Lately I am investing time to establish and improve my digital workflow. In all the books I have read about Adobe Photoshop CS3 the importance of non-destructive editing is stressed. The advantage of using non-destructive editing is that you don’t alter your original image. The means of doing so is by using normal and adjustment layers. This means you only have to do the pixelprocessing once to a copy of the original file. If you want to change something later to the image you can edit the specific layer. You can do this as many times as you want without changing the pixels of the original background layer. Although the first thing I do when importing the raw file into Photoshop from Lightroom is create a pre-sharpen layer, I wait with the output sharpening after re-sizing the image for a specific content, such as a print or for presentation on the web. Before saving the print file you can flatten the image to reduce the file size. There are a lot of free (video) tutorials out there for people who are not keen on books. An example is the video tutorial on photoshopsupport.com on NON-DESTRUCTIVE editing.
Film vs. digital, an endless discussion. In the end we all have to find our own ways. This might mean changing nothing;) I have been exposing slidefilm lately and must say I am becoming increasingly in love with the saturation and slight grain. I just offers a spectacular quality without much post production. Digital offers many possibilities but the files look so ‘clean’. It will take time to perfect the digital workflow and the printing process.
David Alan Harvey started an interesting topic on his blog about how we see our own work. This is my response;
“Answering the question personally is to answer why I photograph. A few years back I lost my first son. During a period of intense grief, I started to see images. Not imaginary images but clear visions of a new reality. It was like driving on a road you have taken many times but you never noticed the tree….. This made a big impression on me. This new seeing resulted in me feeling close to him. The longing for being close resulted in the longing for seeing. Photography was the logical medium.It gives me the chance to get close to people, in the middle of life, to give me prove that I am still alive, to get a chance to see what he didn’t see, the beauty of life… So the photographs are the proof….living proof.”
Q: How has photography changed your look at the world?
