Bob wrote:
This is a tough discussion for me. I remember when I retouched images with masking, friskets and an airbrush. ...(Snip)...
So the question for me is what is better? Fast and quick, or as I was trained? I would suggest that my way is better in many cases. ...(snip)...
Few PS users have ... have the old skills I routinely used for decades. No offense. ...(Snip) ...
...and to be perfectly honest, had I had a PC and PS in the good old days, I would probably use it.
Bob,
I suppose that this is what the glass plate photographers said when Kodak introduced the film cartridge... -:))
But I would agree with your feeling that "the old way was better in many cases". What PS and digital photography does is to reduce tremendously the cost of making mistakes, thus allowing a great deal of inefficiency in the process.
Glass plate photographers had to do a great deal of planning and pre-visualisation before shooting their picture. The film cartridge photographer could afford being slightly less careful because he knew that a least one picture out of several would come out fine. And so it went with the 35mm camera and all the built-in automation continuing with digital. In this case, the evidence of failures disappears all together when the camera disk is cleaned out after a shooting. One can't even learn from past mistakes.
This said, PS is just another "tool" (albeit far more advanced than the old friskets) and what will continue to make the difference in the end is the "skills" of the user.
Guy
