Hmmm.... Now this could be a can of worms.

Personally, I agree with most of what you said here. Although my own viewpoint would be that there should be some kind of distinction between photography and Photoshop. That isnt to say that Photoshop art isnt art. I just dont think it's the same as photography. It uses a different skill set. As long as one can get a high resolution image, Photoshop makes traditional skills fairly unimportant.

I've mentioned before that I like to project a photo onto the wall in my studio and work as if I'm on site. I also love that I have the ability to adjust brightness and contrast to reveal different aspects of the scene. Sometimes I even switch to gray scale.

I also like to take digital pictures of my work in progress and display it on the computer screen. A smaller image can reveal a lot about composition and color use. Once again, switching to gray scale can show value problems and allow corrections.

Of course, the purists might say this is cheating, like when people accuse Vermeer and others of projecting onto the canvas. As for me, I'm not really convinced that that's cheating. Does copying a photo onto canvas really diminish the artistic merit of the finished product? Personally, I dont do it because cameras add so much distortion and it's pretty obvious most of the time.

So there's my 2 cents. Thanks for this article, Courtney, and welcome aboard.

Courtney:

About 25 years ago an artist friend rushed up to me all enthused. "I just bought a Macintosh computer," she said. I was stunned. "You are using a computer?" She looked over the top of her glasses and said, "It's just another tool." I'll always remember that and realize how, viewed from an artist's perspective, just about anything can be useful.

Tim

I agree completely with your premise that technology is just a tool, and neither elevates or delegitimizes the work. However, one thought occurs to me is that tools and how they are used can expand possibilities but also invoke limitations. A 1" wide brush has an altogether different set of capabilities and limitations from a #00 round. When we select a tool, we need to be aware of all that we are selecting a set of limitations as well. Consider the feather quill pen, supplanted by steel nibs. Cutting a quill was a tedious and exacting process. With the invention of the steel nib, suddenly everyone could practice good penmanship much more easily. However, a feather quill has a unique recognizable quality, that was lost to the innovation driven by expedience.

Knowing Photoshop capabilities and limitations implies knowing how digital photography works, which further implies knowing how film photography works, and the limitations and compromises made at each stage. Color gamut is just one limitation that is a factor in the use of any of the image capture and manipulation tools in that. We still need to know the basics.