----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim Mulholland" : Well, Bob, you've raised some excellent points. But, in the long run, : does the typical, competent photographer obtain acceptable results with : CC filters or Photoshop? Ten years ago and more, the *only* option was : CC filters. Now, there's an additional tool, i.e., Photoshop, and I'm : trying to discover through others' experiences whether: Ah, found it! I've been dredging through former posts for this - have a look here for a plugin to manage colour correction: http://thepluginsite.com/products/photowiz/colorwasher/comparison1.htm It looks like it does a REALLY good job, probably better than CC filters could manage! and another nice example image: http://www.thepowerxchange.com/product_1688_detailed.html : I appreciate your analogy regarding music. We see it all of the time : with photography and other fields, too, in that folks use technology to : compensate for or cover up lack of talent/competence. A recent photography competition here saw the first prize go to a graphic art composition - a heavily worked image of a gate flipped and repeated a number of times and pasted onto a background of sky. Apparently it was a pleasing image (I didn't see it) but the general consensus was that it bore little resemblance to anyone's concept of a 'photograph' - and the other entrants were a bit confused as to how to approach future competitions - do they submit great photographs, or digital art graphic effect pieces.. technology seemed to have got in the way. David: :Making things easier is unambiguously good, by my standards. Being :lazy is a *virtue* -- one of the greatest ones. Essentially all :"progress" is made by lazy people working very hard to make things :easier for everybody Some do it for other reasons - to make money is probably a big one ;) Another is because they're frustrated at watching things done the hard way, and it merely satisfies them to see efficiency in practice. >>*lazy is a *virtue* << I think lazy might have connotations beyond what you mean David! David: :I sometimes wonder if some of the :abhorrence of making things easier comes from people who know, :somewhere down inside, that their skill in the technical aspects is :all they have, and are bothered by that becoming devalued Maybe. Maybe being 'technical' people they find it difficult to put into words the intangible 'thing' that lurks inside them, bothers them, but cannot be verbalized easily. I hold understanding and knowledge in high regard. I also hold efficiency in high regard too. It always stunned me that the western wheelbarrow continues to be used when the Chinese one is *SO* much more efficient! Yet on the other hand I loathe the current education model of 'training' people rather than teaching them. Sure it's easier to simply 'train' someone to operate an E6 machine, they need no knowledge of chemistry, SG, electronics etc.. but I feel they've been deprived of something and they'll be let down when the E6 machine goes screwy. Were they to have taken the 'hard' road they'd be fine, and be able to wrestle it back into operation with little fuss. We saw a similar thing with colour correcting at the college I worked at. RA4 was declared a vanishing art and lecturers moved the bulk of the colour teaching onto the computers - it was easier. Then they found the students were simply unable to colour correct properly, no matter what they said, did or demonstrated - after a couple of years they started putting *every* student back onto the RA4's - and the students were able then to comprehend the whole matter. Effectively the more difficult path proved the easier one when the final outcome was judged! ;) Why should it have been so difficult on a computer? I can't answer that, but something in the old, slow, 'difficult' process allowed them to learn colour correction better. David: :But there has to be a lot more to it than that; *every time* something :is made easier, a bunch of people complain that others should have to :suffer as they have suffered. Often they can't make a case for why I have made MANY mistakes in my life and I'll continue to do so. I had a student sobbing over her fifth or sixth attempt at a particularly difficult (and expensive) assignment. I told her she was lucky, every day she made a mistake is a GOOD day because she learned something! She eventually saw some small wisdom in this and cheered up :) I'm very glad to have learned things the *hard* way. Mistakes are part of the process - exploring dead ends helps me find not just why things work but also why not! Knowing where things fail, where the limits are gives me a better understanding of the realms in which I work.. I get a feeling for the boundaries and this helps form a picture of the 'set'. I suspect a lot of those who criticize might feel the same way. Of course there are the sour grapes brigade, but I choose to ignore their sentiments and see if they have anything tangible to offer :) Sometimes it really bugs me knowing we collectively have a massive amount of information in our respective minds yet we cannot effectively pass it on - and we can't gather it in a particularly efficient way either. Each of us is born to learn all over again. Each making the same mistakes that have been made for countless generations. sigh a shame - maybe the Borg really are doing things the right way ;) k
