This was the one I started with. https://prophotoshopartistry.com/specialoffer The others were from the same vendor, one for Black and White, and currently am in a longer and more ambitious class called Awake. While the popular subject matter of winged women does not interest me much, there are enough other kinds of work that do appeal, and the skills apply to anything. The course remains available to an enrollee forever, which is good for me since I need lots of repetition for anything to stick. PM me if you have any particular questions.

THINKING ABOUT PRINTING?

Some of the processing decisions I make when creating a non-literal landscape image depend on how, in the end, I think I may want to display it. For instance, if I want to print something on rough canvas I do not add a rough canvas texture because the two would fight each other; however, if I mainly want to display that same image online, I would add the canvas to emulate the look of printing on that surface.

I'm attaching a few images that illustrate this way of working.

1.Ducks in Cypress Swamp - Meant for printing on aluminum, I emphasized the shiny aspects and delicate branches. The actual scene was very gloomy as it was snowing, and way too dark. Layer of Topaz Detail among other things.
2. Pier in Morning Fog - Meant for printing on canvas. I added rough textures that the texture of the canvas would work well with and add a border vignette that I extended to account for the folding of the canvas.
3. Scottish Swans - Meant for printing on Red River Polar Pearl, a shiny metallic paper that I like to use at home. Again, I enhanced the shiny aspects that I knew the paper would look good for, but not as much as with the one meant for real metal.
4. Delta Bayou - meant for printing at home on Red River Aurora Art paper, a cold press type paper that has a sculpted look. I picked a texture and edge approach that I knew would make the lumps and bumps of that paper even more arty.

Sometimes, the 'scape simply needs some of its furniture re-arranged. This image is not literal but not fantasy either, it is meant to be fairly realistic. I walked up onto a beach in the Cayman Islands in November and spotted: a flock of colorful chickens who scattered to my left, a woman directly ahead of me in the water trying to get a large sting ray off her fishing line, a beachy horizon that was too bright to capture even with a polarizer, and a portly man in a hammock to my immediate right. No more than two elements would fit in the frame at a time, so I captured all of them separately. This was one of those places where the guide tells you to have fun and be back at the vehicle in 5 minutes, so I was a bit impulsive.

The horizon and the man had to be seriously underexposed to hold the highlights. Still, the underexposed shot of the hammock potato provided the better scene, so I used it for the base and processed a layer of it in Aurora to introduce a touch of HDR. I had several shots of the fleeing chickens and chose one that I thought I could meld into the tricky blotchy sunlight where I wanted to place them. I processed the woman and the chickens each separately, also with a touch of Aurora but dialed it down more since they were more properly exposed. I had to scale the woman a bit to bring her close enough to the shore to put her where I wanted. Then I set about extracting the chunks of the image I wanted to move, and blending them into their new places. I used a texture painted over the water and another on the beach to help pull those pieces together.

THINKING ABOUT PRINTING?

Some of the processing decisions I make when creating a non-literal landscape image depend on how, in the end, I think I may want to display it. For instance, if I want to print something on rough canvas I do not add a rough canvas texture because the two would fight each other; however, if I mainly want to display that same image online, I would add the canvas to emulate the look of printing on that surface.

I'm attaching a few images that illustrate this way of working.

1.Ducks in Cypress Swamp - Meant for printing on aluminum, I emphasized the shiny aspects and delicate branches. The actual scene was very gloomy as it was snowing, and way too dark. Layer of Topaz Detail among other things.
2. Pier in Morning Fog - Meant for printing on canvas. I added rough textures that the texture of the canvas would work well with and add a border vignette that I extended to account for the folding of the canvas.
3. Scottish Swans - Meant for printing on Red River Polar Pearl, a shiny metallic paper that I like to use at home. Again, I enhanced the shiny aspects that I knew the paper would look good for, but not as much as with the one meant for real metal.
4. Delta Bayou - meant for printing at home on Red River Aurora Art paper, a cold press type paper that has a sculpted look. I picked a texture and edge approach that I knew would make the lumps and bumps of that paper even more arty.