I love doing these workshops on Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, because I get to learn a lot from Photographers participating in these sessions. Many times, Professional Photographers also join these workshops who are doing brilliant work in their area of expertise and have varied post-processing or photo management challenges. This weekend I lead another Photoshop Workshop, where we discussed about basics of Post-processing in Adobe Photoshop.
This time workshop happened at Delhi Photography Club, Shahpurjat, Delhi. Idea was to learn about basic adjustments like Lens Correction, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Clarity, Saturaion, Layers, Layer masks, Selection tools, ways to refine edges of selected object etc. Basically to understand what these basic tools do and then use them to achieve desirable result.
Focus of these workshops is to clearly understand the power these softwares provide us and then decide what we want to do with a particular photograph. Many times, there is huge confusion about right way of using different tools. So the simple answer is to know what you want to achieve and then decide which tools make sense to achieve it. Without a clear goal, it's difficult to answer the question.
I also wonder why lot of folks post tutorials with some standard values for different tools. E.g. - A tutorial would say, increase clarity by 10 points. Now what does it mean? Why it would work for all the photographs? If it works for someone, is it a good idea to blindly apply it on all kinds of photographs.
Essentially smart post-processing needs to fundamental things -
1. Pre-visualize what you want to achieve in a photograph.
2. Being aware that how a particular result can be achieved - which tools to use. More than which tools, the important part is right mix of tools.
This Photoshop Workshop had some brilliant set of Photographers of different age groups. There was one kid from Modern School and what a sharp learner he was. We talked about Histogram and how it's important while clicking or post-processing a photograph. Throughout the workshop he could think in terms of Histogram and how it changes when using different tools. At the end of the workshop, he could clearly differentiate Exposure, Highlights and Whites. And explanation included how these controls change histogram of an image.
While doing these workshops on Adobe Photoshop, I realize that 90% of the folks just need Lightroom. Because they have always heard of Photoshop, they tend to learn it. But more value in terms of money and time lies in Lightroom for most of the folks, who just want to enhance the photographs and not manipulate them.
Do feel free to connect back through comments if you need more details about Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
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