I’ve set myself a goal for the next year to become more proficient at Photoshop. I use a variety of editing tools now, most of which are slider-based. You move a slider and watch what happens on the screen. The sliders in most applications are laid out in a nice orderly fashion, and you can literally move from top to bottom and achieve a well-edited well-presented image.
Photoshop is not remotely like that. It’s like making pizza with every ingredient possible available to you in small containers on the kitchen counter. There is some semblance of order (Camera Raw, basic exposure adjustments, image cleanup) but once past this, the choices become ridiculously complex, with the opportunity to create whole new “flavours” of pizza by taking previously used flavours and combining them in whole new ways. No cookbooks, just imagination and an ability to reason how things might go together.
Add to that the challenge of learning something new as an older adult. We don’t absorb information the same way as we did as a child. We don’t necessarily retain it even when learned. Memory declines in uneven ways too – with muscle memory and the memory of physically doing things changing at rates different from the memory of reciting things or recollection. So I’m not only setting a goal but trying to find the best method to accomplish it. Continue reading “Getting Inside My Head – Learning New Things When Older”
It’s been a long standing complaint that Adobe Lightroom is frustratingly slow to load and display images, particularly previews on import or previews when switching from Library to Develop. Adobe promised to deal with this issue, going so far as to release a 
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