Guide: Building a Photo/Video Editing PC

 
Who said people aren't easily influenced? I certainly am, I saw this post on Gavin Hoey's new website, and I was instantly intrigued, I didn't know that more RAM affected Photoshop that much, I was intrigued about the fall of the prices for the SSDs, and the idea kept hunting me for almost three weeks until I succumbed to the lure of an even faster PC (I already had a fast one) and I built a new one, more details after the jump.

Photoshop Elements 10 Depth of Field Effect

I tried out Photoshop Elements 10's depth of field effect on the shot above.  It's a big improvement over the original shot:

The original shot.  What's with the evil eye, lady?

This is one effect that I can't pull off in Lightroom.  To create the appearance of a shallow depth of field with PSE 10, I used the guided mode to walk me through the steps.  First, I used a selection brush to identify the subject.  Next I clicked on the button "add blur."  Finally I dragged a lever to determine the intensity of the effect.  It's a pretty simple process, although a similar result can probably be achieved using a gaussian blur with a layer mask.

Understanding Post-Processing by Mitchell Kanashkevich

cover of Understanding Post-Processing

 Besides Rick Sammon's Light It! app, another tutorial I read over the weekend and that I'm excited about is Mitchell Kanashkevich's ebook Understanding Post-Processing.  Whereas Rick Sammon's app is addressed toward beginners and novices, Mitchell's ebook is primarily for intermediate or advanced amateurs and even pros.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mitchell Kanashkevich is a travel photographer who's career as a pro started taking off not too long ago.  He's very modest about describing how he got there, but his gallery shows that his newfound success in his photographic career is no accident.

ABOUT THE EBOOK
Many times, I've taken photos of scenes that had gorgeous lighting to my mind's eye but I felt I was unable to recreate that beauty in the photo that I took.  When I saw Mitchell's photos, I thought that many of his final images glowed with the kind of light that I have sometimes seen and sought to capture.

Mitchell has two ebooks, Seeing the Light and this one, Understanding Post-Processing.  I thought to myself: I've seen beautiful light, so perhaps his first ebook is not the critical piece that I'm missing.  I figured I would probably get his first ebook eventually, but I thought I had more to learn from his second book.

Mitchell's ebook is written with Photoshop and Lightroom in mind, though the techniques can be translated to other software as well, including Photoshop Elements 9 (whew, thank goodness).  His book assumes that the reader already has a good working knowledge of postprocessing programs, so it's not for the postprocessing novice and is written pithily (really -- it's 37 pages).  If, for example, layer masking is new to you, you might find this book challenging.  Rather, his book is for a reader who knows the technical steps of using various features of postprocessing programs, but is looking for direction in applying those techniques to photos.  (That's exactly where I am right now.)

Mitchell first discusses briefly the main tools that he uses, then he goes through 5 case studies of how he used those tools to achieve his final results, step-by-step.  In describing his steps, Mitchell explains his thought process, and shows the settings he used together with screen captures of the edits.  See thumbnails of his book at his website here.  The case studies all follow a similar process, but each one emphasizes a particular tool, thus providing readers with a view of Mitchell's general postprocessing workflow, as well as a better understanding of how particular tools can be used.

How well does the book fulfill its promise?  If you're a photographer with the level of postprocessing skill for whom this ebook is intended, none of the techniques are truly novel or earth-shattering.  However, this guide afforded me a glimpse into a gifted photographer's thoughts as he works on his images, and walking through the images showed me not only how he realizes his creative vision, but more importantly for my purposes, gave me insight and direction for elevating my post-processing work.

Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3

This past weekend I learned some postprocessing by tinkering around with Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3. 

For comparison, this was the original shot:

I've read a lot of criticism about the X3 from long-time Paint Shop Pro users, but I like X3.  Maybe it's because I don't know PSP well enough to know any better.

What do I like about PSP X3? It's much more affordable than Photoshop and so far seems to handle everything I've needed so far.  On the downside, it does crash from time to time but I've avoided almost all crashes by taking care not to do anything while PSP is processing a command.  Another disadvantage of PSP compared to Photoshop is that there are a myriad of Photoshop resources compared to PSP.  However, PSP seems similar enough to Photoshop that it has been fairly easy for me to learn from Photoshop tutorials and videos and apply the techniques to PSP.

What about X3 vs. Photoshop Elements 8?  I have both and in my view, X3 is more intuitive and user-friendly than PSE8.  PSP also has layer masks that work the way they're supposed to (instead of the workaround needed for PSE).  Here's a comparison by PC Magazine.

In summary, Paintshop Photo Pro X3 is a capable photo editor that is much more affordable than the industry standard image editor Photoshop.  For casual (as opposed to professional) family photographers who are new to photo editing and want to get started in photo editing without having to make the significant investment required for Photoshop, PSP X3 deserves a close look.

Disclosure: I'm not affiliated with Corel and have received no compensation (monetary or otherwise) for this blog entry.