I was lucky enough that when I was taking photography in school, my teachers were big fans of learning how to look at things and see what you wanted at the scene. I try to keep the images I see while shooting fresh in my head so that I can come home and try and get as close on screen as what I saw when I took the photo. I think that has been the single biggest thing that has helped me as a photographer.
I’m thinking perhaps of making a stronger point for learning/thinking about processing in terms of results and processes as opposed to particular software steps.
In that same lane of thought, from an article linked below, I thought this was good:
No one ever looks at a house and says “I wonder what brand of hammer they used to build that house? That’s how I’ll know if it’s a good house or not.”
@patdavid Incidentally I’ve been offered the chance to speak for 15 - 20 minutes about free software at the photo club at work. I’m going to put tog ether some slides (so much good stuff in this thread already), and I can put the slides on github or something. Maybe we can start sharing this kind of information so others can reuse it and adapt it.
Yes, and yes. We absolutely should be sharing whatever resources we can for this. I have no problem doing this on github if you think it might be the best way:
Just hit me up and I’ll add anyone that wants in. I can start by adding in the slides I sent to pippin to use at LGM2015 “State of the Libre Graphics” presentation.
If you’d like a hand with your slide deck please don’t hesitate to hit me up (for assets/images or more).
So does that mean that Adobe CS is free for anyone to use if all they want to do is view existing Adobe-format files? Interesting if true.
Another way that a subscription model can get you into trouble: I went to a talk on processing of nighttime photos. When the speaker tried to fire up PS to demonstrate, he hit a license check dialog. He said he had checked and verified his license on that laptop earlier that day in preparation for the talk, but apparently that wasn’t enough: Adobe decided it wanted a verification right then. He had to leave the audience waiting while he wandered off to find someone who could help him get on the network; that done, we all got to watch as he connected to the network and then to Adobe and finally got PS running. Most embarrassing.
Live demos are risky enough without wondering if the software is suddenly going to decide it’s time for a license check. At many talk locations, a network connection isn’t an option. I’d also hate to be processing vacation photos in a hotel and have my software suddenly stop working because the hotel wi-fi is broken. I’m somewhat amazed so many people are willing to put up with that.
I gave my talk and demo yesterday, it went pretty well! I gave a brief overview of Free Software and talked about what Free software means to me as an artist. Then I spoke the available tools, where to get help, and how to contribute. Then I demoed some of the tools available in Rawtherapee (Lab adjustments, film emulation) and gimp (wavelet decompose & a bit from your skin retouching tutorial, some gmic filters, and a little resynthisizer).
I ended up talking for the whole hour! And I was asked to do another session where I actually go through the whole skin retouching tutorial. So awesome!
People were curious about free software and I explained how projects work, how most free software projects are not corporate backed, how they get stuff (web hosting, downloads).
It was solid advice to demo cross-platform software, so RT and gimp were good calls! I also found another Linux user, which is great as well, don’t encounter too many others that use it in the wild.
Anyway, hopefully I’ll be sending a pull request soon!
Glad to hear it went well! It’s easy to lose track of time and just keep going when you’re talking about a subject you enjoy personally.
This always helps a ton, I think. Especially with such a dominant number of OS X/Win users out there comparatively. Remember – this is just a gateway drug to more software freedom!
Got it! I had to make some changes to integrate it with the existing content nicely. I’ve done that, merged it, and have issued a PR back to your fork to keep things up to date.
