Hello Ken,
I like this idea! But, to be honest my major stumbling block with PL is still building good masks. At the moment, I can't think of any technique that I've used in PS that I haven't been able to replicate in PL; once I knew where a similar tool was available in PL and/or what it's called. And, as I've mentioned more than once I'm very pleased that PL gives me capability with things that I can't do or can't easily do in PS.
Going back to your Jen post and the subsequent challenge posted by Herbert123 (I believe), I have to admit that I didn't feel complete with that exercise. I learned a lot, but I don't remember anyone but me posting something related to Herbert's experiment and I had new problems with the BM tool that I didn't have when working on the Jen image. Why? Dunno. No response to my questions. Therefore, I simply gave up and figured I'd continue to use Topaz Remask whenever I needed to build a mask in PL.
But... I recently come across a PS tutorial by Lee Varis going over the advantages of using the "a" or "b" channels in LAB to build masks. I tried to duplicate the tutorial in PL, but wasn't very successful. But, to "fess up" I didn't have much time to work on it so, maybe, I could have figured more out given more time and effort.
Anyway, bottom line for me is that I'd like to become more efficient with the general image editing tasks I've performed for years in PS. For example,
1. The use of several techniques for building masks.
2. The use and considerations of the Brush Editor. IMO this is a
very powerful panel with sliders that I don't really understand. For example, I've built my own very soft custom brush, but I've never been totally happy with the way the brush works. I have a feeling that the "Steps" slider is causing the jumpiness that I have, but I don't understand the exact correlation between the settings of this slider and performance of the brush.
3. General image repair. I've played around with the Stamp, Copy Brush, and Remove brush and have been reasonably successful with them (mostly the Remove brush), but, again, sometimes they do wonky things and I don't understand why. I, also, wouldn't want to face a real challenge in this area given my current skill level.
4. Dodging/burning. We've got the Brighter/Darker brushes...there many other techniques to doing this type of work. Is there a preferred method in PL? Again, I'm comfortable with simple dodging & burning, but what about more complicated techniques using blending modes, etc?
5. Filter brush. There are more than a dozen choices for Type of brush, but only a couple seem of any real value to the photographer working with PL. Is this tool targeted primarily to graphic artist types and other doing mostly vector type work? For the photographer, I could think of more useful things that I might wish to brush on an image.
That's just off the top of my head. Maybe none of this is what you are looking for, but all are areas that I'd like to learn more about. But, and no offense meant to anyone on these boards I really don't see the true value of your proposal without having, at least, one or two masters of PL participating on a regular basis.
Anyway, all this and 5 bucks will get ya a latte at Starbucks!
Best regards,
AlanH
become a new discussion thread titled
When I was shooting film, the first thing I did when I got the slides back was to use my little Agfa Viewer to drastically cull the slides.
