It’s probably been a good two decades that I’ve been using Photoshop and other photo editing software on my computer and just this week I’ve learned exactly what it can do! It’s amazing!! I always considered myself more of a designer and always tried to steer clear of any photography related work, I left that to the photography professionals. For years I’ve been using Photoshop for adding and removing things from images, cropping, cloning or maybe an occasional basic filter, mainly edit the photo’s just enough to look good on whatever I’m actually designing.
Most of you know that I just recently got married and about a week ago I received my photos from the wedding, although they’re very beautiful and the photographer did a great job there were a few little tweaks that I wanted made to some of them. I knew I had all of the software to do what I wanted to do but had no idea how to do it so I did a few little searches on Google and low and behold there were a hundred different tutorials on doing exactly what I wanted. As I started playing around with what these “experts” were telling me I just kept finding myself being drawn in deeper and deeper until the next thing I knew two hours had passed, my baby was waking up and I didn’t accomplish any of my other chores!
I’ve been using masks within Photoshop for a little while now but knew there had to be more to them and now I think I’ve fallen in love. I had never used Adjustment Layers either and really had no idea what they were even for, now I love those too! I’d finish one picture and then I would quickly search for another picture that I thought could use a little more TLC. I was beginning to feel like an awesome photographer by the time I was done but sadly it had nothing to do with me using my camera and taking a quality picture. Although the couple of pics that I wanted to edit looked amazing by the time I was done I was also a little saddened thinking that there could be some people out there that call themselves photographers but all they really do is edit them on a computer, Ansel Adams may be rolling in his grave watching laymen like me calling themselves photographers because they have an SLR and photo editing software. Either way, I won’t be promoting myself as a photographer but I will be playing around with Photoshop a little more in my spare time, Adobe sure is brilliant 🙂 Here’s an example of my handy work, can’t wait to see what else I can do!
Melissa Nagy Designs 