Jamie v. Photoshop: the Epic Battle

I spent a good portion of the day the day today trying to make sense of Adobe Photoshop.  I never worked with the program much, because why should I have to wade through 15 different layers and 50 different "adjust color" options?  It's nonsense!  By the time the cards are photographed, Ashley and I have already made tons of artistic choices.  It should be simple to take a photo and display it online.

I'm sure all of you photographer types out there are cringing at my philistine comments.  Before you get too upset, I do realize that photography is an art form.  But it's not my art form.  I have a decent point-and-shoot camera that bought because it fits in my purse and is a pretty blue color.  

Anyway, the photos on my Etsy site were terrible--the colors were washed out, huge portions were in shadow, and everything looked really grainy.  I read several articles that the most important thing in an online shop is the photography, so I dove into the murky swampland that is Photoshop to try to give the pics some much needed TLC.  I spent hours trying to figure out how to size the images so that I would be able to upload them to Etsy (stupid 2MB size limit!).  For some reason, when I opened an image, only a hugely magnified version of a tiny corner of the picture was displayed.  When I tried to zoom out, the corner got smaller, but the rest of the picture remained MIA.  I think it was hiding from my poor photo-editing skills.

I eventually managed to get the photo sized appropriately, but the quality was still incredibly poor.  I set about adding multitudes of adjustment layers and fiddling with light and contrast and color and saturation and hue.  Every time I adjusted one element another one went to heck.  I swear, Photoshop is like a boxing master who manages to knock me out while I'm blocking a hit from the other side.  How can it attack me from so many directions at once? I think I've developed a touch of Dementia Pugilistica.  And what did I get in return for all of my efforts?  Grainy neon-colored photos.

Apparently, it's really hard to make a poor-quality photo look great even if you know what you're doing with Photoshop.  I consulted Ashley (who understands the great mysteries of computerized art, like the difference between RGB and CMYK) and came to the conclusion that I really just needed to take new photos.  So that's what I did.  I did manage to use Photoshop to do a little polishing on the new pics, and the results weren't too bad.  I still have some learning to do, but at least I'm making progress!  Photoshop will not defeat me!