Hurter - The best of Adobe Photoshop: techniques and images from the professional photographers

Photoshop and the digital revolution have helped propel wedding photographers to the level of fine artists. Photograph by Jeff Hawkins Photography.

Adobe Photoshop has expanded the playing field for most photographers. Perhaps the greatest advantage of being a professional photographer in the digital age is creative control. According to Kathleen Hawkins, the other half of Jeff Hawkins Photography, a very successful wedding studio in Long-wood, FL, the greatest benefit is the creative control of our work. The pair has a renewed excitement for covering weddings and an appreciation for being able to view the images right awaya powerful advantage for both photographers and clients. Photographers are no longer just recording images and sending them off to the lab for color correction, retouching, and printing. Says Kathleen, We can now perfect our art to the fullest extent of our vision!

In the high-style world of wedding photography, the impact of Photoshop has permanently changed the style and scope of the genre. The photographer, in the comfort of his home or studio, can now routinely accomplish special effects that could only be achieved by an expert darkroom technician in years past. Photoshop, paired with the many available plug-in filters, has made wedding photography the most creative and lucrative specialty in all of photography. And brides love it. Digital albums, assembled using Photoshop-compatible design templates, have become the preferred album type. The style and uniqueness they bring to the wedding experience make every bride and groom a celebrity.

The photographers featured in this book are digital artists. While they are not above using time-saving shortcuts in the image-processing side of things, they still spend a great deal of time perfecting each image that goes out to a client. Perhaps this aspect of contemporary photography, more than any other, has accounted for the profound increase in photographic creativity. This fine-art approach, in turn, has raised the bar financially for many photographers, allowing them to charge premium prices. This is particularly true with wedding photographers who have seen the budgets for wedding photography rise for the last several years. Says wedding photographer David Beckstead, I treat each and every image as an art piece. If you pay this much attention to the details of the final image, brides will pick up on it and often replace the word photographer with the word artist.

For Connecticuts Charles and Jennifer Maring, Photoshop has opened up a wealth of creative opportunities, transporting them from being merely photographers to the status of artists and graphic designers. Their unique digital wedding albums include an array of beautifully designed pages with graphic elements that shape each page and layout. Their storytelling style is as sleekly designed as the latest issue of Modern Bride. The Marings not only work each image but also design each album. Says Charles, There is a unique feeling when designing the art. I dont know what an image will look like until I am two-thirds done with it. I also dont know where the vision comes from. I relate this to the art of photographya higher place maybe. This talented couple believes so totally in controlling the end product that they also own a digital lab called R-Lab. We have been totally digital for almost 10 years, and the challenge and precision of the change has actually made us better photographers than we were with film, says Charles. He believes the outside of the album is every bit as important to his upscale clients as each page therein and has been known to use covers ranging from black leather, to metal, to red iguana skin. He has even found a local bookbinder with his own working bindery to finish his digital albums.

David Beckstead works each image in Photoshop to produce the best possible interpretation of the moment. NEXT TWO PAGESFuture photographers will have to be more than just photographers, they will have to be terrific designers, as well. So says Charles Maring, who, along with his wife Jennifer and a small staff, shoot, process, design, and output all their own first-class wedding images and albums.

Photoshop is fertile ground for nesting applications like master photographer Yervants Page Gallery, an album-design template system that operates within Photoshop.

Yervants great sense of design and flare as an imagemaker have made him one of the most sought-after wedding photographers in the world.

Maring welcomes the technology. The main thing that will distinguish photographers in the future will be their print- and album-design concepts, he says and notes further that, Design is the future. Just as Photoshop has expanded the creative abilities of every photographer, those tools will also be the yardstick by which contemporary photographers will be judged. With so many creative tools available, particularly those employed by graphic designers, the successful photographer will have to raise the bar and the horizons of their own creativity.