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.

For an even freakier peek into Photoshop’s possible future, watch this:

PatchMatch: Structural Image Editing from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

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.

He also gets in the usual snide digs at digital post-production.

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.

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!

That’s it!

The story of Vivian Maier, if you haven’t heard it yet, is a simple and fantastic one. A few years ago, Chicagoan John Maloof went to a furniture and antique auction and purchased a giant lot of tens of thousands of negatives. They turned out to be the collection of Vivian Maier, a hugely talented but unknown street photographer operating (primarily) in Chicago from the 50s to the 70s. Maloof uncovered a few scattered biographical details about her (she was a Jewish refugee from France, she worked as a nanny), but she remained mysterious, and unfortunately she passed away before Maloof could get in contact with her.

What’s left is a considerable body of work, which Maloof has been posting in bursts on a blog he’s started for her, Vivian Maier: Her Discovered Work. (He’s posting her photos at a relatively decent size too, so you won’t need to get out a magnifying glass to see the details.) The blog has been up for a few months, but it wasn’t until Maloof asked for advice on how to handle the collection on the flickr Hardcore Street Photography group that the story began to take off on the internet. It’s too early to say how the photography establishment and the world at large will respond to Vivian Maier’s work, but personally, I don’t think it’s too soon to start throwing around names like Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank as reference points.

Photography is unusual amongst the arts in that it’s not outrageously difficult to attain a basic technical proficiency. I think it’s the sheer ease of entry that makes many people in the photographic establishment nervous and eager to establish a hierarchy. (To wit, the snobbery directed towards the so-called MWACs, i.e. “moms with a camera”.) Part of what makes the discovery of talents like Vivian Maier so exciting is that they provide the thrilling sensation that something subversive and grassroots is happening. It’s not really true in Vivian Maier’s case even though she was ignored by the photographic establishment in her lifetime. (Did she try to seek fame in her lifetime? Was she snubbed? We may never know.) Anyway, as good as Maier was, she was clearly working inside a clearly established street photography tradition.

Plenty of photographers who’ve since gone on to be established figures in the photographic canon went unknown in their lifetimes despite the obvious strength of their work, and in many cases, it wasn’t because their work was too controversial for their times. It makes me think there must be any number of significant artists right under our noses; perhaps not obviously revolutionary (Maier certainly wasn’t), maybe even traditional in their approach, but nevertheless brilliant, exceptional talents that will be remembered long after we’re gone.

I’ve heard plenty of people moan that the advent of the digital era hasn’t resulted in any great new photographers. Maybe we should all start looking a little harder.

There’s a lot of reasons to love Firefox, everyone’s favorite open source browswer, but perhaps the best one is just how easy it is to customize Firefox to your particular preferences. All you need to do is go to the Firefox Add-Ons page and click the ‘Add to Firefox’ button for any add-on that appeals to you.

If you’re the sort of person who spends a lot of quality time browsing images on the internet–any images, from graphic design, art, photography, news photos, pictures of kittens, anything–there’s a lot you can do to make sure that your browsing with Firefox smoother, faster, and ultimately more satisfying. Here are some of my favorite Firefox extensions for making image browsing even better.

All of these extensions are compatible with version 3.5, the latest version of Firefox.



AutoPager
Automatically loads the next page of a multi-page web document. Instead of clicking ‘next’, just keep on scrolling down and AutoPager will load the content for you. Especially fantastic for browsing big sets of images on websites like Flickr.



ColorZilla
Makes it easy to sample colors from the web using an eyedropper like the one in Photoshop.



Save Image in Folder
It can get tiresome to manually navigate to a folder every time you want to save a photo from the web. If you have the Save Image in Folder extension, all you need to do is right-click on the image and scroll on over to a list of your favorite folders and choose. Very easy to set up and use.



Screengrab
Saves websites as images. You can choose to save the whole page, the visible area, a particular section, or the entire browser window.



Tab Mix Plus
Effective use of Firefox’s tabs is the key to being a Firefox power user. Tab Mix Plus gives you an amazing amount of control over Firefox’s tabs so you can browse exactly how you like. Some of my favorite functions of Tab Mix Plus: making sure links open in the current window instead of a new one, setting it up so tabs can be very tiny, so I can fit a ton of them onto my tab bar, easily re-opening closed tabs, closing a tab by clicking on it with the mouse scroll button, and so on. Indispensible.



Tab Preview
Quickly pops up a small image of what’s in each tab as you mouse over your tab bar. Invaluable when you get tab-happy and want to quickly go back to a particular tab without actually clicking on every single tab.



Wikipedia Lookup
Come across an artist or an art movement you’d never heard of? Just highlight any word or term in your browser, right-click on it, and choose Wikipedia Lookup to automatically open the Wikipedia page for that subject. (I find it handy to set it up to open in a new tab.)






You might also try:

Adblock Plus
The most classic of all add-ons. Say goodbye to visual clutter and pretty much all the ads on the internet.



ColorfulTabs
Simple add-on that makes your tabs different colors.



Fetch Text URL
Isn’t it irritating when people post a plain, unclickable url into a webpage? With Fetch Text URL, just highlight the url, right-click on it, and choose the Fetch option to open it in new tab. It’s only a small change from the usual method: highlighting the url, copying it, opening a new tab, and pasting it in the tab bar, but in practice using Fetch Text URL is quicker and less cumbersome.



FoxyTunes
If you like to listen to music as you browse, FoxyTunes ensures that you don’t have to keep clicking back to your music player to see what you’re playing or skip ahead; all the relevant options are displayed in the FoxyTunes bar at the bottom of your browser.



Nuke Anything Enhanced
Remove anything you don’t like on a page via the ever-handy context menu.



Happy browsing!