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Craftsmanship & Work Ethic

Print versus web, versus print books. So, print versus web, a website social media, or a print book. And I feel like we've kind of, I'm not sure if we've beaten this to death yet, but We're gonna. You were gonna. So again, you know. So I'm an educator so I have some education stuff in here. But you really just need the work about us and the contact. I have separated books for different categories. Social media. So here's my personal philosophy about it. It doesn't have to be anybody else's. I do not have a business account on my Facebook. That's my personal account. I post my photography on it, my thoughts on the world than life. People find me on that but it's not really my business. That's just my personal choice. A lot of people will have a business site on their Facebook. And I know this because algorithm shifts and people are not sure if Facebook is dying or what they should do. I tend to think of Facebook as personal and Instagram is professional, Linkedin, 100% is profession...

al for me. And as I said Behance is more arty for me and more of a resource for me. You will not see Pinterest on here because as I said, I don't use it. Printbook. I haven't had a printed portfolio book since 15, oh my lord, 20 years. I have not had a printed book in 20 years. Doesn't mean you shouldn't. I'm kind of existing. However, I am gonna tell you I think it's way too expensive. Why do it? It's so expensive. I have had students give me their books. I have had people meet me and like Adobe Max and hand me their portfolio on a printed thing and I'm like, that's beautiful and I'm throwing it away and I feel awful. So I'm not a big fan. Are you a fan? Every job I've ever gotten, my book, every time I've given my book, I didn't get the job. Every time. So the last three portfolios- and I just print them out vossy but I've never got those back either so I am done on books. It's going to the website. I hope that's not too controversial but there you go. (gasps) The horror. Okay, I'm really afraid there's a typo here. So craftsmanship and work ethic. So here, we're kinda wrapping this down here. We're near the end and I really believe in the end, this job absolutely boils down to craftsmanship and work ethic. That's all it is. Craftsmanship, work ethic. And what I mean by that is master your craft. Now, I said earlier, and I really hold to this. You guys don't have to know everything. You don't need to know every bellin, whistling, quick key and function and la la la. I'm an educator, I wanna teach you these things. I think they're great. I want you to go draw, I want you to learn photography. But I don't want you to give yourself an ulcer trying to find out everything. I don't want you to wait to start working. You know who I'm talking to. Now, now, now. You're ready now. Keep learning. Don't get stagnant. But don't feel like you can't start cause you don't know every quick key in photoshop. I don't know every quick key. Honestly, between the two of us, I'll be watching him work, all of the sudden, he'll do something and I'm like, what the heck was that? I am a workaholic. I've worked with photoshop at least five days a week, without fail, even if I'm on a vacation. I can't believe I admitted that in public. And there are still things that I don't know about photoshop You don't need to know it all. But can I give them the five? Lay it out. You wanna be a retoucher, you gotta be master masker. If you are not, don't start. If you suck at masking, don't even apply because they won't hire you again. You need to know how to change color. Adjustment layers. And you added one, it was tone? Color and tone? Color and tone, yeah. I didn't put that on there. Be a master of color and then be a master of lightening and darkening. So when I get stuck, I just look at an angle. It's either too light, too dark, or the wrong color. It's one of those three. And if you can do that, you can pretty much do anything. And then it's just either big and a lot or a little bit or detailed. But it does come down to- it only does three things. It goes color and light and dark. Color, tone, value, light, dark. And you notice I didn't say master adjustment layers? I didn't say master curves. I don't care how you get there. Many roads lead to wrong. Just make sure you can do it, okay? Then managing your layers. You need to know where you're at. If you don't know where you're at, you're at nightmare. So you gotta know how to manage your layers. And with that, you need to know how to get files into photoshop. That's kinda basic but you definitely need to know how to manage getting layers, getting images in and out, and just how to organize. And I would say singulate, you need to have control over your destination. Your file size. Because I can't tell you how many people do a masterpiece of art and it's like, oh, it's this big. And there's no awareness of image size and DPI. So if you do one, two, three, four, eh, four things and you can master that, you're ready to work. File size. Where do you start off? If you're just gonna start one today, what do you do? If I was doing a generic portfolio, fun piece, eight by 10, 300 DPI. 300? Yup. Okay. How is that for right off the cuff? How about you? Eight by 10, I'd do 200. Oh, well, show off. And he's got that little wakem. So what are you gonna do? Oh. No, I'm kidding, alright. Here's the other thing. Put the time in. I have a personal issue I have where I keep hearing people say, oh I need the quick key. What's the quick key? What's the quick, quick, quick? And you know, I feel like this. Get good, then get fast. Get good, then get fast. So put the time in, do the work. It's so basic. And it's not that hard. It's time applied. Keep on learning. We have this problem in our industry. This is shocking. There are folks who do work like we do and they stop. They stop learning. And they're