If you’re shooting weddings, chances are you’re bringing more than one camera with you, and/or at least one additional shooter. Why wouldn’t you take two minutes to sync the time of your cameras before the shoot? If you don’t, it means photos taken seconds apart will be strewn willy-nilly across your job, and the only way to get them in their proper order will be to manually reorganize them. (And don’t say the order doesn’t matter– having like images with like makes editing so much smoother and more consistent, and it makes for a much nicer presentation for your clients.) Oh, no big deal, it’s not too hard to drag a few photos around in the catalog. But picture this: a catalog with perhaps thousands of images. Imagine sifting through those thousands of images for the shots, say, of the bride getting her hair done. Ok, here’s the first set of images of her getting her hair done, and (scroll scroll scroll) and here’s the rest I took with my other camera. Now, the groomsmen pre-ceremony portraits. The wedding party group portraits. Going down the aisle. Ceremony candids. Detail shots of the venue. Bride’s dance with her dad. Post-ceremony couple’s portraits, location #1. Post-ceremony couple’s portraits location #2. Pre-ceremony wedding party portraits location #4. Ok, wait, now here’s some more of the bride getting her hair done, how did I miss those? Scroll scroll scroll. Ok, there they are. Imagine doing this dozens of times. Imagine how confusing things can get when you’re dealing with hundreds, perhaps thousands of images. Imagine how much more confusing this would be for your photo editor, who wasn’t there and doesn’t know that you doubled back to a location, or about anything else unexpected that happened on the day. And then imagine how absolutely none of this effort would have been necessary if you had just taken two freaking minutes to sync the clocks on your cameras to begin with.
Please: sync your camera clocks. Your editor will thank you.
The iPhone is smaller than most cameras. This makes it easier to position it in places you couldn’t place a DSLR[...] The iPhone’s small scale also changes interpersonal dynamics between the photographer and human subjects; people feel more at ease with what’s perceived as a more casual act, you can make contact with both eyes, and allowing the subject to see the picture while it’s being made (instead of after) provides a dynamic feedback loop of action and reaction or pose and repose.
Don’t knock it, photo snobs. Still, I’m glad no one is asking me to edit iPhone photos. (Yet.)
Here’s a few things not to do if you’re planning on “borrowing” a photographer’s images for your own commercial purposes.
Don’t put the stolen photo on a billboard by a busy freeway in the county where the photographer (or their helpful, ever-alert retoucher) lives.
If you’re in a industry that requires photography only a relatively small number of specialized photographers can handle, and have had discussions with one of these photographers about the possibility of them doing work for you, don’t go to that photographer’s website and steal all their photos from their portfolio and put them all over your own website. Also, be aware that if one of these photographers recognizes your thievery, it’s very possible that they’ll recognize the work of other photographers you’ve stolen from on your site, and will then take a certain pleasure in informing those other photographers of your theft, thus turning the righteous indignant fury of one pissed-off photographer into a world of pain.
The Dunning-Kruger effect explains the phenomenon in which the very stupidity and/or incompetence of an individual makes it impossible for them to understand just how stupid and/or incompetent they are. Cases like the above illustrate the unexpected upside of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the people dumb enough to steal a photographer’s images are also often too dumb to avoid getting caught. Kind of poetic, really.
Update: Lots of discussion on the same subject on twitter lately, after illustrator Jessica Hische was stolen from in a similarly brazen and foolish fashion, leading to the creation of this instructive site: Should I Steal Intellectual Property?
So, what have I been doing in these months and months I’ve been neglecting this blog? Working, of course, but also studying like the big old nerd I am. One of my current Photoshop texts is a certain infamous book by one Dan Margulis.
Dan Margulis is the sort of teacher who doesn’t care if he terrifies you. All the lazy, cheap, quick tips you find in online tutorials by hacks who don’t know any better fall by the wayside, and suddenly you find yourself in a starkly beautiful landscape where only hard-earned knowledge can show you the way. You’re in Dan Margulis’ world now. While other Photoshop books are repeating basic shortcuts you should have mastered 200 pages ago, Dan Margulis shows you grayscale images of the different channels of an image in RGB, CMYK, and LAB and commands you to figure out which is which. Without knowing the color of the original image. Note to people who don’t know what channels are: this ain’t a cakewalk!
