Photoshop staples, or "Yes, it is overwhelming."

This photo has nothing to do with the post, but hey! it's pretty and this is possibly the most schizophrenic post I've done, so why not?

First, the intro that I wrote before becoming overwhelmed and deciding that I needed to watch a movie instead of tackling the impossible...

So, let's take a hypothetical reader who just installed Photoshop on his computer—we'll call him "Mark." (You see, readers. This is what happens when you leave comments. I might actually do a tutorial with you in mind.) Photoshop can be overwhelming. Too many menus and functions. You can buy a book, and probably should, but choose wisely. Some books try to be all things to all people and end up jumping from stylized typography to drawing tools to curves until you just give up. I've always been puzzled by the tutorials in most Photoshop books. "Let's cut out this clown's head, paste it in the middle of a desert, make flames come out of its mouth, add some text with cool 3D effects and drop shadows, and turn it into a web page!" OK, I made that up. But only because I don't have one of those books on hand. Next time you're in a bookstore, flip through a few and you'll see what I mean. Ask yourself if you would ever do any of those projects. Yes, they're supposed to teach principles, but why not teach them in more of a real-world scenario? For me, "real world" means photography, so I prefer books that focus on photography such as Martin Evening's weighty tomes. They're not exactly curl-up-by-the-fire reading (unless you're the type of person that reads encyclopedias for fun), but they are a great reference tool.

I still stand by my reading suggestions (in whatever edition is the most current), but for more immediate satisfaction, I will identify 3 staples of my own real-world Photoshop use. If my "starters" tutorials are little recipes, this is a look into the pantry.

Lasciate ogni speranza...
And now, here's the part where I interrupt myself and explain why it is indeed overwhelming after all.

I thought I was going to boil it all down to 3 elements. If I had they would have been:

1. Layers
It always starts with command-J (or Ctrl-J for PC), which duplicates your background layer. I know it sounds extremely basic, but when I first started doing Photoshop, I would often forget which layer I was working on. Had I actually continued the course of this post, I would have explained the difference between making changes to duplicate layers v. making changes to adjustment layers, and by about 1 a.m. I would have just told everyone to buy the book Layers.

2. Curves
I use curves more than anything. My "adjusting tone and color tutorial" shows a technique that need not be limited to photos of happily engaged people sitting in dead grass. If you experiment with the individual color channels and with the "all channels" s-curve (see step 8 of the same tutorial), you will be working on a technique I use in most photos. When I attended an Amy Dresser webinar, I saw her lasso highly-feathered selections dozens of times just to make subtle curves adjustments to each.

3. Masks
If you can't selectively apply adjustments, there's really no point in doing Photoshop. Quick masks are a good place to start because it is a very intuitive technique.

Had I really gone into detail with each of the above, I would have an endless post, so, yes, it is overwhelming. I still think the layers, curves, masks thing is important, but my desire to show "real-world" retouching has led me to conclude that I should start sharing start-to-finish retouching that isn't based on one tutorial. Nothing could be more honest than to walk you through my actual process. And so, I'm adding a new feature to take-out photo: the real-life retouch. Once every couple of weeks I will show the steps I take from RAW to retouched. Sometimes I do very few adjustments, sometimes I do dozens. I'm not promising an Amy Dresser webinar or anything, but I like the idea of de-mystifying the process and I'm guessing that it will lead to more specific "starters" tutorials as well. It may turn out to be underwhelming, but sometimes underwhelming is exactly what we need.

Refine: le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

A quote usually attributed to Voltaire (which he attributes to "a wise Italian")—Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien—has always disturbed the perfectionist in me. A few of the English translations are:

• Better is the enemy of good
• Better is the enemy of good enough
• The perfect is the enemy of the good

When I was living with my dad and his artist friend in France, I heard them throw the phrase around, often in reference to her work in ceramics. If you've ever worked at a potter's wheel, you know how quickly a perfect vase can suddenly turn into a muddy heap just because you thought you could make it a little thinner, a little taller. In that context, "better" destroys "good." In other contexts, the enemy line is not so clear. In fact, I often have trouble deciding which side I'm on. Why should I fight for good when I can be a martyr for better? Besides, if I learned anything from watching Six Million Dollar Man episodes as a child it is that "better, stronger, faster" is always right.

In Voltaire's moral tale, La Bégueule, a foolish woman who likes pretty, shiny things learns the perils of always trying to trade up. Improving talents, knowledge, and moral character is always desirable, notes Voltaire, but the rest can lead to a life of illusion. In Photoshop, where, let's face it, we are often creating illusion, the quest for pretty, shiny pictures can quickly go too far. I won't moralize, but I will say a few words about refinement in retouching.

