Focus on Fundamentals: Recommendations for Photoshop Training

> I've been involved in photography for many years.
> I've been shooting digital, but it's time to learn
> Photoshop. Can you recommend a good training or tutoring
> program, CD, book or DVD?

That question leaves the door wide-open to plugging my own wares, but I think it would be more useful to step back and think about what you are really looking for as a serious beginner trying to learn Photoshop or even Elements.

As a beginner, you want to get to understanding what you are doing with Photoshop and get up to speed by the quickest path possible. The desire to get things done quickly and make leaps in progress is an attractive goal, and because it is what users think they want, it drives the market for learning materials that are created. That has led to an abundance of learning resources that promise to make it easy, yet a dearth of good information. Materials that want to win the reader as a friend and up painting a rosy picture, fill out the content with fluff and humor that are easy to read, trumpeting how easy it is to improve your images. Ultimately, these soft texts and programs offer very little but a handful of quick tips, a few sloppy tricks, deflated wow and the failed promise of learning it all fast.

Regretfully, you'll find that just about all of this advertising is a gimmick. Titles like "Learn Photoshop in a Day" lure in readers with a promise, reveal the 'gimmick' ("...using 24 one-hour lessons!"), and then fail to provide anything of real substance. On the other hand, titles like "Suffering for Photoshop" or "Difficult Methods for Pretty Pictures" won't tend to attract readers, and optimally the hope is that Photoshop should be easy to learn. But the whole premise of learning something as complex as Photoshop in such a small amount of time is absurd. If you are learning a lighter mood may make you comfortable in the new terrain, but what you don't need are materials that are entertaining (presentation without substance), materials that just repeat the Help menu, materials you can get for free if you poked around the internet, and materials that ultimately leave you with no sense of what to do with your images -- and fail to give you a good idea how to work with images intelligently and safely. "Just trust me" is a favored line, for example, of one well-know Photoshop author when it comes to color management suggestions, and the somewhat sour advice offered routinely causes more problems than it cures. It is quick and easy, but ultimately harmful and wrong.

From my perspective, the best place to start as a beginner is with solid fundamentals:

* An introduction to navigating the interface and setup (including some basics of color management)
* A plan for handling images once they come off the camera (proper ideas of file types, sizing, and storage)
* A background on the tools you need to work with day-to-day
* A plan for working with every image you encounter
* An idea of what you want to accomplish

This may not be the most exciting list if you need to experience learning like it is a carnival ride, but it is terribly practical and gives you a solid foundation to build on and expand from. Know where to find tools and navigate and you will have a sense of comfort. Handle images correctly and you can experiment and learn without causing your source images harm and store them safely and efficiently. Find out what tools to use every day will help you avoid those that can cause damage to your images while using those that are most efficient. Define an outline to follow and you take decided steps forward rather than ambling randomly from one technique to the next experimenting and wasting time hoping something fabulous happens during click-and-pray. Practical, refined methodology yields the best and most consistent results.

Resources for learning are numerous. Some people will learn best from books or DVDs or even online courses and tutorials. I would suggest that you take a wide approach and use a variety of resources. First, don't neglect Adobe's Help. It is a great free resource for learning about individual functions and features and how to apply them that comes with the program. Tutorials online are hit-or-miss depending on the source, and many of them contain information that is harmful to your images -- take them all with a grain of salt. You'll have to weed through them. But truth be told many of those same harmful techniques were duplicated from the all-too-common Books and DVDs that contain unfortunatate misunderstandings and misinformation, and were compiled by marketers or other opportunists who saw the huge market for Photoshop and image editing training. That is, many materials are compiled by professional trainers and professional writers rather than people with real day-to-day experience in image editing.

Online courses come in many types...from those that have lessons sent out without any ability to interact with the instructors to those that offer full access to industry experts (see betterphoto.com). Of course those range in price accordingly. The advantage of the latter is being able to actually interact with the expert teaching the course (rather than just having their picture on it) and get explanations and answers to your questions. In this day, even books and DVDs have the opportunity to offer online areas for Q&A, and very few do. I think readers should have access to authors (as I have offered for all my books since the first one), and those who don't offer that are essentially refusing to support their materials. (see my open forum for my new layers book: http://photoshopcs.com/forum)

