Unveiling Creativity: Transforming Ideas into Painterly Storytelling Imagery

Amber Damour
Track: Digital Post-production

At a Glance

• A Step-by-Step Capture Workflow
• Learn Amber’s complete process for creating storytelling portraits—from concept development to lighting, posing, and working with models to evoke authentic emotion.
• Mastering Painterly Post-Processing in Photoshop
• Gain hands-on experience with advanced editing techniques, including skin retouching, background enhancements, color grading, and painterly effects to give your portraits a fine art finish.
• Creating Seamless Composite Images
• Discover how to blend multiple images into one cohesive, compelling composite that enhances your storytelling while maintaining realism and artistic integrity.
• Confidence to Bring Your Vision to Life Walk away with a clear, repeatable creative process and the confidence to push your artistic boundaries—transforming your portrait work into emotionally impactful, gallery-worthy imagery.

Class Description

Unveiling Creativity: Transforming Ideas into Painterly Storytelling Imagery is an immersive workshop designed to deepen your understanding of visual storytelling and enhance your post-processing skills. You’ll learn Amber’s step-by-step award winning portrait capturing process from start to finish.

We’ll delve into the intricacies of lighting, composition, props, wardrobe, and posing, exploring how these elements can be manipulated to evoke specific emotions and convey your intended story.

In addition to mastering these essential techniques, we’ll explore the art of creating composites, allowing you to blend multiple images seamlessly into a single, cohesive narrative.

Through hands-on creativity-building exercises, you’ll discover how to push the boundaries of your imagination and infuse your images with unique, personal flair.

Following the capture of your storytelling images, we’ll transition to the digital darkroom, where the magic happens. We will delve into advanced post-processing techniques using Photoshop. Amber will guide you through advanced skin retouching, color grading, painterly touches, and adding depth and dimension to your images.

You’ll learn how to breathe life into your images and elevate them to new heights of visual storytelling.

This class is ideal for portrait photographers who are looking to push their creativity, elevate their technical skills, add storytelling and fine art elements to their client or personal work and dive into advanced editing and retouching Photoshop skills.

Whether you’re newer to conceptual work or an experienced professional looking to refine your editing and artistic vision, you’ll walk away with a clear, repeatable process to bring your ideas to life. Why this class will change your creative journey:

You’ll learn how to take control of every part of the storytelling process—from vision to execution—and transform ordinary sessions into meaningful, artful portraits your clients will treasure.

These techniques not only enhance your skillset but also help position your work at a higher creative and professional level, opening doors to premium pricing, awards, and deeper artistic fulfillment.

What to bring: Students should bring a notebook, a laptop with Photoshop installed (preferably the latest version), a Wacom tablet (optional but recommended), and a few of their own RAW images to work with during the editing portion of the class.

• CLASS INTENSITY: Blue
• CLASS BREAKDOWN
  Classroom instruction & demos: 30%
  Hands-on: 30%
  Post-production: 40%
• PREREQUISITES:
  Lighting 1: All Levels
  Post-Production 3: Can work with layers, layer masks & understand blend modes.
  Post-Production 4: Digital Art & Composite experience. Experience in blending image with brushes.
  Studio Business 1: All levels

What do these mean? Learn More