Some of my Photoshop professors didn’t even mention curves — they thought it was too complicated for us poor distracted college students. (I have clients who are still afraid of curves, bless ‘em.) Meanwhile, Dan Margulis devotes chapters to every nuance of curves, and explains why you’re a chump if you even think about using the Master Curve.
Dan Margulis is not the type to beg anyone’s permission to have an original thought. I was reading a more conventional Photoshop book which blithely assures readers that there’s no reason to ever use the Apple RGB working space. Meanwhile, Dan says, “I use Apple RGB! I’ll tell you why and when in ten chapters, if your puny little brain hasn’t exploded by then.”
Maybe this seems a bit too demanding. That’s fine, you can have your Auto Color. Me, I’ll be over here, learning at the feet of the guy with the technique so mercilessly sharp that he was able to teach a colorblind guy how to color correct.
As if I didn’t know it before, reading Dan Margulis has made me certain that I’ve chosen the right career. Not to say that I’ve become his obedient follower in everything — but I dearly love his rigor, his unapologetic emphasis on technical mastery, and how goddamn opinionated he is. An industry that embraces such a man is the industry for me.
Embarrassing confession time: I took way, way too long to get comfortable with graphics tablets. The first time I used one was at my first paid Photoshop-intensive job. I learned a lot at that job, but the work was, shall we say, not exactly high-end. A tablet wasn’t seen as a necessity for the work I was doing, but I mentioned that I wanted to learn how to use one, and my boss kindly dug through his drawers and found an old tablet I could use. It was a tiny, tethered thing, several generations past its prime. Although I tried to use it as much as possible, I found it incredibly awkward, and allowed my delusional self to imagine that my mad mouse skillz made the tablet superfluous. No tablet was provided at my next big gig. I didn’t mind, and moved on.
Then, some time later, a professional retoucher very generously took me under her wing. She let me observe her technique with her tablet and suddenly I felt like a complete idiot for not being more serious about mastering the tablet. My eyes opened, I started working with a tablet again, and much to my surprise and delight, it resulted in the single greatest leap in my skills since I got into digital post-production. As crucial as it was to have someone experienced teach me proper technique, it was every bit as important to use a tablet that is a) reasonably sensitive (you should be able to navigate menus without awkwardness), and b) a decent size. If you’ve struggled to get comfortable with graphic tablets, the problem may not be you; it might be the tablet. Once you’ve worked with a good graphics tablet, you will never go back to your sad little mouse.
While I’m being a shameless shill for the graphics tablet industry, I might as well just go ahead and say it: the Wacom Intuos4 is the business, and you should sell your mother to get one, if necessary.
Incidentally, if you look up ‘graphics tablet’ on Wikipedia, you’ll find this little tidbit: “In 1981, musician Todd Rundgren created the first color graphics tablet software for personal computers, which was licensed to Apple as the Utopia Graphics Tablet System.” Now you know. Also, Giorgio Moroder helped design a supercar, but that’s a story for another day.
Recently, Adobe previewed an upcoming feature called Content-Aware Fill. It was so immediately obvious how cool this feature was that it received coverage all over the internet, even on sites that don’t make a point of talking about Photoshop. If you somehow missed it, take a look now:
For an even freakier peek into Photoshop’s possible future, watch this:
The reaction to this sort of stuff is generally: 1) “cool!” 2) slack-jawed disbelief, or 3) ohmigod, I’m out of a job. But stuff like this no longer gives me career anxiety. Let me explain why there’s no reason to be afraid.
