Thursday, September 2, 2010

Just a bit of Frustration!

Hi Everyone,

The last few days have really been a bit frustrating.  I bought a new photo editing program...Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.  I usually do all of my editing in Paint Shop Pro but wanted to try Adobe simply because most photographers use Adobe and there are online tutorials. 

I've been following several other photographers on Facebook, reading their blogs and have been admiring their works.  It inspired me to push my creativity to the next level.   I looked online for some more tutorials for PSP that could get me close to what I've seen, with no luck.

When I read up on other photographers, almost all of them use Photoshop.  Well I'm not quite ready to budget for that program just yet, and besides PSP can do alot of the same things.  Then I heard that Photoshop Elements was a mini version that didn't cost quite as much.  I found mine on Ebay and purchased it a couple of weeks ago.

I joined Love That Shot online because they have several tutorials and I thought I'd give it a try.  Then I found out about Actions....?  Apparently, PSElements is really a mini version and doesn't have alot of the features that the full version has, so going through tutes and getting almost finished and then I find out that I cannot complete the tute.  Frustrating!

Anyway, these Actions are really cool because they cut down the editing time.  The steps are already completed for you and you just play the Action. 

Now, installing these Actions was another story.  I found several different tutorials about how to do this.  And they were each different.  Some were, I believe, incomplete because when I tried, I was not seeing the same things that were described in the tute. 

To make matters worse, I had a photo shoot this week and I'm trying to edit these photos in my new PSE program.  I have a deadline to meet in getting the proofs ready.  Photography is not the only thing I do either, I'm very busy with 2 businesses, 6 kids in the house, 4 dogs and a bird, a garden, I'm a singer, Sunday School Teacher, Ladies Minister, and I'm on the worship team and publish the church bulletin, AND I would not change a thing.  I cannot sit still for very long, if you can't tell, so I can be a bit impatient sometimes which I'm sure is the whole cause of my frustration here.

But there is definitely a happy ending to this story too, there always is.  I did get my Actions installed and have started the editing process from my photoshoot.  I think they're pretty awesome.

Does anyone else have PSE and are you experiencing difficulties?  Actually, one problem I haven't figured out yet is when I play an Action, I get messages on some of them that the command "transform" is not available, along with some other commands as well.  Does anyone know where to activate these hidden commands or if I need to download those too.

Help,
Corbie

2 comments:

  1. I agree, learning a new editing program can be very fustrating. One thing I did, that I would recommend to anyone just starting out with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, is to purchase the Scott Kelby book that corresponds to your version of the program. Scott Kelby writes a new book for each version on Photoshop, PSE or Lightroom that Adobe publishes. I LOVE his books! I just purchased Lightroom 3 software and Scott's Lightroom 3 book. I have many of his books and have yet to be disappointed.

    As for actions in PSE. If you are getting an error when you run an action, make sure you have done the following before running the action: 1. make sure you are working in 8 bit not 16 bit. 2. make sure you run the action on a flattened image (if you make any adjustment layers before running the action, flatten the layers first).

    I hope I have helped in someway. Good luck.

    Jen

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  2. Thanks Jen,

    Actually that does help, I did catch myself not flattening the images before I did another. And I'll definitely look for the book too.

    Thanks again,
    Corbie

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