Some disagree that you should ever need training, and that the best method for learning Photoshop is to simply get in and play. That is valiant, and if you have infinite time, this may be a viable option. If you can't afford books, DVDs or other training, then it certainly makes sense. But as the only resource of learning, unguided exploration of such a vast program is penny wise and pound foolish. Why learn about tools you won't ever need for image editing? Why waste time learning to apply features that harm your images? And how do you grow to understand the theory behind the tools by just the click-and-pray method of discovery? It will be hugely time consuming and very costly in its own right. Having been one who learned Photoshop when there were no books, and no experts, it took many times longer than it could have to get up to speed. These days there is the opportunity to ride on the experience of those who have spent time figuring out what is really important. There is something to be said of apprenticeship in learning any trade. Making an investment in formal materials should at least supplement any 'learn as the wind blows' mentality if images and image editing are important to you. I do think you will retain a lot more by jumping in and experiencing the pain of learning...but I also think base fundamentals can stop you from getting burned.

Focus on fundamentals from the outset rather than tips, tricks and 'wow' can form a net of safety for your experimentation. For example, I had a self-taught student that thought they knew a lot about Photoshop, and found out in my course that her routine for the past 3 years of image editing had been systematically ruining her images. She resized all images smaller and saved as JPEG to save space as soon as the images came off the camera, and resaved over the originals when she edited. That original source for her vacations, memories and other photography had been compromised, and potential detail permanently lost. It is not simply wasting time at that point, but obliteration of years of photographic work -- as sad as losing photos on a crashed drive, and with no options to even do it all over again. The student's predicament was a tragedy, but there was no way to reverse it...and she is not the only one. It could have been different had she learned her fundamentals first.

Puttering has its place and is very important to learning, exploring, and confidence...but it is a single avenue that can also lead to misconception and disaster. Certain practical, fundamental things are just not intuitive and learning to deal with them can save hundreds of hours of frustration, or even catastrophic loss. Whatever the source you use to get off on the right foot, exploring and experimentation is best done in concert with learning fundamentals.

I hope that helps!

Richard Lynch

The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book for CS4 was just released in mid-March ('09)! Get it on Amazon: http://aps8.com/taplbcs4.html. The book has 60 new pages of material, including a section on making manual HDR conversion the layers way. All of the exercises and materials have been reviewed and updated. That said, techniques aim at being timeless and accessible for many versions of Photoshop and Elements as well. This is a book for the serious-minded.

For those looking to learn Photoshop fundamentals, I teach a Photoshop 101 course at betterphoto.com recently updated for CS4 and Elements 7 (Photoshop 101: the Photoshop Essentials Primer). The course covers my outline of fundamentals from the bulleted list above and helps get you started enjoying and experiencing the program without the frustration and potential disasters. Betterphoto courses allow interaction with the instructor as well as other classmates.

What You’ll Use in Photoshop CS4

If you are at all interested in upgrading to the newest version of Photoshop (Photoshop for PC, Photoshop for Mac), you’ve probably read any number of articles on “What’s New in Photoshop CS4.” What you’ve gotten is a list and theoretical notions of what these features could, potentially, do for you, probably driven a bit by the seeding of the excellent Adobe marketing team. What you probably haven’t heard is a listing of what you will really use every day in CS4 if you are someone interested in correcting and adjusting photographic images. The reason you don’t is no one has time to digest the features before they rush out their articles to be first to press. Honestly, it takes about a year for me to fluidly incorporate new features in my workflow. Including a period of exposure to the CS4 beta, I’m just about getting to the saturation point as to what I really use and feel is a benefit in CS4. In some versions of Photoshop releases, my workflow honestly hardly changed at all. For Photoshop CS4, two features have become part of what I do every day and changed the way I work with images. These new features are the Adjustments Palette, and the Masks palette. Neither are, thus far, available in Elements.

I talk about each of these in context in my new book (The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book for CS4 due out in March of 2009). This blog is all about why I think these features are bound to change your process of image editing if you choose to use CS4.

The Adjustments Palette

A bitter-sweet addition to CS4 is the Adjustments palette. The sweet part about the addition is that this palette takes the place of the many dialogs that appear for adjustment layers. The benefit is that the dialogs no longer have to be closed. You can create an adjustment layer or click on any existing adjustment layer in the layers palette, and the adjustment settings appear in the Adjustments palette – immediately. As you make any change, the changes are applied to the image and committed. Previously you had to accept the changes on the dialog by clicking [ok]. If you wanted to make additional changes, you would then have to double-click on the Adjustment layer thumbnail to open the palette back up to adjust the changes. Not any more. Every time the adjustment layer is active, the palette shows the settings you have stored and that are currently applied to the image. The Adjustments palette is ultimately convenient for accessing and making changes to adjustments, and it is a feature that can save many clicks in opening and addressing what used to be dialogs. The adjustments it offers are no different than in the dialogs. It is something that works very well, but for one small factor, the bitter part of the addition.

