From black-and-white to color

In the mid-1960s, I purchased my first SLR camera, a Pentax, replacing it a few years later with a couple of Nikons. I shot a lot of film for about 15 years, but never made a color print, instead concentrating on black-and-white photography and doing my own film (mostly Tri-X) processing and printing.









I didn't shoot as much for the next 15 years, but then discovered Photoshop, using it first primarily as a tool for producing web graphics, and later as a tool for enhancing photographs. The biggest benefit Photoshop provided me was a path to color photography. Photoshop gave me a sense that I could control the outcome of the image during processing and make it my own.

Photoshop is broad and deep. It took quite a while to gain a reasonable level of competency and it would have taken longer without the video training on the lynda.com and National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) web sites, two resources that I highly recommend.

I still love the black-and-white image, but it's good to have color as an option, too. Nearly all of my images over the past three or four years are color.