Photography editing: Do a course or teach yourself ?

[RLeadbetter]

i found when starting out www.pixel2life.com to be one of the most helpful sites going. It is a regularly update catologue of tutorials for all sorts.

Good luck

[kazdez]

Partly self taught, but still do not understand what I am doing sometimes. Can do the very basics, and have a son who is great at it, but I decided that I wanted something a bit more structured. So am starting an 7 week night course next week.

Husband says I probably know enough of what they are going to teach, but it might help me put it all in proper perspective.
They also offer a PS for photographers, but it is on a Saturday and I work on Saturdays.

[aycee]

To learn the art of manipulation requires endless hours of practice but first I think you have to know how to master it enough to use it.....books are a very cheap and very good way to do it..The Photoshop Bible Dummies etc are all good though far far too comprehensive for most...there are books galore..Scott Kelby is one very good one,,see Margaret's link though he is a Mac man and doest handle the short cuts available in Windows very well..but a wonderful book all the same...but practice on the really hard photos will bring you up to speed and it depends on how much you want to get from it and how much work you are willing to put into it...

the net has wonderful tutorials as well...but in the end its passion and practice

Alan!

[etherial]

Where/how does Lightroom fit in with Photoshop....?

Lightroom is more of a library management, tagging, rating etc and it does basic editing. I was going to say basic editing but I shouldn't because it does more than that. It is really quite powerful and many people have it and nothing else. I use it and do maybe 90% of my work in it. It is great to handling multiple images, and people often have catalogues totalling many thousands.

Photoshop CS/Elements etc are more about working with a small number of images (often only one) and doing detailed editing and they have an extensive amount of tools and brushes etc. They also do layers to give you more flexibility when editing.

As I said, I use Lightroom for cataloguing my photos, and doing cropping and overall image adjustments. Then if you need to do something more, like remove a person, blur a backround etc etc then move to something like Photoshop. I use Photoshop Elements 7 and have found it to do just about all I want it to.

Hope that helps!

[Chilli]

Thanks Mic, yes it helped.

[bigdazzler]

Chilli if your photography requires you to batch process large numbers of images LR is without peer. It is primarily what we call DAM (Digital Asset Management) software that is used for organising and cataloging your images. It is much more than that though. It is a RAW processor as well as a very handy editor. But probably the best thing of all is that Lightroom is a non-destructive editing program. Any change you make to a file is stored in a database, you never alter your original file (unless you specifically tell LR to) and all changes you make to your original can be undone at any time. 90% of my editing is done in LR and I only go over to Photoshop, which is a dedicated photo editor, for more precise and complex editing. IMO every semi-serious photographer should be using LR, it is fantastic.

[paullivo]

I read lots of photo mags, online articles, buy books, subscribe to Kelby Training, search the web for particular techniques I want to use, belong to a couple of camera clubs that have activity night to discuss various aspects of photography and processing and one of the clubs has a SIG (special interest group) specifically on PS. The SIG has less than 10 members and we decide on topics and program them to be discussed at the monthly get together. If no one knows about the particular topic of interest one of us volunteers to take it on and then spends a month or two researching it in depth and then presenting it to the rest of the group by actually doing the techniques at the meeting and providing handouts.

[SnowA]

In the self-taught group (that's not quite right, since I'm a long way from considering myself as having 'learned') but you know what I mean.

Doesn't need to be expensive either - Gimp is free and powerful, and there are plenty of online resources about how to use it. I've also just bought a book to get a better understanding of it, for ease of reference.

[matilda]

i used tutorials from lynda.com

zeke the guy that teaches there, aslo wrote many of the photoshop books out there, and he is a hoot! Makes learning fun.

I also google things I don't know.