The bitter part of the Adjustment palette is that you need to have it in view all the time if you use adjustment layers to make any adjustments to your images. You don’t really have the opportunity to store the palette away and call it back, and if you did that would defeat the purpose of the palette’s advantage. The palette needs to be visible — not just in the palette bin, but in a prominent spot on screen, or you’ll have to go hunting for it when you need to make a change. And every time you make a new Adjustment layer, you need to use it, as what is an adjustment layer without adjustment?

Regretfully when an adjustment layer is not active, the palette only displays yet another, redundant means of creating adjustment layers. In fact none of the palette itself can boast ‘new’ features and utility. So it is ultimately useful for defining adjustment layer changes, and not so useful otherwise. If you are a user like myself that already needs Layers and History and Actions and Channels and Info, and maybe Paths and Brushes and Character and Paragraph…the ‘need’ to have the new Adjustments palette in view compounds the issues you may already be having with on screen landscape. Depending on your monitor size and the way you practice editing, this landscape may be more or less precious. While I find it is a bit inconvenient to make more space on my 17” laptop, when I work on my desktop and 30” Apple Cinema Display I do not miss the landscape and appreciate the simplicity. If Adobe offered an option to use the classic dialogs, it would probably have been best for the majority of users.

As it stands, there are advantages and convenience to the presence of the Adjustments palette, though it may be in contention with other features. But as you can’t get away from it, it will necessarily, to some extent, alter the way you work. It will certainly take some getting used to.

Masks Palette

The Masks palette in Photoshop CS4 is not the obligation that the Adjustments palette is. Masks is, instead, a distinct difference in function from the way users could previously work with layer masks. Although you can still work with masks the way you did prior to CS4, the Masks palette extends layer mask functionality by offering options such as virtual adjustment. That is, you can make slider-based adjustment to masks for such things as Density, Feathering/Blur, Refine (which opens a separate dialog) and Inversion. The palette itself will indeed take up more landscape on the screen, like the Adjustments palette, but it is not quite as intrusive as Adjustments as it is a palette that can be brought into view when needed, and stored in a grouping with other palettes.

The benefit to the Masks palette is that it actually adds to the functionality offered in Photoshop. Where changes to masks directly in previous versions of the program were permanent, changes using the slider in the Masks palette are more like adjustments themselves: the positions of the sliders can be changed at any time and the result on the mask itself changed or even removed. In this way the changes are virtual, and ultimately flexible, as you are not committed to a change as you make it. The ability to adjust masks as you go can come in handy for compositing, and I have found it very useful in working with manual HDR and Depth-of-Field compositing.

If you find yourself blurring and feathering masks, and otherwise refining mask edges, you’ll find a place for the Masks palette on your screen. Once the palette is there on screen and you adopt going to the Masks palette for mask adjustment (instead of seeking out permanent alterations like Gaussian Blur), you will find the feature is a new one that you need, and don’t want to be without.

To Sum Up
The two features do bring something new to the table for Photoshop CS4, and they will certainly alter the way you work somewhat by enforcement and somewhat by choice — of that you can be assured. For me the Masks palette is a giant step forward in handling mask content, and it is a much welcome addition. However, whether it is one so important as to ‘require’ an upgrade will depend on the way you work in the program, and your need for masks or the space you have for more palettes.

Richard’s newest book, The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book for CS4, will be available in stores this month! The book adds some 80 pages of new material including a section on manually producing HDR images. Get your copy as soon as it hits the shelves by pre-ordering on Amazon: Preorder your copy now

The Psychology of Color Management and Calibration

The cliche experience that many have had is watching a family member trying to master the color on the family TV set. The people-centric medium of TV makes us to look at images where the color being off becomes unbearable and unnatural because skin tones just look wrong. We all know what skin tones should look like so we are compelled to change the screen to make the skin tones look as we expect. It's natural to trust that the color being broadcast to your TV is correct, only changing the settings on the TV can make it right. Hopeful TV color experts twiddle the controls trying to achieve a vague balance that only they can, while everyone else sits idly looking on hoping thing would be alright soon, impatient with the technology, wondering why it can't just be right in the first place -- or if adjusting it is the thing that is screwing it up.

