Dave wrote:
<snip>
If only for one moment in doubt, ask me and I will post a photo of the books in my library. I also buy monthly magazines on PS and Painter.
If I knew earlier that you are so clever, I could have saved the money and ask you how to do it. Maybe I should ask
Cher Threinen-Pendarvis, Jeremy Sutton and those people why they do not simply use Photoshop but waste their time on Corel Painter’s X’s Quick-Clone, which is in fact, for newbies.
Dave Du Plessis
I don’t deny many of them are very good, some of them are experts on some way, but because of the limitation of word I often don’t suggest any book (for fun is ok but not for learning). Video Tutorial is better than book, but it too has some limitation, and depending on what you want to learn and what the tutorial is teaching.
I have looked at few Video Tutorial clips to find that very few are good to spend time watching, and money to learn some real technique. This is what I am looking at.
– Book, most book usually show some dirty quick tricks the authors learn from some forums. They may require some understanding of how Photoshop works, little practice to gather some thing to write about. Or it doesn’t require much Photoshop skill.
IOW, knowledge but not real skill
– Video Tutorial, many of them using low-rez image to teach some dirty quick reparing technique. Yes, I do agree they look good, and very helpful to most newbie to learn newer command. And quite often I suggest newbie to learn from video tutorial, and they usually help to get to know Photoshop.
But the real deal should be video tutorial of Headshot Portrait Retouching those worl on very small detail, zoom in 100-300% to work on even smaller area, and to work with real skin-texture, human skintone etc.. not fashion, magazine type etc.. this often teach you the real retouching technique and good for large print etc..
– Do you want to test your retouching work (especially masking)?
Since the printing price is so cheap these days (used to be $3-4 per 4×6" print now you can get for around 13-20 cents a pop) and the INK doesn’t know nor want to lie (human like our friends or ourselves <bg>) so I would suggest to make a 4×6" and 8×10" print to find out the true about our work.
Or *if* you can spot little error on 4×6" print then you know for sure it will be a much bigger error on 8×10 print, and if you can spot little error on 8×10" print then you know it would be a much larger on 20×30" print etc.. and by spending few bucks on the larger error we will learn to pay much closer attention to much smaller part. Too me it’s a very cheap lesson.
– And if you work on small detail work, you may learn how ugly human may be <bg>, you may be able to see the different skin-texture between age’s, race’s, sex’s, and few others. And if you work on small detail work you may find many people turn human skin-texture into plastic look, then some plug-in company uses some dirty trick to replace real human skin-texture with digital skin-texture (after the real skin-texture been destroyed by the soften/blur option). Or you should be able to tell the difference between real and faked human skin-texture.