How good are you at photoshop?

[snow patrol]

Hi all,

i've been a cc subscriber for a few years now but typically only tend to use lightroom. However, i've come to realise that there are certain things that lightroom just doesn't cut it for and i've been delving more and more into photoshop...with limited success i must add.

It's just so massive and daunting and i feel like, as someone in their mid thirties already, it might be 'too late' for me to really learn it and get to grips with! Is that a silly thing to say?

Realistically, how easy is it (with the help of youtube / guides etc) to get 'good' at photoshop? Or is it something that takes years and years of continued use?

I'd be interested to hear other people's tales of ps

 

[snow patrol]

What do you shoot?

For portrait, it would be good to learn basics of dodge & burn, as well as frequency separating (though plug-ins like Portraiture can achieve good results too). You'll also need to know how to use liquify and layer masks. Image compositing would be good to learn.

For landscape, it would be good to learn basics of luminosity masks, and get familiar with plug-ins like Nik Collections, as well as adding orton effects. Stacking techniques could also be useful for longer exposure shots.

For architecture, you'll need to know the theory of tilt/shift as well as keystone/distortion correction and stitching in post-processing.

For street & journalism, I don't think altering the contents of the photos to be a good idea, so these rely less on Photoshop.

I tend to do weddings for the most part. And at the moment i'm only really using photoshop when i need to do proper spot removal or removing background distractions on certain shots. Lightroom's capability for this is pretty limited to be fair.

I don't want to learn everything, as i'm sure 95% of what photoshop offers is not relevant to me, but it would be good to really get to grips and practice with things that would be WORTH learning. I'm not even massively familiar with layers etc, apart from the basic concept!