In Ken Robinson’s Ted presentation, amongst the many excellent points he make is that in designing our schools’ lesson plans, no matter how prudent we think we’re being, we’re attempting to prepare students for a world that we just can’t anticipate. So it is with image editing. You can take every Photoshop class your school offers, you can read every Photoshop book, watch every training video, or do every online tutorial, but the reality is that Adobe (or maybe, someday in the future, some other company that’s surpassed Adobe as the dominant company in image editing—shock horror) may bring out some new feature that renders a task that used to require several (billable) hours dead easy. Say goodbye to the meticulous, carefully honed technique that took you years to perfect—if you can’t do the new faster technique, your clients will find someone who can. Someone cheaper, probably.
(Also, as a side note, I have to think that whenever a video like this comes out and gets coverage outside of Photoshop-nerd circles, you worry if less-savvy clients will form even more fantastical ideas of what Photoshop can and can’t do, and how long it actually takes to get things done in Photoshop. “Hang on, if you erase the top of the building in Photoshop, the sky will be behind it, won’t it?”)
The unavoidable fact, if you’re going to be a retoucher, is that you will have to be committed for the rest of your career to staying on top of the technology. You’ll have to discard the techniques that took you months, maybe even years of blood, sweat, and tears to develop the moment something quicker comes along without a second thought. And you better not waste time mastering every important new technique that comes your way. No matter how good you are, the progress of technology will never stop. That’s why I think that if you’re going to survive in this industry, it’s crucial that you are (or make an effort to become) the sort of person who never gets tired of learning new things.
Not such a big deal, right? Who doesn’t think of themselves as the sort of person who enjoys learning new things? But try to imagine yourself in the future, imagine how you’ll feel after years of dealing with ground beneath your feet constantly shifting. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? Who wants to stand around waiting to be made obsolete?
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano depicts a dystopia in which technology has rendered all labor obsolete, except that of a tiny elite cadre of engineers. Published in 1952, with a strong emphasis on vacuum tubes and other technological wonders that have long since been supplanted in the public imagination by much more nefarious, imminently threatening technology, its specific vision of the future is rendered reassuringly impossible to modern readers. Yet the fear that underpins the whole novel, the fear that technology will make us obsolete, is every bit as powerful today, and I expect it’s especially acute amongst those in careers that require dependence on changing technology, including photo retouchers. After all, history teaches us that not only is change inevitable, it is often terrifying, unfair, and inhumane. (No wonder those who predict an imminent apocalypse are always with us. Somehow it’s very easy for societies to forget just how many wonderful things we have that our ancestors didn’t. Things like not dying of the Black Plague, not being burned alive for one’s beliefs, like children going to school instead of being maimed in filthy factories, and infinite other marvels that make it a pretty good time to be alive.)
The unpleasant fact is that the changes that will come as image editing technology evolves will not always be unmixed forces for good in our industry, just as Photoshop itself has always had a decided dark side. Someday all the most complicated things you can do, the things you considered you specialty, will be rendered so simple that your client’s nephew who has a copy of Photoshop actually could do them. Or maybe, and this is more likely, you’ll be able to do new things with the new techniques that the proverbial nephew-with-a-copy-of-Photoshop couldn’t even imagine. Because you know how to experiment in Photoshop, you have a honed and sophisticated understanding for what gives an image impact, your knowledge of Photoshop, and photography, and color theory, etc., is deep in a way he couldn’t even begin to grasp. You will grow and change with the technology. It will be scary at times, but it will also be stimulating, even fun. If you’re dedicated and experienced enough to choose to make photo retouching your career, at some point you passed through the wall of understanding and you began to see inside the image. You know what it needs, you know what it can do, you see the possibilities. When new technology comes along, you will be able to explore its possibilities in a way the inexperienced amateur couldn’t even imagine. Even if Adobe came out with a one button interface in Photoshop that said “make my image beautiful” and came with a device your clients could plug directly into their brains, it wouldn’t be able to do what a knowledgeable, artful retoucher could do. The technology is only a starting point. Embrace it.
