If there is one thing I've learned about Photoshop, it's this- Every Photoshop user will have something to teach you. I recently watched a new video by Halo of Black Lotus Tattoos in Maryland called Reinvent Yourself: In Depth Photoshop for the Tattoo Artist. It's also meant specifically to be useful for tattoo artists, but he's got a whole range of tricks that I'd never heard of in 20 years of using Photoshop. It's an in-depth tutorial that shows you a live screen capture of a number of demonstrations, all which are useful for use in tattoo design. He covers subjects such as: 

- Basics even for a beginner

- Learning each tool step by step

- Correcting very poor references

- Manipulating photos for tattoo designs

- Making caricatures of people

- Merging two photos to make one

- Painting out unwanted background

- Endless color choices

- Making a perfect ink palette from a reference

- Making a flawless stencil to save time and stencil ink

It's a downright useful tutorial and will give you a lot of bang for your buck- Halo has taken not only his experience but all the stuff that he learned in a digital art college course that he thinks is the most useful to tattoo artists, and distilled it down into an hour and forty minutes of smoothly produced information. You can even open the DVD on your desktop and then open Photoshop right next to it, and try out the things that he's demonstrating. I highly recommend Reinvent Yourself for all Photoshop users- even if you have lots of practical experience with Photoshop, I assure you you'll learn something from this course. We've got in in stock now in our online store.

Reinvent Yourself is a great compliment to a DVD set we already carry: Get Digital, by Mike DeVries and Jamie Parker. Get Digital covers a lot of fundamentals, but approaches it much differently than Reinvent Yourself. It's geared toward projects such as business cards and banners that can be of immediate use in your practice, along with many great tricks for working with reference material. Save on shipping by ordering both DVDs, and you'll have a comprehensive library of Photoshop tricks and tools that is sure to get you up to speed and working with digital tools in a way that empowers you as a tattoo artist.