Scott Kelby on CS5

[neil poulsen]

. . . But the irony is, he's right - Photoshop has already radically changed our lives, one little "trivial" feature after the other, over the last ten years or so. Or else we wouldn't be having a few "discussions" like this every week.

e.g. The healing brush.

[PenGun]

The only reason one would need to master Photoshop is if you did digital image manipulation for a living.

Most of us just need to master a tiny subset of it's features to deal with our images. I just twist B&W and and only for my printer. This is not to say that there are not valuable tutorials that are useful but really if the image is good 'levels' is 90% of the battle.The web stuff is trivial, Gimp is just fine.

I do get a kick out of the large group of guys making a good living off the ignorance of the digital SLR guys though.

[Greg Blank]

Anything you can learn is good, I think curves substantially beats levels for tonal adjustments- from what I see. If I was just using levels I'd be doing Photo Shop elements. But I use batching, actions and a separate plugin that allows me to generate complete websites using the batch actions functions and PSD files, in short that saves me many many hours of work coding. I am setting up files for prepress as CMYK, not that you can't do that in other programs but PS has it all and it intrigrates well with the Data Color device I use for calibration.

I've been toying with the idea of CS5 extended. Or even upgrading to the full graphics CS5 suite from PS3.

The only reason one would need to master Photoshop is if you did digital image manipulation for a living.

Most of us just need to master a tiny subset of it's features to deal with our images. I just twist B&W and and only for my printer. This is not to say that there are not valuable tutorials that are useful but really if the image is good 'levels' is 90% of the battle.The web stuff is trivial, Gimp is just fine.

I do get a kick out of the large group of guys making a good living off the ignorance of the digital SLR guys though.

[PenGun]

Anything you can learn is good, I think curves substantially beats levels for tonal adjustments- from what I see. If I was just using levels I'd be doing Photo Shop elements. But I use batching, actions and a separate plugin that allows me to generate complete websites using the batch actions functions and PSD files, in short that saves me many many hours of work coding. I am setting up files for prepress as CMYK, not that you can't do that in other programs but PS has it all and it intrigrates well with the Data Color device I use for calibration.

I've been toying with the idea of CS5 extended. Or even upgrading to the full graphics CS5 suite from PS3.

As I said I just use it for my B&W scans. Curves I use more for colour but whatever floats your boat.

I'm sure you can "batch" Photoshop to do a series of actions to images but I would like to know about a plugin that makes websites. I used to do website backends at one time and having stuff just assemble it's self was my whole purpose. Those were the good ol' days of perl against Apache. Still useful, but php is enough for most anything.

I really just use Photoshop for it's killer spot tool. Cinepaint will work well too for my simple needs. I keep Win 7 around for my games so it's easy to add Photoshop.

[mdd99]

Just what I need another upgrade that I'm still trying to master in 5 years.

10 for me.