THIS PRODUCT PROVIDES ACCESS TO THE RECORDINGS - YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO DOWNLOAD.
 
Most of us reach a point where the camera is no longer the problem. You know what the buttons do. You can process an image without looking up a tutorial. And yet you look at your pictures and something is missing, and you cannot quite name what it is.
 
Part of the answer is that we stop looking. We learn a way of working that gets a reasonable result, and then we repeat it. The other part is colour, which is doing an enormous amount of work in every image you make, usually without you deciding any of it.
 
These two sessions are about both. The first teaches you to see again. The second teaches you to shape what you see.
 
Included: Sandra's Creative Eye Warm-up Guide. A short PDF setting out the exercise the whole series is built on. You can do it tonight in ten minutes, and the sessions explain why it works.
 
Part 1: Developing Your Creative Eye
Sandra opens with a question rather than a technique. When you stand somewhere, do you actually look, or do you raise the camera and shoot the obvious thing?
 
She then does something unusual for a Photoshop session. She stops you judging.
 
The warm-up. Sandra's whole approach rests on becoming what she calls a happy clicker. Take one image, give yourself ten minutes, use adjustment layers only, and push the sliders much further than feels sensible. The point is not to make the picture look good. The point is that when you stop asking whether you like it, you start asking what actually changed: the mood, the colour, the contrast, the story, the place your eye goes.
 
She then does it live, with no plan. Sandra works aloud, throwing a photo filter at an image, cranking the dehaze, changing her mind, undoing, deciding to try black and white instead, putting a crow on someone's shoulder to see what happens. Whack it in became the phrase of the evening. You are watching someone experiment in public, which is a very different thing from watching a polished demonstration.
 
Two exercises you can do straight away. One is a looking exercise built around a single graphic, where the room noticed wildly different things in the same image. The other is a sixty-second drawing exercise that says a lot about how habitually you reach for the same shapes.
 
And an honest conversation about why this is hard. Years of making pictures for competition judges teaches you to hunt for faults rather than possibilities, and several people said out loud that they were trying to unlearn it.
 
Part 2: Colour, Mood & Atmosphere
Sandra opens this one with Monet: colour is a day-long obsession, joy and torment. Then she spends the session turning it into a decision rather than an accident.
 
Reading colour before you touch anything. What the tonal range actually is, which colours are present, and which two are carrying the picture. Accent colour is the idea people took away most: in one image it is a red door and a bird's beak, and once you have seen them you cannot unsee them. She makes the same point about black and white, which is still full of colour decisions even when no colour survives.
 
Colour harmony, in practice rather than in theory. Complementary colours, what sits together comfortably, and what to reach for when an image is too warm. She shows you where to find a colour wheel: in Photoshop, in Lightroom, in the Library panel, and in Adobe's own online wheel.
 
Colour depth, and why most people lose it. Sandra builds depth in very small increments, layering, adjusting opacity, changing a blend mode, rather than making one large move. She shows what desaturating actually costs you, and how to use curves to separate colour instead.
 
Her own techniques, shown properly. Colour dodging, which takes the thinking behind dodge and burn and applies it with colour. Selective colour built on luminosity masks. Working the red, green and blue channels individually. Solid colour fills, photo filters, hue and saturation, vibrance, colour balance, LUTs, Camera Raw presets, and finishing with the Nik Collection.
 
A live composite, built from nothing. She constructs an image on screen and narrates every colour choice as she makes it, including the ones she rejects.
 
Why we love this
I have hosted a lot of Photoshop sessions, and most of them show you a finished way of working. Sandra shows you the messy bit. She changes her mind out loud, tries things that do not come off, and says so. That turns out to be far more useful than watching someone be right.
 
She also joins us from Australia, which means her alarm goes off at half past two in the morning. She opened Part 1 by stumbling out of bed on screen doing her best Dolly Parton. That tells you most of what you need to know about the tone of these two evenings.
 
Colour is the subject you ask me about more than any other, and Part 2 is the most thorough answer I have been able to offer.
 
A few words from people who were there, including two presenters who came along as participants:
"Another inspiring evening!" — Maryellen
"Great session Sandra, really enjoyed it." — Celia
"I loved the idea of accent colour. I need to look at my composites and see if they need one." — Pam
"Definitely got me thinking about colour and colour depth, and love the idea of colour dodging." — Gill
"I have learnt to look at Photoshop in a different way." — Alison
 
Who this is for
Anyone who wants to grow the creative side of their photography, whatever your genre or level. You do not need to be a Photoshop expert to follow along.
 
About Sandra
Sandra Dann is a creative artist and educator, and an Adobe Community Expert. Through SandraD Imagery she teaches Photoshop, digital art and creative storytelling, blending photography with imagination, colour and texture. Her style is relaxed and down to earth, and she cares as much about building your confidence as your technique.
 
What you get
Both sessions in full, Part 1 running 1 hour 16 minutes and Part 2 running 1 hour 27 minutes, plus Sandra's Creative Eye Warm-up Guide as a downloadable PDF.
£12, with access for three months.