Heavy Machinery, Used Lightly — Photoshop for Photographers
Three online evenings on the fraction of Photoshop photographers actually need: masks as thinking, retouching with a conscience, and the ethics fences drawn clearly.
The workshop
Photoshop can do anything, which is precisely its danger. This three-evening online intensive teaches the fraction photographers actually need: layers and masks as a way of thinking, compositing with a conscience, and retouching that respects the subject — with the ethics made explicit throughout: what editorial work permits, what documentary work forbids, and how to know which room you're in.
Every exercise starts from a photograph, half of them yours. Frequency separation is demystified and then mostly declined, which participants report as the single most liberating hour.
Lars Petersen
Copenhagen · Editing · Lightroom & print
Lars ran a pre-press studio for fifteen years before teaching. He treats editing software as a darkroom with better ventilation, and the print as the only honest proof.
- Masks-first thinking installed permanently
- Restraint as the headline retouching skill
- The ethics map, drawn clearly and kept
- Live review of your own files across the sessions
- Photoshop (trial suffices)
- A mid-spec computer and a mouse at minimum — tablets welcomed
- Six of your own files per the pre-course brief
- Three live evening sessions
- Homework review between sessions
- The written exercises and your personal-policy template
- Session recordings for participants, fortnight access
- Photoshop subscription beyond trial
- Hardware
- The urge to use everything you've learned at once (please decline it)
Online — three live evening sessions, Central European Time
“'Do it on a mask so you can be wrong gracefully' is now taped to my monitor. Three evenings, and my files stopped being afraid of me.”
“The ethics evening should be mandatory for every photographer online. I wrote my policy, published it on my site, and two clients have already thanked me for it.”
Questions, answered
How much Photoshop do I need coming in?
Open a file, find the toolbar — that's the floor. The course builds the rest in the right order, which is the part self-teaching usually scrambles.
Where does AI editing fit?
Demonstrated honestly, fenced clearly, and cross-referenced to the AI Workflow workshop for the full treatment. The personal-policy exercise is where you decide — in writing — what your own images can contain.
11 seats remaining.
Departures are deliberately small and tend to fill from the newsletter. Booking places no charge — we confirm your seat personally, then arrange payment.