Mini Brief Four. The realisation that photoshop is a digital darkroom.

Slowly my mind is filling up with more and more photoshop information. Which is amazing, the things I have learned are beyond anything I have ever dreamed of! Like I have explained in previous blog posts, I have always loved photography but I always thought that photoshop was kind of like cheating and that to be a good photographer you shouldn't have to use photoshop to make an image amazing. But then I realised that photoshop is essentially a digital darkroom.

In high school, I spent countless hours processing images in the darkroom. Developing, stopping, fixing, washing, cropping, adding effects, burning, dodging and I always thought it was magical. Now we can do those same things on photoshop and never have to worry about wasting chemicals because it didn't turn out right... that's why we have a history button.

Right now I feel like I am back in high school, doing some persuasive writing, but really I am just telling you about my eureka moment during mini brief four.

It really started when I added an adjustment layer and I remembered making an imaging and laying a OHP copy of a news paper article over the image so it looked like a layer of news paper was covering my face. Then I thought... oh onions have layers, oh wait, photoshop has layers!!!

Adjustment layers quickly become my next favourite thing on photoshop. The ability to change a particular layer only was so amazing and I had heaps of fun pushing my photos to their absolute maximums.

This is a before and after example of an image I manipulated in photoshop.

Personally, I think that the original is nicer but it was still heaps of fun to push the image to extremes and make it look completely different. The before version looks like a dry winters day and the after version looks like a lush winters twilight.

Oh photoshop yay for you being my new darkroom.... wait a minute that's obviously where Adobe got their name for the 'Lightroom' software....