People are more apt to assume that what they see on their computer monitor is accurate when they pull it out of the box. Monitors are not constantly replete with skin tones that remind us that something may be off, as you spend considerable time using it for other activities like checking email or word-processing, which has nothing to do with skin tones at all. When a digital photographer sees a face, it might more often be in Photoshop, where they just change the color with tools in the program offered for that type of control. Regretfully, changing the color and trusting what you see in Photoshop and on your monitor can lead to martian prints and web postings of people in your images, and a quandary: why should color that looks correct in one place be off or plain wrong in another.

The answer is Color Management.

As they say, a little knowledge can be dangerous. Knowing enough to adjust the color in Photoshop doesn't turn out to be enough to make the color right. While some will come to the conclusion that the poor results have something to do with color management, just what they need to do to work with color management is less clear. They may revert to familiar territory and seek out the computer's brightness, contrast and color controls figuring this is how they have to make adjustments fiddling like you might do with a TV. They might get close and even get lucky with this method, but generally nothing could be worse. Adjustments made with the monitor controls as a means of color management end up being a best guess at what everything should look like on screen, and a compromise much like the TV expert's attempts at balancing RGB with the primitive TV controls. Guessing is not a good approach to color.

Some may go a little further and read a few web postings that have to do with adjusting color on their monitor, and these will range from the incorrect to the absurdly simple to the horribly technical ones that you are not quite sure are written in English. Naturally, the TV-color-minded inclination that "it is just color, how complicated could it be..." pushes people more toward accepting the absurdly simple and incorrect approaches. Some may take it a step further to seek out help from an expert (who may be anyone from a well-respected authority in Photoshop or color management to a neighbor who knows "a bunch about computers"). Regretfully the better answers (like the book Real World Color Management by Fraser, Murphy and Bunting, a 500+ page book) may be long and involved and daunting from the outset. On the other hand, getting the color right doesn't require getting a college degree in the subject, and such extensive study may be unnecessary for common folk, who, after all, just want the right color.

Those who want the right color without the doctorate end up taking suggestions from friends or people on forums, or look for the 'right' way to set up their color management. Truth be told, there is not one right way: more than one method will work. In fact, any method of color management that makes sense will work...but the other side of the coin is: the same color management scheme just doesn't work for everyone, and some will work better than others. The best way to get the color right and pick an applicable color management scheme, is, in my opinion, understanding the shorthand version of what you want to achieve and applying the simplest steps possible to get there.

The basics of color management requires:

• Calibrating your monitor
• Creating an ICC profile (usually part of step 1)
• Setting up color management in Photoshop or Elements (and perhaps other programs) correctly
• Setting up previews/screen proofing that make sense (Photoshop, not Elements)
• Applying appropriate color tagging to your images

If you neglect any one of these, you are gambling with your color results, plain and simple. If you do a few and not the others, you are not necessarily any better off than doing none at all. More frustrating, if you don't do them all, things may work sometimes, and not others, and you'll never be able to tell why. But attack each of these components with the intent to know why they are important, how they apply, and how to apply them, and you'll have the skeleton of color management, which is enough to hang your color on. You get skin on your skeleton when you define the purpose of what you are trying to achieve. Do you print to the same printer all the time? Do you print to many? Do you post images to the web exclusively? Do you print and post? Do images all come from the same camera? Do you have many sources of images (multiple cameras, images from friends, clients, etc.)? All these questions filter into your color management choice.

This is not the first time I've mentioned color management in my blog, and it won't be the last. Here are some other Color Management entries:

• What Color Space Do I Use? (Part 1)
• What Color Space Do I Use (Part 2)
• Calibrating My Home Printer

These additional resources should give you some background on making better color management choices.

For more info on approaching color management seriously, I have a 4 week primer course at betterphoto.com called From Monitor to Print that will work you through these 5 essentials, and test your results, making you color competent in a short amount of time with the least amount of work. You'll want to look into good calibration tools like the ColorVision Spyder (by the way, I posted an article on 9.11.08 about using the ColorVision Spyder Express to calibrate a dual monitor system -- which the manufacturer says is impossible). You can also simplify your color life by finding a system and sticking to it (don't change printers, papers, profiles, inks, or services without a plan).

