About a week ago, I jumped back into using Photoshop for the first time since 2018 and I’ve got to tell you, it was kind of like putting on a favorite pair of jeans. Yes, the interface has changed a little and a bunch of terrific new tools have been added—especially Object Select, which I’ll come back to in a minute. But even after such a long hiatus, it was still so familiar that straight away it got me thinking about why I stopped using it, and in a broader sense, about some of the decisions we make around the tools we use. My dad taught me years ago to always get the best tools you can because in the long run, they make the experience of using them that much better. And “better” could mean efficiency, special features, or just durability and overall quality. For example, my dad was an incredible mechanic, and many of my childhood memories of him involve engines—from fixing them to taking them apart and putting them back together again. In fact, in one of my favorite photos of him, he’s wearing a pair of blue coveralls out in the garage of our house in Azusa, California where he’s working on rebuilding an engine. You can even see a pile of parts on the floor behind him. Dad always used Craftsman hand tools (like his father before him) because he said that for the money there was nothing better, and if a tool ever did break, you could bring it into any Sears and walk out with a new one, no questions asked.
10 years ago, I had an idea to make a little PDF guide of photography terms that I could give away as a sign-up bonus for my newsletter. I wanted to call it Photography by the Letter and it was going be 26 terms, from A-to-Z, that would hopefully act as part education and part inspiration for new or novice photographers. As I started doing the research, it quickly became obvious that 26 terms wasn’t going to be enough. Then I thought, “what if in addition to the terms and their definitions, there were photographs and diagrams and maybe tips and exercises to help reinforce what readers were learning?” The feature set quickly spun out of control and my free PDF became a full-on book project. If that wasn’t enough, Serif released an image editing app called Affinity Photo. It won all kinds of awards and straight away people started calling it a “Photoshop killer” so I thought, “what if I use that for all of the photo manipulation?” They also released Affinity Designer to compete with Adobe Illustrator and I thought “Perfect! I’ll use that for all of the diagrams.” In the interest of transparency, there may have been some spite towards Adobe for their subscription model pricing that contributed to my decisions. Regardless, apparently I thought that writing and designing a book wasn’t enough of a challenge and that I should also learn two new pieces of software in order to create all of the assets.
In 2018, after years of research, multiple rewrites, and at least two major redesigns, Photography by the Letter was released in print. The book featured over 170 terms and concepts, nearly 100 original photos, more than 50 original diagrams, plus tips, Q&As, exercises, and interviews across 232 pages, and I couldn’t have been more proud of it. Ted Waitt, a publisher at Rocky Nook wrote, “It is really quite beautifully designed and very well printed. I honestly cannot think of a self-published book that I have seen better production values on.” Since the initial release, I updated the PDF version of it, adding more than 50 new terms, 10 new tips, 10 new exercises, 10 new Q&As, and 5 new interviews. And next month I’m releasing the last update to the book, which will bring the final number of terms to more than 250 and the final page count to about 340, making it almost 50% bigger than when it was initially published. But I need to be done with it. It’s a project that originally could have taken a week, but has been a part of my creative life for more than a decade.
One of the things to come out of preparing the final update has been a renewed interest in photography. I’ve never really been what you’d call a prolific shooter, other than in high school when I was burning through 100’ rolls of film so I could get back into the darkroom, but photography is something that I’ve been involved with for more than four decades. When the world shut down from the pandemic, I stopped making the effort to get out and take pictures. Weeks became months, months became years, and basically here we are. But for me, photography has always played a very specific role. Looking at the world through a viewfinder restricts how much of the world I am able to take in at any given moment, and that’s a good thing. For someone who often finds the world a very noisy place—and I mean that both in terms of sound and vision—the restriction provided by the viewfinder allows my otherwise busy brain to slow down a little. So recently, I’ve picked up a camera again and started thinking about what, if anything, I have to say beyond just documenting what I see.
But here’s the thing: whether I do or don’t have a unique voice isn’t really the point—and saying that out loud honestly feels a little strange, given how much I value narrative. I know that as makers, we want to find a particular point of view that sets us apart and makes us unique. While I’ve struggled with finding that for a long time, I’ve come around to thinking that maybe the process itself is my unique voice—and maybe it always has been. The various dots on my timeline are connected by my love of process—trying something new just because I was interested in it or to see whether or not I could do it. But somewhere along the way, making became more of a business than something I did for the joy of it, and I think the fun began to slowly drain away as things like reach, monetization, and branding became more important to me than the ideas themselves. If you have an entrepreneurial sprit, maybe that’s the part you like the most, and that’s great. But some of us don’t feel the same way—we just want to make things. I’m definitely one of those people, and it’s taken me a while to find my way back.
To bring this full circle, getting back into Photoshop was sort of an accident. While working on the final update to the book, I’ve also been photographing my paintings ahead of offering them as prints and laying out some new zines. When I started processing the photos in Affinity Photo 2, I noticed that while the JPG files looked great, the Raw files looked soft and underexposed. A couple weeks before, I signed up for the Adobe Photography Bundle, which includes Lightroom and Photoshop. When I opened the same Raw files that were soft and underexposed in Affinity Photo in Photoshop, the difference was night and day. In terms of the amount of detail rendered and the color and exposure accuracy, the Adobe versions were miles ahead. For days I had been trying to solve the detail issue, shooting and reshooting at different focal lengths and apertures and trying different kinds of sharpening in Affinity Photo, and in the end, it really came down to the quality of the Raw engine in Adobe Camera Raw. Add to that the perspective tools for squaring up the edges, Smart Sharpen, and the new Object Select tool, which allows me to mask the paintings away from the backgrounds in just a couple clicks rather than going around each piece by hand with the pen tool, and I’m saving a ton of time getting to a final image. Since I’ve got nearly 150 paintings to photograph, those savings add up pretty quickly.
One of the things that has surprised me the most about this whole experience is realizing how much I’ve missed and still enjoy using Photoshop. I started with version 3, which came out in 1994, and over the course of nearly three decades I’ve logged thousands of hours with it—more than any other application except for maybe a browser. Much of that time was spent on personal projects, just testing features or trying new techniques to see where, if anywhere, they would lead or what, if anything, they would inspire. Of course, I also used it professionally, and even taught it for a while, but I used it just as much to play—to make something just because I could. And none of this is to say that Affinity Photo isn’t a terrific application or to diminish what it’s capable of, because it is terrific and it will continue to evolve just as Photoshop has. In this particular case, though, it was the wrong tool for the job. Every application or workflow or tool has its own set of limitations and strengths. Finding what works with us rather than against us frees us up to focus on making instead of fighting with the thing that gets in the way of it.
QUESTIONS
What are some of your favorite creative tools? Hit reply, leave a comment or email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.
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Thanks for reading.
These are always insightful and a deeper thinking than I can do. I keep putting off the learning to edit photographs but maybe I ought to invest in a quality tool.