Photo artists: How'd you develop your skills?

Over the years I've been on plenty of various forums and had the pleasure of seeing the work of some tremendously skilled photo artists.

Some of the stuff here on Phun.org rates right up there among the best, IMO.

I'm curious as to hearing from fellow artists how and when you got started. What motivates you? What editing app(s) you work with. What was the learning curve like for you? What's your favorite genre to work with (celebs, scenic stuff, collages, cloning, etc.).

Do any of you make any sort of income from your skills, or do you just do it for personal enjoyment?

Often we tend to work alone 'in a bubble of solitude' - so I thought it might be interesting to share a little of our backgrounds and experiences.

 

I wouldn't call myself an artist; I just like the huge playground digital photography is nowadays.
Although I only retouch and tweak existing images since I'm still hooked on my old school Pentax, a set of filters and a stack of my trusted Ilford Delta Pro 400 film rolls.

Started photoshopping some 7 months ago due to the sigs thread but loved photography since I was a teen.
As to learning, I collected myself lots of pdf e-books on PS and photography along with my dads old photography books and started reading and learning at a fair pace.

Apps I work with:
Nik's SilverEfex Pro (editing B/W, adding natural film grain), Color Efex Pro (editing color images) and Sharpener Pro
onOne's Skin Tune 2, Color Tune 2, Mask Pro 4.1 and Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5.0
Vertus Fluid Mask 3
Digital Anarchy's Knoll Light Factory and Backdrop Designer
D Fine 2.0
Lokas 3D Shadow
Akvis Chameleon, Coloriage, Decorator, Enhancer, Noise Buster, Retoucher and Stamp
Pictocolor's iCorrectEditLab Pro 5.0

Digital photography is as said a huge playground but it still seems so limited when I compare them with some film based photos.
IMO digital photograhy will always be limited as long as it's pixel based; it's square and unnatural and doesn't really come close to the richess of colors in nature; not to speak of pixel artifacts and noise (especially in HDR imaging).
And what to think of 32 or 64 bit images when there's still no screen or printer available to render a decent output?

 

I'm not a photographer by any stretch of the term. I took a short course in B&W photography eons ago, primarily to learn the works of my 35mm film camera. I had a steady, well paying job at the time and had no plans to persue anything more than recreational photos. I'm hoping to take more time for this in the very near future.

Always being involved in art of one form or another since I was a kid, editing photos had great appeal to me once I got ahold of my first Photoshop program (version 7). I now use CS2 with no additional features added thus far other than a few fonts. No formal training there. I've learned all I know from trial and error and a few tutorials from the net. Its been a great hobby thats lead me to some private requests from a few models, friends and family. Contributing here at Phun has been equaly enjoyable.

 

Similiarly, I've never thought of myself in terms as an artist - although feedback I often get labels me as such. I guess there's an artist aspect to what I/we do - using the combination of camera and photo editor. But I don't feel I have the same level of creativity it takes to be considered 'artistic'.

My path had a lot of twists and turns over the years. I started out working with industrial cameras for litho graphics companies, and gradually developed a passion for hobby photography (helped along by a co-worker who was into photography and generously showed me a few ropes).

From there I took a two-year college course in computer graphic technical illustration and learned about digital imaging. Years later, film cameras began shifting towards digital and I was finally able to combine my college training with digital photography.

I've also worked as a videographer for several companies in Toronto over the years - working cameras for TV commercial casting calls, and then as a video editor for a large adult video distribution company. All of this background got thrown into the mixing pot that eventually led to starting my own production company back in 1999.

Brings us to today...

In the early 90s I started out using BarneyScan for some very basic image editing (I cringe to think back on the quality, heh). It was re-tooled and released a short while later as Aldus Photostyler - which I still use today along with Photoshop7.

As for skill development - back in the early 90s there was no tutorials or 'Dummy' books available, so I basically taught myself by trial-and-error a lot of the techniques I commonly use. I'd visualize how I wanted an image to look...then figured out ways to create it.

 

Like TCF I got started with Sigs. Been making edits and sigs about 4 months. I had the usual collection of 3 or 4 thumbs as a sig and started seeing some of the cool sigs everyone was using. Once I got started with Photoshop 7 I haven't stopped. I would search for any tutorial I could find on the web for extracts, backgrounds effects etc. I have gotten better but still a long way to go to even come close to some of the amazing work I've seen posted. I still do sigs but mostly collage edits because the sig thread seems to be more about artwork instead of celebs and I'm posting my Hilary sigs Didn't seem to fit with the thread. I'm getting back into learning now that the newness of it has worn off. I still do not use or understand paths, blends and probably 1000 other tools available in PS. Actually when I started I manually extracted each photo with the lasso tool. Not only time consuming but was never a clean cut. Then I moved to channels and select color range to extract and believe it or not I just discovered the magic eraser. I like how you start with a blank canvas and as you go seeing how the pics fit together.
Thanks for starting the thread always nice to hear how and why others do their edits.

