“I use Photoshop as I would to hand-print an image; i.e., burning, dodging etc. I don’t use ‘special effects’ very often; I'm still a big fan of more traditional techniques, applied digitally, of course.”—Marcus Bell

Award-winning image by Australian photographer Marcus Bell

In the days leading up to the advent of digital imaging, the skeptics/realists would often predict, “until a digital image can rival the amount of information found in a 35mm film chip, professional photographers will continue to ignore digital imaging.” These thoughtful folks proclaimed that there are 10,000,000 discrete units of information (bits) in an exposed 24x36mm film frame. That is a 10MB image—a file size that is now commonplace. In fact, at this writing there are a handful of professional 35mm digital SLRs that offer16–18MB original files. And unlike film, digital images resized in Adobe Photoshop can be made almost any size, defying the limits of size and resolution.

Photoshop has expanded the playing field for most photographers. Perhaps the greatest advantage of being a professional photographer in the digital age is creative control. According to Kathleen Hawkins, the other half of Jeff Hawkins Photography, a very successful wedding studio in Longwood, FL, the greatest benefit is “the creative control of our work.” The pair has a renewed excitement for covering weddings and an appreciation for being able to view the images right away—a “powerful advantage for both photographer and clients.” Photographers are no longer just recording images and sending them off to the lab for color correction, retouching and printing. Says Kathleen, “We can now perfect our art to the fullest extent of our vision!”

In the lucrative world of wedding photography, the impact of Adobe Photoshop has permanently changed the style and scope of the genre. The photographer, in the comfort of his home or studio, can now routinely accomplish special effects that could only be achieved by an expert darkroom technician in years past. Photoshop and its many plug-in filters has made wedding photography the most creative and lucrative venue in all of photography. And brides love it. Digital albums, assembled using Photoshop-compatible design templates, have become the preferred album type of brides and the style and uniqueness these albums bring to the wedding experience make every bride and groom a celebrity.

Photoshop and the digital revolution have helped propel wedding photographers to the level of fine artists. Photograph by Jeff Hawkins Photography.

The photographers featured in this book are digital artists and while they are not above using time-saving shortcuts in the image-processing side of things, they still spend a great deal of time perfecting each image that goes out to a client. Perhaps this aspect of contemporary photography, more than any other, has accounted for the profound increase in photographic creativity. This fine-art approach in turn raises the bar financially for so many photographers, allowing them to charge premium prices. This is particularly true with wedding photographers who have seen the budgets for wedding photography rise continuously for the last several years.  Says wedding photographer David Beckstead, “I treat each and every image as an art piece. If you pay this much attention to the details of the final image, brides will pick up on this and often replace the word ‘photographer’ with the word ‘artist.’ ”

Every image that goes out to clients by David Beckstead has been worked in Photoshop to produce the best possible interpretation of the moment.

For Connecticut’s Charles and Jennifer Maring, Photoshop has opened up a wealth of creative opportunities, transporting them from being merely photographers to the status of artists and graphic designers. Their unique digital wedding albums include an array of beautifully designed pages with graphic elements that shape each page and layout. Their story-telling style is as sleekly designed as the latest issue of Modern Bride. The Marings not only work each image but also design each album. Says Charles, “There is a unique feeling when designing the art. I don’t know what an image will look like until I am 2/3 done with it. I also don’t know where the vision comes from. I relate this to the art of photography. A higher place maybe.” This talented couple believes so totally in controlling the end product that they also own their own digital lab, named R-Lab. “We have been totally digital for almost 10 years, and the challenge and precision of the change has actually made us better photographers than we were with film,” says Charles. He believes the outside of the album is every bit as important to his upscale clients as each page therein, and has been known to use covers ranging from black leather to metal, to red iguana skin. He has even found a local bookbinder with his own working bindery for finishing their digital albums.

The future photographer will have to be more than just a photographer, he or she will have to be a terrific designer, as well. So says Charles Maring, who, along with his wife Jennifer and a small staff, shoot, process, design and output all their own first class wedding images and albums.