In my dodge and burn tutorial, I try to show how very subtle skin retouching is always better fake, plastic-looking skin. The shortcut skin smoothing methods are useful as well, but the problem is that when you see Barbie-doll skin, it can be hard to dial things back down to "good enough." For example, I have seen a lot of people do something like this...

when this is plenty good enough:
Self-restraint is hard when you have just learned how to make people look perfect. I look back in horror at some of the work I did in my first year or two of retouching. But since then, I have developed a rule:

Do the correction and then dial it down.

It's the Photoshop equivalent of Coco Chanel's advice, "When accessorizing, always take off the last thing you put on." How do you edit accessories in Photoshop?

1. Do your adjustments on separate layers
2. When you're happy with an adjustment layer, go to the "opacity" box in the layers palette and lower it from 100 to 80 or below. Look at step 3 of my "fix dark photos" tutorial and you'll see what I mean.

That's it. That's probably my top rule of refining photos. I always do it. The only possible exception to the rule is when you are looking for an extremely stylized effect. Otherwise, always turn it down. This applies to just about everything:

• sharpening
• contrast
• saturation
• etc.

One of my pet peeves with tutorials is that they almost always encourage excess just to make sure you can see the before/after difference. In my dodge and burn tutorial, I was worried that people wouldn't even notice the before/after difference, but I didn't exaggerate the "after" because I wanted to reinforce my preference for moderation and at least a modicum of verisimilitude.

It's OK to fight for good even though better might be brighter, sharper, more colorful, and more dramatic. Trust me, your photos will end up looking more refined.

September Monthly Special: Revise, Reshoot, Refine

Original, snapped hastily in a rare moment without people sitting in them.

Revised: straightened, cropped, decided that the background was too static, added motion blur, punched up the color a bit, and voilà!

It's back-to-school time and since I am teaching four classes this semester—each of them with at least three writing assignments to grade— I know I will be pestering my students to spend more time revising their work. When choosing a theme for this month, I thought about three "Rs" of my photo taking process from my most recent trip to Paris: Revise, Reshoot, Refine.

I can't help but make comparisons between writing and photography (hey, etymologically, it means "light writing"after all). Here's what I wrote (and yes, it feels weird to be quoting myself) for some bio interview questions sent to me by Wild Apple (the company I recently signed with):

Probably because of my background in literature (PhD in French Literature), I think of photographic technique as a form of research and writing. I start with an idea, a concept, a sort of thesis. Just as I would use keywords to search a library database, I take my ideas out into the city and use them to create order out of all those possibilities. As a scholar, I have spent untold hours in the libraries of Paris pouring over old books and manuscripts, searching for the details that can take on new relevance and interest through my writing. As a photographer, I explore Paris as if it were a library filled with books—some of them well-read classics (the Eiffel Tower, the view from Notre Dame), and others, the overlooked stories waiting to be discovered. I am inspired by Victor Hugo’s assertion that when you know how to see, you can see the face of a king in a door knocker. In other words, the city itself has a language that the careful observer can learn to read. Of course, reading is not the only step. I also spend a lot of time revising/reshooting, editing, and refining. With Photoshop, I can literally cast my ideas in a different light again and again until I find the presentation best suited to the message.

So rather than focus on the more traditional concept of "composition," I want to think about the photographic print itself as a composition. In the selection and editing process, there is a moment when you decide "this is the version I'm going to print." How does that happen? How can we improve? What if we took a "finished" work and completely rewrote it?

My high school English teacher always told us that you never finish a composition, you abandon it. Kind of a negative way of looking at things, but that's exactly how my perfectionist tendencies speak to me:

perfectionist tendencies: You're going to turn that in? Really?

me: Um. yes. Why?

pt: It's just that, well, hmm. Oh it's probably nothing.

me: What's nothing?

pt: I'd probably make it more, you know—polished. But that's just me. Go ahead. Turn it in if you're happy with it. I'm sure it's very, uh, comment dirais-je?—adequate.

My perfectionist tendencies are a passive aggressive pain in the butt and naturally, they speak French. They love to say "impossible n'est pas français!" to which I reply, "Impossible is not French? Go into any store, ask for customer service. It's their favorite word."

But I digress...

My point is that shooting and editing photos is not unlike researching and writing a paper. Personally, I think it's a lot more fun, but it still requires work and attention to detail.

This month, as I sort through the 3000+ I took in Paris, I will be making a lot of editing decisions. Those decisions often involve revising my initial composition (i.e. cropping), and they always include refinements (or retouching) including color correction, noise reduction, and sharpening to creative choices. Sometimes, an almost-good-enough photo inspires me to go back and reshoot (which, for Paris, will have to wait until spring). For most of the month, I will focus on the many editing choices that go into a version of a photo that is worth the price of the print.

Note: I've decided to stop using "Mister Linky," but I still want you to participate by putting links in the comments. I'm looking at using a different tool based on a suggestion, but haven't had time to do it yet.