Competent color handling is more than just calibration, but don't get psyched out. Make the effort to know what to do, and you can put it safely behind you.

The Photoshop Options You Should Never Use

Amongst the plethora of screens and functions and the thousands and thousands of options that you have in Photoshop and Elements for correcting, changing and composing your images, there are some options, features and functions you should never use. It might seem inconceivable that Adobe would put options you shouldn’t use in the program, but they are there, and some of them are named to sound downright savory. These features lurk in the user interface, and users make the same mistakes over and over by using them. The features and functions that you shouldn’t use span every nook and cranny of the program, from opening your images, to correcting, through saving/printing. Users apply them again and again until they learn what these features and functions are and to avoid them because of the damage they do to their images.

The list of features is tremendously long spanning all versions of Photoshop and Elements. Instead of listing all the features, let me simplify the list by making a few generalizations:

• Don’t ever apply features just because they appear on a dialog and you feel obligated to move a slider or click a button.
  
• Don’t ever apply features that don’t improve your image or your vision for it.
  
• Don’t ever apply the features you have not experimented with enough to know how to apply with predictable results.

The crust of this biscuit is simply: don’t feel obligated to use features just because they appear on screen and in the program or ‘sound good’. What you should use are the features and functions (and buttons) that make sense, fit your workflow, and improve your images. Features that ‘make sense’ means that you know what the features do before you apply them to finish images, and not that you ‘click-and-pray’.

For example say you open the Levels dialog — which is an imperative tool for image correction. Once the dialog opens, you could click the Auto button. You could also click the White Point, Black Point and Gray balance eyedroppers and apply those — some tutorials may even suggest it. But, even if your image seems to improve on your screen, you may not be doing the image integrity any favors. The fact is that even brilliant features used incorrectly can run counter to what you really want to do for an image or even ruin it. It may be easy to go the fast way and click an Auto button, and it may produce pleasing results at a glance, but it can also compromise your images. And what is the biggest objection to applying things the right way? People want it quicker, and they will ultimately accept speed while sacrificing quality…For my images, it is unacceptable to sacrifice quality to save a few moments. It doesn’t make sense to spend lots of time to learn how to take the best pictures, lots of money to get good equipment, and toss away the quality of the images you captured because you can’t be bothered to spend time getting the corrections right.

Tools you shouldn’t use include those that might damage your images, as well as those you simply don’t know well enough to apply. That is, the list of tools you shouldn’t use is virtually different for every Photoshop user based on their level of experience and what they know. The list will change as you learn and gain experience with the program.

Regretfully learning the tools takes time. However, you can use your time learning more efficiently and cut time from experimentation and exploration. The first thing to do: make a short list of tools you know you should explore. Just start listing those you think you should know better. Don’t list more than 30. Make them tools that you think are important (you may find out otherwise). Next set aside a time — 15 or 20 minutes a day — to explore those features/functions. Plan to explore just one tool a day for as many days as there are tools on the list. To begin your exploration, learn the basics of any feature using the Help materials provided by Adobe. The information there will tell you the way the function was designed to perform and how to apply it. This is a useful starting point: you’ll find out how a feature is applied. Help will tell you little or nothing about the best way to use a feature. Reading up shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.

Next try applying the feature/function on an image according to the instructions to see how it behaves in practice. Try to give it a workout using all the possibilities you can think of. Apply it to several different images. Spend between 10 and 15 minutes ‘playing’ with the tool. That should serve as your introduction, and you will probably learn a few things you didn’t know before. However, you’ve probably learned just enough to be dangerous…you may be able to apply the tool, but that may not tell you what it really does and why it works, and that can affect how you use it productively.

To learn proven techniques for the best way to apply features, may take a lot more effort, and sometimes weeks, months or even years of study, depending on the complexity of what you are trying to accomplish. It is the kind of time that not everyone can dedicate to learning. Sampling tutorials found on the web may be helpful, but choosing the right tutorials can be tricky and may not be cohesive with a holistic approach to image editing. Some tutorials may actually contradict one another, and it will be hard to sort the good tutorials from the bad, and the harmful. Beware of tricks and tips that you can’t get to work on images other than those used in the tutorial. Even some books that promise quick results or that are a series of effects may never do much to improve your process with image editing. A scattered approach that does not rely on solid process may prove more confusing than helpful. Many tutorials may be well-meaning, written by people who are excited about sharing their new-found successes. However, good intent doesn’t make for a good tutorial — and it may be that what you apply can harm your images…and it may be difficult to tell the difference.

