Jason Tag Photography

My personal philosophy is that, as a photographer, I should be able to make good images in camera.  That is to say that I should strive to not need editing in photoshop or rely on it to fix bad exposures or shots.  That’s just my personal feeling so don’t shoot me if you disagree.  I have always admired artists who are able to do things with photoshop that seem like voodoo witchcraft.

My own experience with photoshop goes about as far a being able to fix contrast or color correction and that’s about it.  pretty much anything you could do in the lab with film.  what I saw other artists doing with it blew my mind away.

So, I recently picked up a book that teaches techniques for re-touching photos in Photoshop.  and I decided to play around with it just to see what I could do with one of my images.  I chose an image I shot with the lovely and ever beautiful Jessamyn for my experiment.

I didn’t do a whole lot to the image.  I mainly removed freckles (which I love) just to see how good the tools really are.  I also tried to even out her skin tones and I smoothed her skin in certain areas.

Now after playing around with this, what did I learn?  I learned that it’s definitely col to have this tool and to be able to change fix a photo to make it better.  I found things about photoshop that I never knew before.  I learned to use tools that I didn’t know existed.  And I saw a little of what is possible if you really know what you’re doing.  But I think I”m going to stick with my purist approach and continue striving to shoot better first.

Jess: Forest - Original Image

Jess: Forest - Re-Touched Image