How Photoshop training stretches creativity.

For creative professionals, Photoshop training never Ends: Martin Scorsese's biography of Howard Hughes, the Aviator, used more than 400 shots created with Adobe After effects and Adobe Photoshop CS. The man behind the effects was Rob Legato, Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor, formerly known for his work on Titanic and Apollo 13. Although some of the visual effects on the aviator have changed very little since Hughes used them to film Hell's Angels, most of the effects for the aviator were created by Legato and a team of artists using high-level graphical tools such as Adobe Photoshop on Mac and PC-based systems.  "What's revolutionary is that a person can do all of these things," says Legato.

The "Photoshop training" on the job produced spectacular results in the Aviator. Desktop systems enabled artists like Legato to extend their creativity to boundaries they would not have dreamed of just a few years ago. High-end software programs like Adobe Photoshop are changing the way movies are made. Traditionally, visual effects artists have not worked on filming as part of the main unit; The main unit shoots a scene, leaving a space for the effects. Instead of relying on an expensive special effects studio and working as part of the main unit, Legato was able to do the effects himself on a desktop system. Director Scorsese was able to send his comments immediately, and Legato was able to quickly make the necessary modifications.

Using Adobe After effects, Legato could show Scorsese how a scene would look before it was filmed. This enabled the visual effects team to produce what is essentially an animated storyboard; The director could visualize a scene before filming it and before committing studio resources and live actors to film it.

Photoshop's color synchronization techniques allowed visual effects artists to achieve notable screen results in the Aviator. Scorsese wanted colors in the Aviator to reflect the appearance of the films of the periods portrayed in the film. For the action set in the Decades of 1920 and 1930, Scorsese used Photoshop to create the visual texture of the two-color Technicolor technique. For the period after 1937, Scorsese used Photoshop to create the three-color Technicolor transfer system.

Legato was able to emulate the Technicolor processes of early periods by scanning black and white photos and using Photoshop CS to overlap the magenta, yellow, and cyan filters in the photographs. This is the most amazing thing about Photoshop: it is so powerful and can do so much, that even Adobe people are often surprised by the new applications that users of cutting edge industries find for the software. As Legato points out,  "The software can be used in a way never imagined by the people who invented it."

Martin Scorsese has never been known as Artistic director, much less as an innovator in the field of visual effects. But as Legato says, Scorsese received training in Photoshop at work:  "Very soon, he asked us to we changed the color of a dress here or to We were a shadow there."