done and soured out and they don't know why they're not getting calls anymore when they've been in the industry so long. And it's because they've dived in themselves. They stopped looking at new work. They stopped learning. And you gotta find out some of the new steps in the program. You have to. I'm gonna give a real quick little thing I did. I lecture at Adobe Max a lot. And Thomas knows one of the inventors of photoshop. Four, five years ago. He was at one of my lectures and I talked and Thomas was there. I was so geeked out. It was so exciting. And I went up to him and I said, hi, I'm ... And he said, wow, everything you showed, you could've done in photoshop three. And I said, I know, I'm old school. Isn't that great? He said, yeah, not great. Because photoshop is all about their updates and new set of wonderful. And I was like, oh no. And that's kind of the, no, you need to keep learning. Okay, don't kill yourself. Don't keep yourself an ulcer but keep on moving. And don't leave sight of the big picture, huh? I did that. I flattened out a couple years ago cause there wasn't any more challenges. Anything they threw out, I could do. So I kinda arrived. Again, I didn't know what I didn't know. So Lisa was like, let's go to this Adobe Max in Vegas? No, no. Photoshop world. Photoshop world in Vegas and I was like, oh what do you do. She was like, it's a big get together. They have Margers and then they'll have speakers and folks will be teaching stuff. I was like, alright. You know, not expecting much. I was like, man, there's nothing I can't do. And then you just watch and I watch someone do something I could do but just the different way they did. I was like, wow, that could be I have for those ideas. And then we picked up a number of those things but just hearing it a different way or watching it in a different atmosphere. Going across state lines just to see it in a different way. And that really intrigues something and that sparked something. It really did. I had a learning curve up until three, four years ago. That was fantastically. I did some great art, I think. I'm very proud of it. But in these last three, four years, to travel around and meet different folks and do different art work and learn new techniques, it really just sparked it back up. Yeah, we were both really arrogant. We had done this 25 years, please. And we said, oh my god, there's actually some stuff we can learn here. It was eye opening. It was revolutionary and it's such a little thing. Yeah. And it was a technique the guy didn't succeed in teaching very well. But we were sitting there and we were like, while we know what you're trying to do and it's fascinating, Yeah, you bombed the demo. And yeah, we were in the front row going wow, this is awesome. And he's going, oh my god, it's horrible. Then we talked about all the way five hours back. So, real quick, I just wanna, don't lose sight of the big picture. And what I mean by that is what are you doing this for? What are you doing? If you're in a closet, grinding out tennis shoe retouching and you're miserable, don't do it. Do what you love. Make this fun. You know, life's too short. Don't lose sight of the big picture. And when you're working at three in the morning and you're crying and a job's going bad, that's okay, too. You're not always gonna be there. And sometimes, it's gonna be painful. You're gonna tank on a client. You are gonna screw up so bad on a job that someone's gonna yell at you. Okay. You'll get through it. Don't lose sight of the big picture. You're not this one mistake. You're not this one little bit. You're all of it. If that makes sense. It's your learning parts. And mistakes happen. You're gonna learn big right then. Yeah. And so on that note, there's a lot of places where you can find information on how to do photoshop. As we talked about it here, we were not a photoshop retouching course. We are a business of retouching course. But I wanna give you a couple sites that Simon found that he found really helpful and it talks about photoshop etiquette. And you might find some information in there that you find interesting. There's a lot of the step out there. Some of it, you'll toss out. You'll think it's not valuable. And some of it, you'll really go, oh, I didn't think of that. And it might be something as simple as throw your past away. Or label you're files appropriately. Or name your files with the stock number that it actually came from. Things like that. Don't be a shnook. There's absolutely don't be a shnook in there. I count on that. So again, the ideas get good then get fast and you know, hopefully we can help you and help you move on. Creative live is a great resource. A great low pressure resource. There's no stress. There's no test. There's no limited time. There's no you've gotta be in the freshest mind because you can watch it again later. Thank goodness, right? It's three in the morning. I actually binge watch creative live. I don't know if I should admit that or if there's a group to help you with that if there's a support group. But I'm a creative live binge watcher. Again, get good then get fast. See how we can help. That's my website. Contact me. And we have some classes here. We have some classes at creative live that are actually hands on like, here's how you do some photoshop. So if you're interested, if some of our information has been useful to you, these are more retouching specific workshops and they are definitely pro level. They're definitely about working in a professional environment. So what we talk about are things that if you're working not this is a hobby and I just feel like doing it. Not that you can't use it for that. But it's with that slant of work or work environment. Can I end with a quote? or close end? That Japanese quote I like. And it just keeps sticking in my mind. The quote reads, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time to plant it is right now.