When You Often Ask The Wrong Questions...

One of Fremantle's most famous bike-riding photographers frequently says that if Photoshop is the answer, you've asked the wrong question. He's in a good position to say this as he has passed a working lifetime making excellent pictures with film as well as digital cameras and has the ability to teach others to do the same. I am not sure if he gets it right every time, but I'll bet he gets it right nearly all the time. That's experience and skill. Some of the rest of us have a poorer batting average. I can look back on decades of negatives, slides, and prints and see where I went wrong, and that on a steady, regular basis. I'm not saying I was dumb, but I learned early on that you could make most mistakes in new ways if you tried... The advent of the digital workflow, the computer, and the image-editing program then came to me in the early part of this century and, quite frankly, I was delighted. My friend and late employer Ron quite frankly was not. He preferred the analog ideas and sometimes looked at what I did with a little dismay. However, I carried on and learned what I could do with the early Photoshop programs. In my case, not much, because the terms used and the control sequences were so foreign to me. It was not until I started on the much simpler Photoshop Elements that I could get my boot into the toe-hold and climb into the cockpit, so to speak. Even there a number of the features of the program went untried until YouTube and simple magazines explained them to me. As time went on new programs came up, were tried, and largely rejected. Some were fine to use but quickly abandoned by their makers, leaving me stranded. Others were nearly as good as the Adobe products but couched in such confusing terms as to make them even harder to play with. Finally the Adobe works shifted their business model to subscription services but linked the two most popular image programs in an affordable team, and I took the PS plunge. It still seemed as obscure as before, but the help of friends and the experience of the Photoshop Elements helped a lot; many of the commands and shortcuts were the same. There are still quite a few things it does that I don't access but a number of the operation sets are simple routines to get into and the results are getting to be more predictable. And for me, asking the wrong questions all the time, as I do, Photoshop is a good answer. A good dance show will see me do nearly all my editing in the companion program, Lightroom, but if I have particularly bad shots to sort out I can use some of the PS magic to recover my errors. I think I get value for money each year. You can too - ask in CE about the subscription types that you can sign up for. If Photoshop Elements is what you need ( and most of my blog material goes through PSE ) you can get that as a one-time direct purchase . Note: You may find yourself snorting scornfully at being told to use Photoshop..." Everybody knows this already...! ". Not so; I spent last Wednesday cheerfully showing a photographic friend how to make the recent heavy river flows even more spectacular and picturesque with PSE. He'd gone up to Noble Falls hoping for the sort of misty water shot that has been all the rage with long exposures. He didn't have an ND filter when he took the shots ( you get these from CE ) but we could still smooth out the river a lot with the basic selections, layers, and filters. As he did that I used PS to set fire to buildings in the CBD - a very satisfying task.