Photography Portfolio - day 2 - Mastering Adobe Photoshop Adjustment Layers

Adobe Photoshop CC - love it or hate - you will end up there eventually doing adjustment layers!

There a jobs we all love, and those we hate. I love Lightroom, and if I could do all my processing in Lightroom only I would be happy. I can quickly move around the sliders in the Develop Module, and am highly skilled with adjustment brushes, effects etc etc etc.

Adobe Lightroom CC is great.

And now that I have the Nik software I have black and white conversions taken to another level.

I do not like Photoshop editing. I am from the Lightroom version 1 era - I was there at the beginning of Lightroom so Photoshop was always something else.

So most of my work is done in Lightroom. My Lightroom workflow is

• Import into Lightroom
• Cull the import
• Add the chosen images to a collection
• Keyword/ sort the remaining images
• Process
• Output/ Publish

This is the simplified version, but that is the main steps. You get the idea.

And if I want a black and white I go to Nik Silver Efex.

I do go into Photoshop, to clean up images. Spot removal, clone stamping and content aware fill. And then I save back to Lightroom.

But I need more. Layers. OK I get the basic principle of layers. I have just not practised it enough to be proficient in it. And now I need to do a selective edit of part of an image – can’t say too much as I want to show the final image and work back from the RAW file – this is the final stage in image one of my Photography Portfolio.

This is not an exercise in churning out a set of 30 images – this is all about taking my work to the next level, so I am going to go through the set of images one by one, doing what is needed to produce a portfolio of a suitable standard. In doing this I will be improving the finished standard of my commercial photography work.

So now I am going to teach myself layers. I am completely self-taught, so this should not be a problem, and will add some new tricks to my skill set. And I have an idea for something I want to experiment with, called luminosity masks. That and getting my sky replacement more polished

See I never run out of things to learn, work on and experiment, which is why I guess my work has developed over the last two years so much. And the fact I enjoy it so much helps – I feel for any photographer who does not absolutely love learning new things all the time to push themselves forward!

I am a subscriber to the Adobe Creative Cloud, which is where my Lightroom software is delivered from, and where I get Photoshop from. I do not use anything else out of the Creative Cloud – well apart from the mobile features in Lightroom that is. Which reminds me – there are some very, very cool Apps now for Photoshop for the IPad which I need to have a play with. When I say IPad I mean IPhone in my case.

So I am now off to learn layers properly, rather than dabbling and playing at it– I will report back when I have done this, and also how to remove things properly.

Thanks for reading this post – hopefully tomorrow there will be a new image for you – nothing for today – sorry!