Elected “Photoshop Pro of the Month” by Photoshop Madness / graphic-design.com

Well I didn’t see that one coming.

Photoshop Madness has elected me “Photoshop Pro of the Month”:

“Nicolas Noben sent in this Photoshop tutorial (full w/pictorial) but while we were browsing his site we found an extraordinary collection of images in addition to tutorials. The best part is Nicolas is a serious artisan, and has virtually nothing in the site or the blog that is not functioning and essential. BRAVO, Nicolas!”

I browse the web to find so many cheap and cheesy tutorials, I always thought it would be nice to document how the pro do it. My goal is to provide photoshop tricks that the pro actually use. Often, these turn out to be much less complicated that what people would imagine. “If it’s not complicated, it’s not pro”. Truth is, people should concentrate more on the light and colors when they capture it than trying to get something out of a bad shot.

That said, post-processing is vital in digital photography. When an image is rendered to film, there is a post-processing made by the chemicals and the setup. With digital, it’s just millions of 100101010 absolutely pure, recorded by the CCD/CMOS of the camera. Granted, the software within the camera has a tone curve specific to its model and renders the image in a certain way, which can be seen as post-processing… But trully you get something rather flat and dull coming out of your camera.

That’s when digital post-processing comes in. Digital gives you flexibility that film doesn’t. When you pick a film such as velvia or nc (natural colors), you’re already picking a type of post-processing for your image that you haven’t shot yet. Digital gives you purity in the way that you get the data as seen per an electronic device.

That flexibility given by digital recording of light isn’t always a good thing. That’s when all the bad post-processing comes in, cheesy effects and weird modifications to images. With great power comes great responsability, remember?…

But honestly, if you’re sharpening your image from the camera, you are post-processing. Even the high-end DSLR from Nikon have reputation to output dull looking and flat images. Nikon agrees that pros know what they’re doing and just don’t take for granted that the camera will do everything for them.

Thank you graphic-design.com for this recognition, I’ve got a lot more to write and you’ve just made it worth it.

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