Photoshop Techniques

I haven't been doing much actual shooting lately. Most of my "photography" has been concentrated on editing pictures (finally starting to catch up) and plan where I want my photography to go: including what, how and with what I will shoot; what I will do about my current website, including what is on it, how it is laid out, and if I will stay with google or get my own website; and what I want to do with this blog.

For now, my clearest plan is for the latter - my blog. I want the majority of this blog to be about photo editing with Photoshop CS2. I will discuss editing with specifics - beginning with a photo that I took straight out of the camera (either a .jpg or .nef (RAW) file), and all the steps taken to get it to how I wanted it to look. My hope is that by using carefully selected specific images, I will be able to cover a number of editing techniques and situations.

I have learned much about photo editing from others via the internet, and I want to create a resource for others to learn photo editing.

I will not get into any technical specifics in this post, but I will say how I will begin.

I do all of my editing as layers in Photoshop, and while I do use a number of editing techniques with layers, I have five layers that I use most frequently, and so I add these five layers with an action to every image.

My next post will discuss which layers I use, why, how I create them, which blending mode I use, and how I add them (quickly, too!) using actions in Photoshop. Stay tuned in the next day or two for more.

If you haven't in a while, please check out my photos. I update them regularly - usually several times a week. http://www.picasaweb.google.com/mgreerphoto

Matt Greer