Consulting books and courses by experts in the field, designed to get you up to speed, can save you time and effort. An expert’s years of experience can go to work for you by helping you steer toward the best features and how to use them — saving time in exploring the program. Just as you would invest in your camera or additional equipment like lenses, invest in yourself to gain the skills you need to make the best images…don’t expect the equipment or the program to do-it-for-you (you may want to read my blog about “magic tools”).

So, do yourself a favor and start a list of tools you shouldn’t use today, before you damage another image. Stop oogling at tools that sound like the solution to all your problems, and learn about yourself and what you really need to know. Focus on those that you know and that you can use productively to make your images better. I’d be glad to hear which tools are on your lists, and happy to help you answer your questions about them!

PS — There have been some changes and updates on the hiddenelements.com and photoshopcs.com layers websites that you may want to check out…with more to come. I added some elements 6 materials to hiddenelements.com and a switch to php page building so the site will be easier for me to maintain. I also added some materials to fill out the ‘under construction’ pages on the photoshopcs.com site. I look forward to hearing from visitors about the changes.

What Makes a Good Photo?

A topic that comes up again and again in my classes and presentations in one form or another is "What makes a good photo?" There is no simple answer.

However, there are pure, simple facts of what comprises good photography. Good photography takes into account many things: lighting/shadow, composition, exposure, subject, story, color, contrasts, sharpness, depth of field, and more -- often intangible -- things. A good photo is one with great orchestration of the facets of photography, that ends in a pleasing image. Likely there is a little bit of luck tossed into our salad of preparation, positioning and equipment.

There are no bonus points for dangling from helicopters except in that it may offer the right perspective. A great moment, whether captured of a penned animal or one in the wild, is still a great shot. Whether they look while standing knee deep in mud or sitting in a plush armchair, the final image is what the viewer sees...no less or more because of the subject or how it was captured. Passion for a subject should be evident in the photography of it.

There is no one philosophy that will capture a great image, but any great image will encompass all these things. I think the ideals are reinforced by the perceptions of Ansel Adams, and I have collected a few of his attributed comments here:

Mr. Adams on a good photograph:

• A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
  
• A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
  
• A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
  

On the rules for making a good photograph:

• There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
  

On luck in making photos:

• Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.
  

On perspective of observing photos:

• A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.
  
• There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
  

On how to take an image:

• To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.
  

On photography and the creative spirit:

• No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.
  

To me, wherever there are opportunities, I am glad to share the joy of photography, at whatever level...photographs need not be marred by griping discussion for what an image could have been, if only...Shots can be satisfactory as an amateur or professional, and only your own expectations of what is good will change. Images can be explored in greater depth and improved in image processing to bring out more -- as Adams often did himself as an artisan in the wet darkroom, which today we can all explore without chemicals using Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

As you explore your photography on whatever level, and as your skills develop, enjoy it for what it is. Enjoy a sense of accomplishment in how you improve or improve your images, and your skills. Resist the urge to be overly critical and poison the water that keeps your interest in images and photography growing.

A good photo is always the one you are about to take, and it can be better for what you learned from the experience you gain as you shoot.

---

Improve your photography with post-processing using Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Richard's Photoshop Courses can help you get more out of your images and your investment in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

The Joy of Making Mistakes

The Brief Anatomy of a Mistake
It seems to be human nature to be dismayed at having made mistakes. Botching a capture in a fleeting moment is a missed opportunity, and certainly we are right to be a little mad at ourselves for not being properly prepared. Ruining a print because you set up a file incorrectly is costly, but curable.

While it may be disappointing not to make the perfect image, no one ever learned a thing by being perfect. The reality is: every mistake is an opportunity...an opportunity to learn and to enhance your skills. In fact, it could almost be argued that if you don’t make mistakes, you’ll never learn, expand your horizons, and improve.

All mistakes aren't good (for example, dropping your digital camera in the ocean while out at sea), but all come with a lesson. There are mistakes you will be able to learn more and less from. There are times when the risk of mistakes will ‘cost’ more. The best mistakes are those that come with the least dreadful impact.

Looked at in the right way, the opportunity created by making a mistake is potential for learning and the true joy of pure accomplishment.

