I?ve started to learn something?

I’ve started to learn something…

Is it just me, or are many YouTubers rather up themselves? While others recommend it as a wonderful resource, I find that it’s often waffly and padded (I want to know how to do X or Y, and nothing else), and also, worst of all, makes too many assumptions about what I know already.

I want to relate this to a specific editing skill that I don’t have – using Layers. A couple of times, stumblingly, I have followed a tutorial in a magazine to (for instance) colour pop an image. And then I’ve forgotten all about it. Certainly, I’ve felt no need for using Layers. And I sort-of know there’s a dropdown menu for them, and I’m occasionally aware of something taking up space on the screen on the right.
But here’s the thing: I am being bullied into learning about Layers by a fellow-member of the Critique Team – I suppose it’s fair enough, as I’m bullying her into trying Lensbaby optics. And we may be making progress…

Now, at present, I still see Layers as being inherently immoral (and probably fattening, and liable to make my hair fall out) because you can’t use them in the darkroom. That’s my editing touchstone. But – after over an hour on the ‘phone, I understand that there may be occasions on which I want to use Layers to tweak part of a picture, when I want to do something in editing that isn’t global, and doesn’t involve dodging and burning, or spot healing and cloning.

I think it amounts to the sort of adjustments you can achieve in Nik Efex with their control points, though with more adjustments available – I await correction on this point. And, to some extent, there are different ways to crack every problem… You don’t have to know all of them, but sometimes it’s good to know about them, at least.

Actually getting the first result ran into the buffers after about three minutes, but a further two ‘phone calls while I wrestled with my mouse delivered some suitably-adjusted hair on the picture I posted yesterday: it benefitted from a Levels adjustment to dark hair in a low-key nude.

I am not going to try to tell you how to use Layers, because I’m still faffing around, trying different clicks and selections on the Photoshop screen to get what I want. Most of the time, I end up brushing a broad white or black swathe across the image (usually both, in succession) before getting the brush to do what I want.

But I’ve succeeded with two more images today, without resorting to the telephone.

And I’ve realised that if I go on down the road, I may need to spend more than two minutes editing some pictures (even when I work out how to do it right first time). I won’t be doing that on every image,
though. My photographic style depends, very largely, on making the right choices in-camera, and then on global adjustments which don’t need layers – to the extent that finding a picture that needs something doing for which Levels will be useful is a non-trivial task.

My instructor works very differently: she constructs her pictures one element at a time, both in the real world, assembling the objects for a still life on a table (or, yesterday, a chair). It therefore makes perfect sense to continue this process on the other side of clicking the shutter. But… We shall see how it all pans out – and if I end up hiding in my darkroom for a week, it’ll be her fault.