Ps & Lr

[Bill Pierce]

Face it, although there are a lot of “digital darkroom” programs, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom still dominate the field. They’ve been around a long time, and, even the photographers and technicians I know who feel these programs have certain shortcomings keep them on their computers. In my own case, I began using other programs to process Fuji raw files and, although Adobe has over time greatly improved their handling of Fuji files, I still feel I’m getting better results from programs like Iridient Developer and PhotoNinja. But once the raw file conversion is over and I’m printing or preparing files for the web, I’m back into Lightroom for the basics and Photoshop for a few tricks.

I wish there was extensive instructional material on using Iridient and PhotoNinja, but there isn’t. And so my bedtime reading concentrates of Lightroom and Photoshop. Adobe provides a great deal of that, but I have a few other sites. Can anybody else add to the list?

https://www.youtube.com/user/AdobeLightroom
https://www.youtube.com/user/Photoshop
https://www.youtube.com/user/PhlearnLLC
https://www.youtube.com/user/PhotoGavin/

 

[Dogman]

Honestly, i've been going the the other direction--less and less post processing and more and more procedural simplification. I was never big into the post processing thing anyway. I only recently started using Lightroom 6 and I've only delved into the most basic procedures. Although I've shot everything in Raw since I started using digital cameras, I've started moving exclusively to JPEGs and giving them just a minor touchup in LR. JPEG files are a lot better today than they were when I bought my first digital camera. For my purpose, which is making inkjet prints up to 13x19 on matte watercolor paper, this is certainly adequate and saves time.

And, yes, the 400% enlarging pixel peepers would surely be able to point out a plethora of IQ faults in my pictures.

 

[peterm1]

It is hard to get much information on software other than the Adobe products. My preferred PP software is and has been for a long time Corel Paintshop Pro (in its later variants) which rival Photoshop for power but I find simpler to use (and many times cheaper to buy). But its near impossible to get much info on the web about how to use it. Not helped by the fact that many of its tools perform similarly to the PS ones but are differently named and have slightly different procedures to operate. Never the less by reading PS tutorials then using trial and error I was able to make the transition and now find it does what I want. Much of the time that I have been most successful in finding tutorials it has been by using specific search terms like "layer masks" or "converting to black and white" etc rather than general search terms like "Photoshop tutorials".

Several years ago I happened on a site providing free download of various technical books. They seemed legit and finding that they had lots of ebooks in PDF format on Photoshop, Lightroom etc I downloaded some of these and found them to be a very useful way of getting detailed and accurate info at a level beyond what most online tutorials provide. You might check for such sites. Here is one list of sites.... http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/20-best-websites-to-download-free-e-books/

I suspect I used the first site listed (free book spot) but the link appears to be broken so maybe it was dodgy and has been taken down.

Recently I added Lightroom to the mix mainly because its useful to convert RAW files but by no means is it flexible enough to use for my kind of PP. I put quite a bit of effort into this stage of image production. For this I run under Lightroom, the Nik suite of products which I find to be simple, intuitive and superb (Lightroom allows you to export and edit images in an external program then re-import them to LR to finish the process). Nik plugins are even more superb now that Google has abandoned support and made them available free online. I HIGHLY recommend them.