The Kitchen: Part 2

Thanks for checking out my blog “Raw & Unedited”/by KLMoore for Part 2 of my opening series on what’s in my kitchen.  In Part 1, we looked at some of the tools that I work with and now in Part 2 we’ll look at the two main programs I use or my ovens where everything gets cooked up.  Those would be Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom4. 

I started using Photoshop about 10-12 years ago.  It wasn’t until about a year ago that I really started, I mean really started, using Photoshop to a larger degree.  I knew how to do a little retouching of photographs, but nothing like I do today.  Today, I use Photoshop to create my composites and as a tool to fine-tune, manipulate, and apply the finishing touches to my images.  Am I proficient in Photoshop?  Not by a long shot and I work hard to learn new things all the time.

This is one my recent posters using some of the composite techniques that I've just recently started to learn.

Dacula Poster With Logos

At first, Photoshop seemed to be an overwhelming program to learn and use.  One of the first things I did was to purchase a Photoshop “how-to” book that had articles on retouching, color correction, and other topics that were pertinent to what I wanted to learn.  This book was fantastic because it gave me step-by-step instructions with pictures (I’m a visual person) to show exactly how to do a specific task.  As long as I could follow instructions, then I could learn a few of the techniques.  I didn’t really understand much of the “why” it worked the way it did, but I could get the results I needed.  As a result of the book, I was just starting to scratch the surface of what Photoshop could do and I could get by with a few of the basic things.

What happened next was what really helped me become a little more proficient.  I joined the National Association of Photoshop Professionals.  I spent a lot of time pouring through the site to pull out information that I wanted and that’s when I finally started to learn why things worked the way they did.

This is from a Senior shoot that I did where I first processed the image in LR, then took it into PS to add the composites of him playing basketball, plus a couple of other touches and then back into LR for final processing.

It was through the NAPP that I became acquainted more with Lightroom.  Like my tablet, this is the one piece of software that I couldn’t do without.  Everything I do starts here.  It started with Lightroom3 because I kept hearing from other photographers that they used it.  So I decided if they did, then I needed to look into it if I was going to be serious about photography.  As with anything new, I started with learning and understanding the basics of LR3.  Through constant reading, experimenting, and learning, I have learned more and more each day.  When LR4 came out recently, I listened to what the upgrades presented and decided to upgrade.  I love LR for the flexibility it affords me in manipulating images.  It is such a powerful program that I work on all of my scenic images and baseball images here without the need to do anything in Photoshop.  Even with my portraits, I will do about 80-90% in LR and then pull them into Photoshop for whatever final touchups or adjustments are needed. 

This is an example of one of my favorite images from one of my favorite trips with my wife that was all done in LR.

In fact, I am such a huge fan of Lightroom that it was one of the presents I gave my wife for her birthday this past month and I am excited for what she’ll be able to do with it in her photography.  Most of my favorite art images were processed totally in LR and I’m always experimenting with what else I can do.  Also, most of what I’ll be talking about in some of the blogs in the future (like my double-baked potatoes) will be dependent on LR.  Am I proficient in LR?  Nope, but I’m learning.

Part 3 is coming next and that section will include some of the lessons that I’ve learned along the way.