Times Square by Bert Monroy | I'll Treasure this FOREVER!

This I will treasure forever !

Loving having this VERY special print on the wall in my 'temporary' office ; "Times Square, New York" Drawn and Painted using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator by my friend, the INCREDIBLE Bert Monroy …

It’s hard to put into words how much it means to have this ; an iconic piece of art created by Bert … someone I followed from Day 1 when first I started out using Photoshop. I’ve learned so much from him that I used back when I would do more compositing work but that are techniques I still turn to today when retouching my photography.

Having presented on the same stage as Bert and having travelled to present at different locations around the world with him, I am both honoured and blessed to call him a friend.

LIVE BROADCAST

To see a close up of “Times Square” have a watch of this recording of a LIVE Broadcast I hosted with Bert as my Guest where he zooms in and out showing all of the details and explains some of the techniques used to create the final piece …

Lightroom is for Photographer's who take the picture correctly ... REALLY???

Had to share this and to ask your thoughts...

So my most recent video which is only 9 minutes long is all about Color and which Color Space (sRGB , Adobe RGB , ProPhoto RGB ) to use for Photography ... Editing , Printing , Sharing , Posting on the Web ... Comments have been fantastic BUT one posted yesterday stopped me in my tracks; this is it...

Photoshop is for people who are engineering images.
Lightroom is for photographers who take the picture correctly the first time.

I disagree.

Lightroom is getting better and better. It's exciting to see the enhancements BUT there are things we can do in Lightroom now that only a short while agree would only have been possible in Photoshop; in fact, Lightroom's full name is ... Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

We would always see and hear the “I like to get it right in camera” comments (well...don't we all?!?) but this made me think ... will we now start to see the 'I only edit in Lightroom' comments as being the modern day Put Down attempt ?

Images are edited.

They ALWAYS have been.

Even choosing a paper is (in my opinion) editing, because paper influences the look / feel of the final image.

Just a thought 🤔

Anyway, if you haven’t see my Color Space video, here it is …

Restoring a World War 1 Military Portrait using Photoshop

So yesterday I took some time out from recording a new video to work on restoring this Military Portrait for my Uncle Jeff.

Not something I usually do, in fact I think I've done one in the past, but it feels great to be able to be help like this as this is a portrait of a family member that my uncle is researching for his next book…

I guess this took about 3 hours to do, initially jumping in using the Photo Restoration Neural Filter in the current Photoshop Beta.

This certainly didn’t get the job done, but it did give me a good starting point…

As the original photograph was oval in shape, for my Uncle’s research / book I opted to make it a traditional portrait crop which meant adding in a completely new background which was reminiscent of the time it would have originally been taken. This also had to be done due to the small amount of background being visible and clean of damage.

I shared the result across social media yesterday evening and the response has been great, so I’ll look to add a video onto my YouTube Channel going over some of the key retouching points / techniques in the very near future.

BRILLIANT! LIVE Setting for PERFECT Photographs + INTELLIGENT Presets in Lightroom

The LIVE photo setting in the iPhone / mobile phones is INCREDIBLE!

Long Exposure Photography, being able to choose an exact moment before or after you took a photograph AND then there's Presets in Lightroom. Great advances in technology or cheating?

Whatever you think...it's VERY clever stuff!