[Don Schaeffer]

I swear I learned my lesson. I think I got a bit trigger happy as I learn more about photoshop. Subtle use of the program is good, but I will try to avoid the heavy hand of photoshop.

--Don

[Kombisaurus]

hahaha Don..
Good advice.

Something I often have to say to myself, as I sometimes get a bit carried away with photoshop and become too heavy-handed.

I think Noise Ninja is my biggest problem though. My photos are often a bit noisy even at ISO 50, but I have a bad habit of going overboard with Noise Ninja in an effort to get rid of the noise. I don't seem to notice at the time, but I look back later and often prefer the noisy originals.

Using photoshop is good, but producing images that look photoshopped is often bad. It is a VERY easy program to abuse.

Cheers
Adrian

[guerito]

I must say I rely quite heavily on photoshop. My main problem is contrast. If my skies aren't blown out, my shadows are too dark. And then, of course, the horizon. When I have a horizon in my picture it's slanted. And the crop and the rule of thirds. I'll stop here because the list is endless. There are very few pictures I take where no photoshopping is necessary.

Sometimes I try to do it decently, so that nobody will realize. But more often than not I get carried away...

[Toad]

Good -Bad. Such judgemental wording!

What matters is the final image - doesn't matter how you got there or whether it looks Photshopped or not - the image stands on its own.

In painting you have many schools and styles with radically different looks and feels. Is an impressionist painting less valid than a painting that is realistically rendered?

Why should photos be restricted in ways that other art forms are not? Photographers have a love/hate relationship with Photoshop, it seems.

[Kombisaurus]

You're right Toad.

Looking back at what I wrote it does seem like I'm saying the only good images to come out of photoshop are those that look like they could have come straight out of a camera. This is not what I meant.

I *should* have qualified my statement by saying something like "with most of the photos *I* work on these days and the images that I strive to achieve, photoshop is a great tool but an obvious photoshopped effect is usually not what I'm after".

I have no problem with anyone who decides to depart from a photorealistic image or who uses photoshop for more than simple touching up (and I have done my fair share of this). It is a powerful tool that has many uses.

But I will say that it is easy to get carried away with the novelty factor of many of the filters and effects, and usually people will tend to err on the side of heavy-handedness rather than subtlety.

Using your example of an impressionist painting, it takes a certain amount of skill, thought, and attention to paint a successful impressionist painting, and by its very nature it is a more emotional representation of the scene than a photorealistic one. But it takes about 3 mouse-clicks and no thought for anyone to turn a normal photo into a photoshopped impressionist lookalike, which although visually similar, has clearly no emotional interpretation driving the process. Does that make everyone with photoshop a Monet or Cezanne? Of course not.
I'm not trying to have a go at you at all here, and I'm also not saying the photoshopped impressionist image is of no value, just that it is easy to abuse the "power" of photoshop... and skilled photoshop users, like skilled painters, are not as common as we'd all like them to be. With photoshop, it is the judicious use of these filters and the subtleties and combinations of the effects that make all the difference into the image, otherwise it is the photoshop programmers who create the images, not the user.

Photoshop is the tool, not the solution!

Cheers
Adrian

[Rufus]

Wheeee!!!!

[EnglishBob]

My Personal tastes are for photo-realistic images, I tend to use photoshop lightly for cropping, very mild sharpening and sometimes to correct an under-exposed image slightly.

Horizons too get straightened

It seems the established photo-society competitions even expect 99% of pictures to of been post processed, and will say "that dead leaf should of been cloned out" or some such.... many of the images are film, printed commercially in a photo-lab and have never been near photoshop.

All that said there are some very fine images that pass through these boards thatr have been meddled with! The sun-light in the woods is one I remember well, and Irma's conversion of the snowy park with lights is another I remember easily.

[shuttertalk]

I try to do as little post processing as possible. For some reason, I value the integrity of the image more - and I admire the skills of a photographer in achieving a great image to begin with, rather than fixing it up later.


I only break out photoshop if I'm working on a special project - i.e. framing the image on a wall, or entering a comp...

[jericho]

Long live photoshop!!!!........ as well as the program rufus uses - Painter pro shopper or something like that...

[adam]

Just as long as it doesn't get too obvious.
My christmas flower ( http://www.shuttertalk.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1661 ) is a good example where it's not so obvious!

[Rufus]

OH!!!!!!

Did you process that Adam? I'd never have known!

[Rufus]

Long live photoshop!!!!........ as well as the program rufus uses - Painter pro shopper or something like that...

I use Photoshop. Shows how much of my threads you read. Typical
I used to use Paintshop Pro, but NN and I bought PSCS. With money. Yes.

So there.

That's the last time I invite you to join a forum!

Why cant you read the threads? :o :o :o



Take that!

[shuttertalk]

Another photoshop convert eh? What made you decide to change?

[slejhamer]

I try to do most of my processing upon RAW conversion in Capture One, and use Photoshop only for blending expsosures and some sharpening.

And sometimes "effects" like soft focus, or black & white conversions.

But that's it.

Oh, and skin retouching, and some cloning here and there.

And dodging and burning, either with those specific tools, or with curves and layer masks.

And I use my home-made saturation action on some landscapes.

The Nik "polarizer" effect is quite good, too.

And then there's Paint Engine, which for a free plug-in does some fabulous work if that's the effect I'm after.

That's all - otherwise Photoshop gets no use at all.

Oh yeah, and resizing and saving for the web.

And that shadow/highlight tool is genius.

And ...