Last night I began a four-week class on Advanced Photoshop. The class is being taught by John Simo at the West End Darkroom in Greenville.
I thought I knew Photoshop. I’ve been using it for the past twelve years, ever since version 4.0. I knew I had barely scratched the surface, but I wasn’t prepared for just how little I really knew. In the class of eight, I felt like I was the furtherest behind, in terms of knowledge of photography and Photoshop. It was a strange feeling – I’ve felt confident in just about every class I’ve ever taken.
The first time you see this it’s a trick. The second time you see it, it’s a technique. The third time you see this, it becomes a method.” – Triantaphyllos Akylas
That being said, I did learn quite a bit in our first session. Most of these were in the form of shortcuts and little helpful setups for screen. Even though I intuitively understood the relationship between megapixels and print quality, it helped to have it spell out mathematically. For example, at 300 dpi print quality, an 8 X 10 photo would require 8 X 300 X 10 X 300 pixels, or 7,200,000 pixels, or 7.2 megapixels. If all you’re doing is printing 4 X 6 prints, then you only need a camera that can do 2.2 megapixels. If you’re only going to share photos online, you need even less.
Despite my lack of confidence in the class, I feel like I’m learning a great deal, which was the whole point of taking the class in the first place. We already have the outline for next week’s class, which will cover exposure correction and black and white conversion. I’m looking forward to it.
I understand your reaction. Considering that there seem to be multitudes of ways to do essentially the same thing in Photoshop, one could likely spend the rest of their lives learning to fully use the current version, much less the new updates that come out every year or two.
I kind of look at it like using any other creative tool. Everybody has their own techniques, their own tools. The important thing is the output, and the creative (or productive) eye that controls it.
I’m a bit PO’d at Adobe right now. We have maintenance licenses from a company called Compusult that give us “free” upgrades over the course of several years. Adobe apparently decided unilaterally that they were going to deep-six this. The activation codes for CS-3 don’t work. Adobe is not being helpful about this. Compusult is apparently out in the cold too. I’m hoping Clemson decides to take legal action, but that gets into big money. I HATE big corporations and monopolies!