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The Score and the Performance - part 1 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

Published 01/08/2010

Even now after spending over six years producing my prints digitally I am often bewildered by the way in which people complicate the matter. Photoshop as a tool is wonderful and it is often best to bear in mind that hardly anybody (if anybody) know how to use all the controls within it and more importantly why! I still recall the first time I sat down and tried to get to grips with all the menus' dialogue boxes and tools and making a complete hash of the image on the screen. I also remember a point were I was no longer looking at the image I was working on, but staring at the controls because I was just trying to make sense of it all.

This spooked me. I felt like some geek sliding into the dark side! Oh no I was becoming a techy and the artistic photographer in me was dying. More importantly I was not really enjoying what I was doing. This brought me right down to earth and I shook myself up and reminded myself that the image is what it is all about and not the process getting there. I fully understand that when we embark on a new learning curve we will take time to understand how the master the new tools and methods but what Photoshop was doing to me, and from what I have seen, does to a lot of people is to take over and become the focus of the activity. I was only interested in doing what I had always done to produce an image that delivered a visual statement of what I experienced when I was stood there in the landscape.

All I wanted to achieve was what I did in the dark room without any of the distractions of buttons and menus. Don't get me wrong, all of the buttons, commands and menus had perfectly useful functions but not for me and I have never been impressed by anybody who knows how to do things in Photoshop in 10 different ways. WHY?

So what did I do in the dark room, then? I used to darken parts of the image and I used to lighten parts of the image. I would maybe straighten a horizon, retouch dust particles or raise and lower contrast. More importantly I used to enjoy it. I enjoyed watching the image being created and the moment being re-born which is essential to making a good photograph. I returned to the keyboard, mouse and monitor and set myself a challenge. To learn and utilise only the functions and tools that would give me the control I needed and nothing more. If in the future I came across a problem that Photoshop could help me with then I would surely learn a new skill, but the greatest problem people have with Photoshop is trying to learn it all at once.

In the dark room I used pieces of card with holes cut out which would let light through from the enlarger which would darken that part of the image that was allowed to be exposed. Conversely I have narrow strips of wire with small pieces of card glued to them in different shapes. When I held these below the enlarger light they would create small areas of shadow on the photographic paper and therefore render that part of the image lighter. If you held either of these closer to the enlarger lens you would create a greater penumbra and so have a softer edge to your image adjustments. The opposite would be holding your piece of card closer the base-board of the enlarger creating a narrower penumbra or harder edge to you image adjustment.

This is known as the wonderful process of 'dodging and burning'. To raise and lower contrast I would introduce or reduce magenta as required in the enlargers' beam of light. Another habit I transferred from the darkroom was breaking up the image into 'working zones'. By this I am not referring to the Zone System, but a means of grasping what individual areas of the image need working on without just diving in and seeing what comes out the other end. For this image of Glen Coe there are four clear working zones. The sky, the sunlit mountain flanks, the loch and the reed bed in the foreground. During the printing process I may indeed make small selections within the 'working zones' but what defines these are natural breaks on the tonal range of the image and if I bear this in mind I can essentially segment my workflow.



Now that I knew what I wanted to emulate in Photoshop I began to explore the controls available to me and began a journey of simplifying things. After some time I immerged triumphant with my new slim-line tool-kit that consists of the lasso tool with feather, quick mask and curves adjustment layers. Not very techy eh! But works a treat for me and does all I need it to.

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• The Score and the Performance page 2
  
• The Score and the Performance page 3
  
• The Score and the Performance page 4
  
• The Score and the Performance page 5
  
• The Score and the Performance page 6
  

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