What to Do When You Make a Mistake
When you make a mistake -- whatever it is -- it isn't time to sit back and lament; it is time to sit up and take notice. It may also be a moment to congratulate yourself for trying new things and not being afraid of confronting what you don't already know.

When a mistake happens:

1. Acknowledge that something went wrong, and don’t assume it is a reflection on you (or anyone around you).
   
2. Study the consequences and understand why things went wrong.
   
3. Plan a counter action or means of avoiding the same mistake in the future.

The first is both the easiest and hardest of these steps. People like to blame themselves or someone else and distract from the sense that something merely happened. Forgo the blame as there’s nothing positive there. The next two steps are where it counts. Look at the event and what went wrong, research or ask questions about the things you don’t understand, and make a plan for avoiding the same thing happening again. You can write down your answers, and keep a notebook to keep track if it helps. All you want to do is plan to avoid making that same mistake again. The plans can be trivial or complex.

Often you’ll be tempted to lean on the advice of others that they gained from experience, and that can be a good thing by helping you avoid making terrible blunders. As long as you digest the suggestions and lessons it helps; it helps less so if you take anyone’s word for granted. Practice what you read in tutorials, lessons and books before you assume you really understand it. And when you practice allow yourself to explore at the fringes where things might just go wrong and that’s where you’ll learn.

Summarizing Mistakes?
Mistakes can come in shooting, in choosing a lens, in working with or against the light, in shooting too few frames, choosing the wrong exposure. You'll see them in bad choices for tools you use in Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements). Don’t be afraid of making the mistakes, of posting them to your gallery, of showing them to people who might help let you know what went wrong or offer opinions. That is research. Opinions will vary as will solutions, and your preferences and techniques for avoiding the mistakes will expand as your experience grows. As your list of mistakes grows it is something you can wear like a scarf or badge of courage and show off in the experience you've gained. Mistakes accumulate with hard work, and experience. You make more of them as you challenge yourself with new styles, ideas and techniques. The more of them you make, the better they will make your images.

If your goal is to be a better photographer, don’t make mistakes, revel in them.

Making a Holiday Card

With the holidays approaching it is still not too late to take on a project and do your own holiday card. All you really need is an image for the cover, some paper to print on (or a service to send to), Photoshop (or Elements), and a plan for the layout. The plan mostly has to do with printing to the edge, and getting the image on the front of the card.

Printing to the Edge
A layout problem that may confound those making their first cards is printing to the edge of the paper. Though some home printers have a print-to-the-edge feature, there is an edge area of the sheets you are printing that the printer will not print on -- commonly called a grip edge. It is often a quarter to a half an inch broad, and may vary from edge to edge depending on how paper was designed to go through the printer. The solutions to the problem of printing to the edge (and this holds for when you send a job to a shop to have it printed), is to design a little larger and then and crop the paper to the size you want the finished piece. So, for your holiday card, you wouldn’t start with paper that was exactly the right size and then use your printer to print the image exactly to the edge; you’d start with a larger sheet, print the layout, and then trim the paper down. To make your layout work, you'd lay out the graphic part of the card to print a bit beyond the crop edge—say, by an eighth of an inch (which is a printing standard). This is known as a bleed. The bleed provides a margin of error for the cropping. If the cut doesn’t fall precisely on the crop mark, the image will still come all the way to the edge of the cropped area.

The Basic Layout

Image on the Front
In laying out the card, be sure to think of how you want it to present! When you use a folded card, you have to put the front of the card on the right side of the layout so that when it folds the front of the card is in the right place. It may not be natural to think of the right side of the layout as the front, but that is where it is! The back of the card is on the left.

Outside

On the inside, the left and right facing sides are more intuitive. You usually want to have the saying on the right.

Inside

As far as the back of the card, you can put several things there for information purposes. Sometimes it is fun to put in your real or even an imaginary business name, copyright and date, website (if appropriate), and maybe some information about the photo (subject, title, separate copyright -- if applicable). Usually this is all in small type so as not to detract from the card. Homemade cards seem to always be the ones that stand out from the others.

For More Information...
For better ways to process your images and get the most out of them for your cards and other uses, be sure to check out Richard Lynch's Photoshop courses and his latest book: The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book

Holiday Gift Ideas
If you are looking for a good gift for that budding photographer or photoshop professional, try giving a betterphoto.com gift card. Good for courses, books and apparel!