is rather limited. By saying there is a certain order to edit photos makes sense. After the holidays, I might just get a Udemy account and check out these tutorials. Thank you for sharing this.

 

Oh, I almost thought Step 1 was missing. I think there may have been a slight mixup with the order. lol

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

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EdD - O my blushy face! Thanks very much for the kind words, they are much appreciated. bleduc, the 5 steps thing is because so often I see a tutorial on how to use a particular feature but rarely do I see tutorials that describe a way of doing things in a particular order. So I try to offer that with reasons why to do things that way. If you try it out I hope it makes sense. In the meantime I'm off to stick a bucket on my head in case any more famous people die in what's left of 2016 because I don't want to hear about it...

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In the meantime I'm off to stick a bucket on my head in case any more famous people die in what's left of 2016 because I don't want to hear about it...

 

No worries. I'm still alive and well.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

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  • 2 months later...

drippy cat, thanks very much for this. I'll just second all the earlier e-motions. I'm hooked too and I think I'll check out your affinity courses. 

 

I do have a quick question that I thought would be answered in that intro: I shoot in raw, because I thought it was better to have a raw image with more data in it to work with before editing. So I thought the idea would be to enhance a raw photo, then develop, then export. But both Affinity's tutorials and this one seem to assume that we'll do most of our editing using a jpeg image. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having raw? What am I missing? 

 

thanks!

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Hi kunmingjay. The course is aimed at beginners and as such I felt I'd stick to basic concepts. Raw is a more advanced concept than I wanted to talk about on this course, although I do have a course dedicated to just RAW development using Affinity Photo right here - https://www.udemy.com/affinity-photo-raw-image-development/?src=sac&kw=affinity .

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