Maring welcomes the technology. “The main thing that will distinguish photographers in the future will be their print design and album design concepts,” he says and notes further that “design is the future.” Just as Photoshop has expanded the creative abilities of every photographer, those tools will also be the yardstick by which contemporary photographers will be judged. With so many creative tools available, particularly those employed by graphic designers, the successful photographer will have to raise the bar and the horizons of their own creativity.

Photoshop is fertile ground for nesting applications like Australian master photographer Yervant’s Page Gallery, an album-design template system that operates within Photoshop.

While Photoshop is an exciting and powerful tool for crafting elegant images, Yervant Zanazanian, an award-winning Australian wedding photographer puts things in perspective. “A lot of photographers still think it is my tools (digital capture and Photoshop) that make my images what they are. They forget the fact that these are only new tools; image-making is in the eye, in the mind and in the heart of a good photographer. During all my talks and presentations, I always remind the audience that ‘You have to be a good photographer first…’ and ‘don’t expect or rely on some modern tool or technology to fix a bad image.’ ” It’s good advice.

Yervant’s great sense of design and flare as an imagemaker have made him one of the most sought-after wedding photographers in the world.

Photoshop Has Replaced the Conventional Darkroom

Up until a few years ago the image was rendered in the camera, but all the magic happened in the darkroom. There are countless great photographers who tell of “becoming hooked” on photography when they first saw the print emerging in the safelight gloom of the developer tray for the very first time. And who can forget learning to load 35mm film onto stainless steel reels? It was a badge of courage that made learning the basics of photography seem more rewarding than a post-graduate degree.

Printing and developing techniques have not disappeared, but they have been morphed into Photoshop to resemble conventional photographic techniques. Literally everything you could do in the darkroom, excepting the brown hypo stains on your clothes and fingernails, can be done in Photoshop and done better and more extensively.

The designers of Photoshop could have used any frame of reference on which to build the application—mathematical or scientific, for example. But they chose photography as the medium that provided the most useful language and logic of image enhancement. And they borrowed heavily from the science of photography. Burning, dodging, cropping, curves, shadow and highlight control and many other functions are all part of the day-to-day operation with Photoshop, just as they are part of the conventional photographic lexicon.

Photoshop offers many different ways to accomplish the same thing. Shown are both the histogram window and the Curves dialog box, which are both means of judging and adjusting contrast and exposure. Actually, the histogram is just for evaluating exposure and dynamic range and cannot be adjusted unless you go to the Levels command. Also shown is an award-winning Anthony Cava image, the way the photographer adjusted it and a blowup to 1600% to show the pixel disbursement in a very small area of the image.

Photoshop toolbox evolution as it has progressed over the years (from left to right: versions 2.5, 3, 4, 5, 5.5, 6, 7, CS, and CS2).

The shadow/highlight menu is another means to make quick corrections to images that are difficult to correct in Photoshop CS2.

Mike Colon is a well known Southern California wedding photographer who uses Nikon DSLRs and their WiFi technology to download images to a laptop as they are recorded throughout the wedding day. Mike’s assistant preps the images and then saves them into a slide-show program so that guests just entering the reception are treated to a visual treat of the images already made throughout the day. The power of digital imaging has transformed the wedding day into a multimedia event.

Photoshop is one of the great technological innovations of this or any other era. The application is so richly layered that users find many different ways to achieve the same or similar effects. It is a powerful application too. Many of the effects displayed by the artists in this book are the result of an intuitive approach to solving a specific imaging problem in Photoshop.

This book is not another how-to book on using Photoshop. There are already seemingly many such books on the market. Instead, this book is about those who use Photoshop as a mainstay in their digital imaging business—artists, illustrators, commercial photographers, album designers, wedding photographers, portrait photographers, teachers and a few unclassified professionals will be presented here. It is my hope that you will learn from their innovative and often original uses of Photoshop.

Thanks go out to all those who helped in the preparation of this book; in particular Claude Jodoin (aka, Professor Pixel), Rich Nortnik, Jr., Jerry D (who has patiently walked me through numerous complex Photoshop procedures), Craig Kienast, Craig Minielly (aka Craig’s Actions), Yervant, Charles Maring and all of the other gifted photographers and artists who appear in this book. Without them, this book would not have been possible.