Ornament Moose wrote:
> It's this idea that PS is somehow just a more powerful, but mysterious and
> dangerous, step up from LR that leads to a
> lot on confusion and frustration. They use fundamentally different paradigms
> to approach image editing. Anyone
> approaching PS as though it's just LR on steroids is likely to be frustrated
> and miss out on the breadth of capabilities.
EXACTLY!
And this is precisely why I think you're hopelessly stuck in the old,
obsolete paradigm. The thinking or approach of singular, stand-alone
images with just some simple means of image organization (directories,
by date or subject) is the old buggy-whip paradigm of image management
and editing. PS is an awesome tool for a single image or composite. As
a tool for handling a multi-image project, it is hopeless and
completely pudgy. It's no different than a house. A house has a
bedroom which is FANTASTIC for sleeping, a kitchen which is FANTASTIC
for cooking, a bathroom which is FANTASTIC for reading and catching up
on facebook, and closets for storage of clothes so they don't hung on
the exercise bike or treadmill. PS is like that kitchen, which is
where you want to do all your cooking and culinary artistry, but it's
not the right place for sleeping, pooping and hanging clothes up.
People, and I think Moose is somewhat guilty, try to use PS for things
which it is very poorly designed.
However, and here is why it DOES work for Moose. If you are very
limited in how much you shoot, or aren't putting together a set of
images that all have to match, or have some fantastic mechanism for
sorting, grading, and managing that body of work, then PS will work
for you. But it's a tool which is very poorly adapted to anything
other than being a really good set of kitchen knives. People like
Moose succeed because of the years and years of experience as well as
the ability to "engineer" solutions to various editing problems.
The very soup to nuts aspect of Lightroom is a complete game-changer.
I saw that the very moment I trialed that beta release and got hooked
immediately. Import the images from whatever sources, sort, grade,
select, edit, output. It's all right there. It's only a very rare
image or project that requires me to deep dive into PS to accomplish
something. (like putting my face in the window of an old boat). But
THAT is not image management, it's image editing.
Image management vs. image editing.
I enjoy having the ability to go to a spot on a map and pull up every
picture taken there, regardless of when. (My catalogs are currently
split into years, so I'm limited to single year queries). I enjoy
having the ability to pull up every image taken of a subject (provided
I keyworded it correctly). I enjoy having that ability to create
independent versions of a given image with completely different edits
for completely different purposes--all non-destructive, and taking up
minimal space, unlike PS files that have 25 different layers on them.
And the ability to output to jpeg for sharing or to the printer with
significant automatic color management, for one or more images.
PS is a clutz environment for anything other than cooking. You can't
easily work two or more images simultaneously. You can't easily
COMPARE two or more images simultaneously. Etc. Etc. To do ANYTHING
other than cooking, you need some form of image management method. It
might be as simple as hard-drive directory structure, or Adobe Bridge,
or some other equivalent open-source nightmare.
The fact that Moose is successful using PS probably should be
considered a one-off thing. There are a handful of people who choose
not to update their own paradigm and will ride out the PS thing until
they croak. But it's certainly not a paradigm that I would push
anybody to who has yet to adopt one.
PS is a awesome program and gives you the absolute best set of kitchen
knives there are. But sometimes you just want to sit on the sofa and
enjoy a glass of wine. PS will positively drive you batty if you try
to use it for anything other than cooking.
AG Schnozz
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|