After a wobbly day yesterday, I am back and on board with a full day of editing images. Editing days are always good days. Sometimes when I am editing, I feel like I am back at pre-school - cutting, pasting, colouring in - creating. When the images are uploading, I can use that "down time" to catch up on emails, messages, phone calls and general correspondence. Days dedicated to editing always seem to fly by.
One of the main stays for any professional photographer these days is being able to use photoshop - unless of course you have the luxury of hiring editors. However for most freelance photographers this is not the case. In a way it gives us another level of creative control over our images. One of the greatest misconceptions is that "if there is something wrong with the reality", we can just photoshop it, right?
Well .. yes and no. Depending on what you want to achieve. In the past, I have had customers deliver clothes to be photographed for online sale, just shoved in a bag. Sadly the photograph will show every one of those wrinkles. Sometimes I feel as though I care more about the client's product then they do, and spend considerable time prepping the products so that they look great in the images. At events, I frequently encounter requests from attendees wanting very particular things to be photoshopped on the photos that they are in, so that "the reality wont be seen on social media". A few months ago, I had a case where at the end of a party, a guest came up to me and asked that in all the photos she was in, if I could photoshop out the cigarettes. Apparently she worked for one of the quit smoking programs and to be caught smoking is a sackable offence. In this situation, life choices had been denigrated to a "photoshop issue". In this woman's world the problem was now my responsibility as the photographer to "protect the perception". Vanity and taking responsibility for our own lives are often not in cohabitation with each other.
I was thinking today, wouldn't it be great if there was a photoshop for our lives. With a few simple steps, we could smooth out the wrinkles, remove the blemishes, add some colour, increase the saturation or vibrancy, crop, resize - and with all the hard work being done by a powerful processor that simply acts according to our commands.
But I guess we do have that in our lives anyway. We just use a different set of tools. The only difference is that the powerful processor is not external to us but inside our own heads. There is always the option, that when all systems fail, we just Control - Alt - Delete, dust ourselves off and start all over again.
Flying Solo Tip 033365 : It's not such a major issue when all systems fail. Contol - Alt - Delete; reboot and start all over again.