When Composites Don’t Play Nice

The written guide

Watching someone do it is not the same as being able to do it.

A session makes sense while you are watching. Then you open Photoshop a fortnight later and cannot remember whether she sorted the edge before the colour, or what that slider was set to, and you end up dragging the scrubber back and forth through an hour and a half looking for ninety seconds.

This is that evening written down so you can work from it.

What is in it

29 pages, 14 steps, in the order Sandra worked, each one with what to do, why it matters and what to watch out for.

• Her actual settings. The blend modes she tried and rejected before settling on Luminosity. The Gaussian Blur radius. The brush opacity she uses for real work rather than the one she demonstrated with. Read off the screen, not approximated.

• Screenshots from the session, two or three per step, plus a picture of where you should have got to by the end of each one.

• Recording times on every step, so the guide and the video work together. When you would rather watch her hands than read about them, you go straight to that minute.

• A glossary of every term and setting, in plain English. Disguise work, creative stash, clipping mask, stamp visible layer, surface photo.

• What you will need, split into essential and useful.

• New to this? and Going further notes, so it works whether you are starting out or want to push further.

• The six questions asked on the night, with Sandra’s answers.

• If something goes wrong. Seven things that commonly fail, each pointing back to the step that fixes it.

• A one-page summary to print and pin above the desk.

It is built to sit open beside Photoshop, not to be read on the sofa. And unlike the recording, it does not expire. Download it, print it, write on it, come back to it in two years.

It is not a summary. Everything in it comes from what Sandra actually did on that particular night, including the questions the room asked.

Made from the recording using checked by me and by Sandra.

Everything in it comes from the evening itself, nothing from anywhere else.

£8. Yours to keep.