Mara Sachs is a vanguard veteran in the design world. She began her career nearly 25 years ago as a typesetter at Ziff Davis and, a few technological revolutions later, has become a thriving freelance Adobe trainer and designer. Her recently published tutorial for Graphics.com/Learning is called
Fundamentals of Retouching in Photoshop and reflects Mara's decades of experience with Adobe software as well as her time-tested teaching abilities.
Q: In these difficult economic times, many designers are thinking about diversifying their practices and skills. Your career has gone through monumental changes. How did you successfully go from being a pre-digital designer to a professional Adobe instructor?
Mara: I started out as a typesetter in New York in the mid-1980s, and within a few years was managing a typesetting department in a large prepress company in Philadelphia. This was the time when desktop computers were just beginning to take hold, and since conventional typesetting was starting to vanish, I was offered the opportunity to start and manage a new desktop division within the company, and to help move our typesetting operations onto the (very new) Macintosh.
We were working with Pagemaker, FreeHand and later Photoshop, all version 1. Nobody had color monitors, since computers didn't have nearly enough memory or disk space to work with color files. The whole technology was so new that there were no standards yet, and nobody really knew what they were doing.
We decided to start a training center, both to train our clients on the new software they were trying to learn, and to cross-train our own employees whose jobs were in jeopardy as traditional mechanical techniques were beginning to die out. This whole time was a great experience for me, since I essentially grew up along with the desktop revolution, and my own abilities expanded along with the constantly evolving software I had to keep learning.
In 1990 I moved to Buffalo, where my husband was pursuing a PhD. This was a difficult time economically and I couldn't find a job. I decided to try freelancing, figuring the more diversified I was, the better. It was an excellent decision, and soon my clients included several advertising agencies and Fisher-Price, whose headquarters were nearby. By this time people had graduated from Pagemaker to QuarkXPress, and Photoshop had just introduced layers, which revolutionized everything.
All of a sudden everyone wanted to learn Photoshop. I had a connection with a computer lab and I started offering Photoshop workshops to designers and photographers. These workshops were very successful and word about them spread. Meanwhile my clients were also requesting more sophisticated Photoshop work, so I was teaching, learning, and doing the work at the same time. I kept finding that as I was preparing to teach certain features of the program, I would get jobs that required exactly those features. And my students were reporting similar experiences.
I have moved twice since then, first to Cincinnati, and finally back to New York, and have continued to follow the same basic path. I have been fortunate that opportunities have always presented themselves to me, and I've simply needed the willingness (and sometimes the courage) to say yes. Even difficulties have often turned out to be beneficial, causing me to turn in new directions and open to new opportunities.
So I can heartily endorse both diversification and also not being afraid of difficult economic times. We just need to keep an open mind and say yes to the opportunities that come our way!
Q: The last thing any photo retoucher wants is for their work to call attention to itself. What's the most common retouching blunder you've noticed, and how can it be avoided in Photoshop?
Mara: The most common retouching blunder I see is bad silhouetting: objects or people dropped onto new backgrounds looking as if they have been cut with scissors, or else surrounded by thin halos from their original background.
The first remedy for this is to learn how to make good masks! This means choosing the best silhouetting technique for each image. The pen tool is perfect for isolating smooth areas, but for hair or fur it is much better to make a density mask using one of the color channels as the basis.
Second, cut into your object a little. Make a selection from your path or mask and then contract the selection by one or two pixels so there is no background included in the selection.
And finally, feather the selection just enough to make the silhouetted object look natural. (The amount will depend on the resolution and the sharpness of the image.)
Another common blunder is blurry retouching, where a cloned area looks mushy compared to the rest of the image. The remedy for this is to use a harder brush, or to use the healing brush instead of the clone stamp.
Q: Every program has its strengths and limitations. What is the most common inappropriate way in which people use Photoshop?
Mara: Photoshop is not designed to be a page layout program. So for example, if you are creating an ad that contains small type and vector art, create the layout in InDesign or QuarkXPress, and then place the artwork and images into the layout rather than compositing the whole thing in Photoshop. If you create the whole ad in Photoshop, the type and vector graphics will end up being rasterized at the resolution of the image and will not be as crisp. In addition, the file size will be unnecessarily large. (There are exceptions, of course: if all the type and graphics are transparent and blend into the Photoshop background in complex ways, it might be appropriate to create the whole thing in Photoshop.).
Q: What can subscribers expect from Non-Destructive Color Correcting, your upcoming tutorial for Graphics.com/Learning?
Mara: This tutorial is going to be an overview of adjustment layers, Photoshop's excellent feature that allows you to make flexible, adjustable color corrections without actually changing any of the pixels of the base image. Photoshop CS4 has introduced a new Adjustments panel, which has somewhat changed the way adjustment layers are handled, and the tutorial will also introduce this updated feature.
COMING UP
New tutorials are added to the Graphics.com/Learning library every week. Here are just a few of the on-demand tutorials you'll be seeing on the site in the weeks and months to come:
- Design professor Joseph Caserto contributes Common Type Mistakes ... and How to Avoid Them.
- Aliyah Marr offers a primer on Self-Promotion for Designers.
- Angela Riechers's How to Make Your Design Work, No Matter What shows how designers can triumph over limitations such as a low budget and lame stock photos.
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