Since years ago that I left the paparazzi agencies, I haven’t used Photoshopped. My agency licensed my PS use, as well as Photo Mechanic, and a few nice other paid applications. When the licensing got canceled, I stopped caring. I also stopped shooting. Photography was dead to me.
I had a revival in photography just last year. Photo Mechanic nor PS work, my main two apps. I gave up on it and started using the standard Apple Photos. It’s not bad. It does all the basic things I used to do and in a jiffy. Photoshop was not necessary. I used PS to do cropping, curves, and very little retouching. Then I sent it to the office, they would take care of the rest. Photo Mechanic is just awesome at organizing pictures.
As a substitute for PS I have been using Snapseed on my iPad. Snapseed is a fantastic and very simple to use software (and also very complete, but not quite PS).
But now I have outgrew Apple Photos, and Snapseed and I need to get back into PS. I actually outgrew quite some time ago, but I was reluctant to go of my old ways. I mean, I still don’t shoot RAW for fuck’s sake. I just started shooting RAW yesterday. I think I’m going to keep it like that. Though I still have no idea how to process RAW.
In my times, RAW was not a standard, but a nice addition. CF cards weren’t bigger than 1 gig and if they were, they were pricey. Sometimes RAW was not necessary. Then it became a standard between photogs to always shoot RAW. Reasons are obvious. You can get much more of a RAW file than you can ever from a JPG.
I haven’t been shooting RAW because I was afraid my iMac wouldn’t handle it. But it is time to move on forward and start shooting RAW and to realized what I have been missing.
Super Moon was yesterday. And it is a great time for photographers to try to get some cool as shit. I think I did a pretty good job, but I know I can do WAY BETTER. I should have kept the tripod in the same position the whole time and track the moon. A multiple moon shot would have been a nice thing on PS layers (what I’ve been meaning to learn). Instead I have several angles of the Super Moon, with also several angles to layer on top for the foreground. Problem is… I FUCKING SUCK AT PHOTOSHOP.
For months I’ve been watching videos, but not really learning or applying anything. Now that I have the material to start actually using PS to its maximum advantage, I have no fucking clue what I am doing. I got impatient and ended up cropping the foreground, then pasting it over the moon shot, then blurring the edges in a shitty fashion because I knew that Instagram’s shitty quality wouldn’t make it look that great anyway.
It looks even shittier on FB.
The edit is much more visually obvious on Imgur as well as the quality of the frame.
I also took a bunch of pics of the super moon and slowly zoomed in or out. This was the result.
People actually liked that picture way more than I thought they would… It’s a very silly trick, but why not fuck around?
So I have MUCH MUCH more to learn. I have a lot of pictures saved, so I can fool around with PS for a while. After all I want more photo gigs, and photo gigs include getting good at PS. Trust me, I knew how to use it well enough at some point. Even got some lessons from friends with Master’s in photography. It’s just been half a decade. And I didn’t really invest much time in it before because, well, duh, I had fucking amazing editors (some that are working for Getty now). So yeah. My editing needs to get WAY WAY BETTER. Time to watch shit tons of youtube videos.
Oh finally.
My cover comes out tomorrow!
It’s reason to celebrate! It’s probably my finest work I’ve done. And it’s a picture cover. I’m excited to see the reception. But I’ll also have to work. So instead of refreshing the cover story over and over to see if it has any comments, I’m going to take a morning stroll and coffee, and get work material done.
I just got invited for some pizza. I don’t feel like going out. But it’s work time. I’ve been meaning to check out this place for a long time. So pizza time sounds like a fun time! And it’s tap Tuesday! And my payment actually came in!
Matingas 