By the time your average digital photographer downloads his photos to the computer, catalogues them and begins to make adjustments, you can have two rolls of film developed and hanging up to dry. You should have your proof sheet and your first set of draft prints by the end of an evening.
If you can run a projection booth you should be able to develop film. It's not that hard!
The discipline you learn is how to visualize your photographs before you even press the shutter button. Developing your film and your draft prints should be, pretty much, academic. The hardest part is figuring out how to make those drafts look like the image you had in your head when you first took the picture.
It's the same skill you need when shooting digitally and it's also the same thing you need when making 3D imagery. If you don't have a good plan before you start, you won't have jack shit when you finish.
The hardest part for the computer to do when rendering complex scenes with lots of characters/objects is doing the pre-calculations. The computer has to calculate all your bound-volume hierarchies, map the materials, locate the lights and camera(s). If your scene is particle heavy or has a lot of nested BVHs, your calculation time grows exponentially. Half the work of rendering is just ray tracing what's already been calculated. The pixel dimensions of your image and your oversampling effect render times more than anything else by the time you get this far.
I have Adobe CS but I'm moving away from it. Gradually migrating all my work away from Adobe or, at least, into something I can import into other programs.
The cost of Adobe software is bad enough but the subscription pricing is what killed it for me. No effin' way will I ever give anybody that kind of control over my computer or my files! I'd rather cut off my own arm!
GIMP does virtually everything Adobe can do. You just have to learn how to use it. If you don't know the basics, it doesn't matter what you use.
I was attending a lecture at a local photography club where they invited this guy who was supposed to be some kind of famous photographer. I don't even remember his name, to be honest. He was going through this big speil about how he works up his photos in Adobe and I was just face palming the whole time.
He was going on about how he uses the Histogram/Levels dialogue then he adjusts the contrast with the contrast filter...on and on...
After the lecture, I asked him why he didn't use the Curves dialogue. He answered, "Oh, that's too complicated!" When I said that the Curves dialogue can do everything that the Levels dialogue AND the Contrast filters can do in one tenth the time, everybody else started saying, "But, you're the FILM guy! You don't know how to use Photoshop!" So I pulled out my laptop, loaded up a picture in Photoshop and proceeded to adjust a picture using Curves in all of thirty seconds.
I asked a cogent question but got a BS answer. I restated the question but got bullied in response. Finally, I demonstrated my point and, still, nobody understood but, instead, looked at me like I had three heads.
There was another lecture by a guy from Eastman Kodak where some guy stopped the lecture to ask what an F-stop was!
If you don't know your basics, it doesn't matter whether you use film or a computer. You'll be stuck no matter if you use GIMP or Photoshop.
Probably, the number one thing that anybody should do, whether they've been shooting pictures for decades or if they're just starting out is to buy a good book, pour a cup of coffee then sit down and read.
If you can run a projection booth you should be able to develop film. It's not that hard!
The discipline you learn is how to visualize your photographs before you even press the shutter button. Developing your film and your draft prints should be, pretty much, academic. The hardest part is figuring out how to make those drafts look like the image you had in your head when you first took the picture.
It's the same skill you need when shooting digitally and it's also the same thing you need when making 3D imagery. If you don't have a good plan before you start, you won't have jack shit when you finish.
The hardest part for the computer to do when rendering complex scenes with lots of characters/objects is doing the pre-calculations. The computer has to calculate all your bound-volume hierarchies, map the materials, locate the lights and camera(s). If your scene is particle heavy or has a lot of nested BVHs, your calculation time grows exponentially. Half the work of rendering is just ray tracing what's already been calculated. The pixel dimensions of your image and your oversampling effect render times more than anything else by the time you get this far.
I have Adobe CS but I'm moving away from it. Gradually migrating all my work away from Adobe or, at least, into something I can import into other programs.
The cost of Adobe software is bad enough but the subscription pricing is what killed it for me. No effin' way will I ever give anybody that kind of control over my computer or my files! I'd rather cut off my own arm!
GIMP does virtually everything Adobe can do. You just have to learn how to use it. If you don't know the basics, it doesn't matter what you use.
I was attending a lecture at a local photography club where they invited this guy who was supposed to be some kind of famous photographer. I don't even remember his name, to be honest. He was going through this big speil about how he works up his photos in Adobe and I was just face palming the whole time.
He was going on about how he uses the Histogram/Levels dialogue then he adjusts the contrast with the contrast filter...on and on...
After the lecture, I asked him why he didn't use the Curves dialogue. He answered, "Oh, that's too complicated!" When I said that the Curves dialogue can do everything that the Levels dialogue AND the Contrast filters can do in one tenth the time, everybody else started saying, "But, you're the FILM guy! You don't know how to use Photoshop!" So I pulled out my laptop, loaded up a picture in Photoshop and proceeded to adjust a picture using Curves in all of thirty seconds.
I asked a cogent question but got a BS answer. I restated the question but got bullied in response. Finally, I demonstrated my point and, still, nobody understood but, instead, looked at me like I had three heads.
There was another lecture by a guy from Eastman Kodak where some guy stopped the lecture to ask what an F-stop was!
If you don't know your basics, it doesn't matter whether you use film or a computer. You'll be stuck no matter if you use GIMP or Photoshop.
Probably, the number one thing that anybody should do, whether they've been shooting pictures for decades or if they're just starting out is to buy a good book, pour a cup of coffee then sit down and read.
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