Photoshop has a horrible reputation. Most non photographers use it in a pejorative sense when criticising a photo and saying that it has been Photoshopped.
That reputation was thoroughly deserved. Some of the early software used had its limitations and, frankly, some of the exponents went far too far. They gave photos that horrible look using Photoshop and the rest is history or so they say.
Well I am a great fan of both Photoshop and Lightroom and use them to enhance all of my photos. I take photos in RAW format which means that the image is in its raw format unprocessed by the camera.
When you set your early Kodak Brownie camera or Instamatic to take photos in Daylight you were effectively instructing the camera to process the colour balance of the image at Daylight (5,000 kelvin ish).
If you take a photo in RAW today with your camera, the change is non destructive. That means that you can change the daylight colour balance (and many of the other settings) on your computer using software.
There is a lot of software out there and I use a lot of it. But the vast majority of post processing that I do of photos I do using Lightroom and Photoshop. I probably do about 95% in Lightroom and 5% in Photoshop. Most post processing in Lightroom can be done with Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) in Photoshop but there are a few things that can only be done in Photoshop. Both Photoshop and Lightroom come as a package with Adobe Creative Cloud for a relatively small monthly payable amount.
If you take a photo using Camera Raw the image on the computer does NOT look like it does on the back of your camera. I teach you how to make small changes to make it look much better than it does on the back of your camera.
I teach you how to make changes that enhance your photo so that they look their best on screen or as a matt or gloss print, and nobody will be able to tell that you carried out small post processing changes.
I teach you how to follow my workflow which means that I spend an average of 90 seconds on preparing the photo for printing or for screen. My view is that if you can tell that Photoshop work has been done on the photo, then you have not done the job properly.
As with my photography tuition I charge £20 an hour for a minimum of two hours for one person and £30 for more than one person. I provide the tuition from my home in Sydenham, South London so that I am able to use the latest software on my large desktop computer screen. I live less than 5 minutes walk from the railway station and the Overground.
If you are interested, please send me an email at philippound@yahoo.co.uk with your contact details
I can teach you the more complicated things like replacing skies, composite images, differential sharpening, cloning, HDR etc. but I prefer to get the basics right first - making a photo look its best.
As with all post processing, the secret is to make sure that the viewer does not know that you have made changes.
Credits:
Philip Pound