One way I am looking at this is a fresh start. And trying not to dwell too much on past work. Revising past work would be slippery slope to go down. Even now I look at older work and tend to leave it alone. It represents where I was at that moment in time. I went through a “big color” phase, using some third party software to amp the color and that work now looks a bit garish to me now. Sometimes I do go back and seek out imagery I never worked on. I then process them to my current standards. I have always thought color to be a tricky thing and personal at that. I always want to push it to just beyond that might seem to be “real”. And I often go to far. Black and white is easier for me to work with, having spent so much time in the darkroom and all. It largely about contrast and density. You don’t have to judge whether the color is too magenta or too red. It will be interesting to see the advances of Photoshop and how they may affect my work. I suspect in some respects it will make my life easier. I recall when I kept up with Photoshop upgrades, it was fun to have the improved ability to massage images with new tools. What they once called fill was now separated into white and high lights And blacks became blacks and shadow. My main reason for my final upgrade to CS6 was the content aware fill tool, which I understand is way more sophisticated now. And I have never had access to content aware move tool. So from that standpoint it should be fun. But what confused me when I did upgrade is they move things around and call them different names or eliminate things all together, forcing me into new routines. I just hope all my actions I have created migrate successfully. It would be a pain to have to recreate them. But the new system is probably a month out, so I have time to mentally prep for it all. It is really a big change for me. I just hope it is not over whelming. But as I have said, my old system isn’t going away. So I will always have my old comfortable shoes to slip into if I need to, eh?