In photography, the difference between capable hobbyist and successful professional is huge, and not just in the quality of work. When you’re a hobbyist, it’s easy to lose perspective on just how an impact networking and paying your dues will have when it comes to building a lasting career. Courtesy of the invaluable advice-on-everything resource that is Ask Metafilter, here’s the beginning of a bracing response to a non-professional photographer who dreams of being published in Real Simple: “The first step is not to connect with magazine editors, that is absolute last step. If they haven’t heard of you, you have zero chance of getting in the door.” It only gets more intimidating from there. It’s definitely tough love, but it’s always better to know what you’re up against.
Photojournalist Harry Benson talks to the New York Times’ Gadgetwise blog about how taking quality photos in low-light situations is easier than you might think and the superiority of digital photography.
I shoot all digital now. I have a closet full of film cameras like Hasselblad, Nikon, and Rolleiflex, and every time I pass by the closet I hear, “Help! Help!” I feel terrible because they were all great cameras, but why should I use them when I’m getting better results with digital?
He also gets in the usual snide digs at digital post-production.
If I manipulated the photos, I would feel that everything I did was fake. I might take a scratch out but I don’t adjust lighting — that’s creating something that wasn’t there. When photographers start doing that, it can’t be called artwork.
Kind of amusing just how quickly and thoroughly the practitioners of a medium that only won the right to call itself an art after a bruising struggle lasting more than a century become experts on what counts as artwork and what doesn’t. Must be nice to enjoy that kind of certainty.
Adobe’s celebrating 20 years of Photoshop with this cheerful anniversary video reuniting the original Photoshop team. It’s a breezy, knowing little piece that’s packed with surprising historical tidbits, Photoshop geek humor, and allusions to the scale of Photoshop’s influence on photography, art, design (including web design: can you imagine how different the internet would be without Photoshop?) and culture at large.
Also of note: 20 Years of Image Editing: Photoshop from 1.0 to CS4 is an article in Mac|Life chronologing the evolving technology of Photoshop, its (lack of significant) competition, and its cultural impact. The most exciting bit what Kevin Connor, Photoshop’s VP of Product Management for Professional Digital Imaging, had to say about the future of Photoshop:
From a technology standpoint, the big trend is computational photography. Increasingly, software algorithms are being used to derive photographs that could not be directly captured using traditional optics and sensors. Today, this technology can give us seamless panorama photos or wide-angle shots with no distortion, but in the future, it may even give us the ability to manipulate a photograph in three dimensions, adjusting vantage point and focus after the capture. Ultimately, it can also lead to software that is smarter about understanding the contents of a photo and can manipulate it as more than just a collection of pixels.
There’s a strange thing that happens to you when you start getting serious about photo retouching. You start to see Photoshop everywhere, in every commercial image. The texture-free skin, the hair blowing in the wind but without a single hair going too far astray, the overly soft or overly defined edges, the unnatural intensity of the colors regardless of the light source, the sloppy combination of images from different photos, freakishly bright and white eyes, and so on. Even if you were always a cynical/realistic sort who took it for granted that every commercial image was retouched, it’s a bit disorienting to open a magazine and see that truth made suddenly, palpably, painfully obvious.
One day, a friend will notice you staring at a page at a magazine and ask you what’s so fascinating, and you’ll say something like, “ohmigod, look at the edge here, it’s so obvious the retoucher’s forgotten how to feather a selection, and how can anyone pose like that without causing any wrinkles, and hello, didn’t she used to have freckles, and skin that was the texture of an adult human and not a baby?” And your friend will look at you with a mixture of confusion, bemusement, and just a teeny-tiny dash of pity, and you will realize that you have become a Photoshop nerd.
So when you see the cover of the latest issue of Vogue magazine, and you think it’s the fakiest bit of Photoshop fakery that’s ever been faked by a professional fakifier with an electrified faking machine, and holy cats, they’ve gotten rid of Tina Fey’s scar, her scar which she’s known for and has talked about in interviews… well, you may blog about it, but you make a mental note not to talk about it amongst the actual people you know in real life. Being a photo retoucher is tough!