 

i've only ever used practice and trial and error. i've got a photoshop cs3 book somewhere but i've never really read through it, just consulted literally once or twice. digital imaging started for me when i was about 14 and we got a new pc with a scanner and a copy of adobe photodeluxe (for anyone unfamiliar with this it was a VERY watered down version of photoshop with pretty much everything you could do arranged into a sort of step by step 'wizard', and looking back, it wasn't very good, but it's where i started 11 years ago!). from there i moved onto photoshop 6 briefly before getting photoshop 7 (or maybe 7 then 8, i've lost track) and then onto the CS series. i still don't really understand all the technical side of photoshop which i'm certain you need a degree in maths to even comprehend, but i can usually find a means to the end i'm looking for. dabbled with the likes of illustrator a few times but never really progressed with them. never really done much except my own thing with photoshop, other than a few flyers here and there and helped a few friends with graphics and image processing for websites.

i've been a fan of photography for as long as i can remember, especially architectural and landscape photography. got a canon dslr a couple of years ago and use it when i get the chance which isn't as often as i'd like, but every now and then i get photos i really like.

 

I wouldn't call myself an artist either. I feel more like A DJ... A DJ uses music created by others, tweaks/combines it to make something that sounds nice.

I tweak/combine images from others to make something that looks nice.

I mostly make sigs, I like doing other stuff too, wallpapers and collages. But I feel most comfortable doing sigs... no idea why .

My learning curve: I was on some forums, people had sigs there, but I thought they could look better (they were all resized pics, ripped out of proportion, slapped a nick on there et voila). I got ulead photo-impact and tried some things... all trial and error. People told me I should use photoshop, but I was so used to photo-impact that I didn't want to change. Untill my pc crashed and I decided to start over and learn photoshop... I got lots of tutorials, a lot of trial and error too and now I don't wanna use any other program. So photoshop is the only program I use.

 

not that i feeld addressed by "artist"...

why? personal enjoyment.
improving? trial and error, open eyes, curiosity.
assistance? xnview, photoshop.

 

I'm a photographer and only do PS work on my own stuff. I consider my art created with the camera and occasionally enhanced by PS. However I've gotta credit Scott Kelby's books on PS for photographers and a few individuals who showed me how to do some things. I'm still on CS2, but utilize a few extras:

Nik Color Efx Pro
Imagenomic Portraiture
a variety of actions from Kevin Kubota, Gary Fong and a few other sources

Honestly now most of my work is done in Lightroom and only hit PS for final edits.

 

For a decade or so i have been interesting and facinating about the eye, i like to consider myself as an artist, the way i think. I think the first software to edit photo's: jasq psp5 i think it was. from there i got into ps 6-cs3

I can see myself having the retouching job as a profession, but it has always been something i have had the most of passion for. painting,drawing 3d modeling and photography never tried sculpting would been fun.

my learing were most of trial and errors, to i got my hands on the best video tutorials (now with utube and such its even easier)

If you can you should grab this - for the camera
PHOTOSHOPCAFE PERFECT COMPOSITION THE ART OF SHOOTING GREAT PHOTOGRAPHS

 

I also use PhotoImpact a fair bit - I like some of the lighting f/x filters.

Minor factoid - a few years ago I learned that Ulead was the development company of Aldus Photostyler (Aldus Corp. was primarily the distribution company only).

 

I wouldn't consider myself any sort of artist in the photographic field or editing field. I have a good eye for a quality image but i am definitely outclassed by most of the other guys in the forum. My skill is with wurds.

 

Hey, we could all benifit and develop skills if all you Creative Pros created a "TUT" thread and taught us some tricks of the trade.

Then I could come back to this thread and tell everyone how I developed my skills...

 

Hehe...

Speakin' for myself - I usually find tutorials awkward and cumbersome to follow at times. Some tuts have dozens of steps to achieve something I can do more easily using only a few steps and different editing tools. I have the attention span of a gnat at times - and lose interest fast if something takes too long.

 

These could have been my exact words on the topic, particularly in regards to attention span. I've watched several that lost me in minutes either because of his PS being a different version or asking myself "why the hell did he go through all that"? They can also be difficult to see on a fuzzy video. I will continue to recomend them for simpler operations. I dont know how long I was using the "Place" command for adding layers when all I needed to do was drag them over. That solved a lot of resolution conflicts also. Speaking of which, I still need to figure out why some text appears so damn small on certain photos. I know its a resolution problem but, one I havent taken the time to resolve yet.

 

I can say I read quite some tuts over the past 8 or 9 months on PS.
I'm not specifically reading them to learn how to create an effect or do something but more so for getting more in depth info on some tools and other.
One of the first I read was a tut on restoring old, faint B/W photos. It was nice to learn the technique but I was pleased more with the in depth info they gave on blending options.
In short, a tut is interesting but more a starting point for asking myself more questions and thus further research on the topic.

Having said all that, here's a nice help to really shortcut in PS: http://rapidshare.com/files/198716549/stuctrohSdraobyeK3SCSP.pdf
only 43 KB but it's an official Abdo*e 4 page pdf file containg all the PS keyboard shortcuts there are. (filename is written backwards to prevent deletion on RS)
It's written for CS3 but I figure most of them apply for all CS versions.