Great news for older users of Photoshop/Lightroom! And it is not what you think.

[DemoTex]

My wife, Dr. DemoTex, is at the American Psychological Association convention in Washington, DC, this week. For her, it is three days of nothing but continuing education (CE) courses to satisfy requirements to keep her licenses in several states. To hear her descriptions of some of these courses, my eyes roll to the back of my head. Not my cup of tea.

But she had to call me today, after what she considered a most interesting CE session. Seems that some psych-types did a study on 70 year-olds. Usual control groups, but here is the meat. Some of the "seniors" learned quilting. Some learned Photoshop/Lightroom. Some learned both quilting and PS/LR. Those learning Photoshop/Lightroom showed enhanced cognitive abilities over the other groups.

Good news for me. I study Photoshop and Lightroom every day. I am good with both, but I use several online tutorials to get in deeper .. every day. Glad to hear that it is helping my 69.5 year old brain. But I thought it was, all along.

[Gabi Hayes]

1. Very very interesting

All I have to do is get a computer with a screen bigger than my 4"er

PowerPoint was about it for me....a tiny bit of Paint, was it?

Have to check it out

Where to learn about those?

Links? Classes?

Thx

They used to teach photoshop in our jr high art classes about 10 yrs Ago

Doubt if they still do

They also did cartoon videos (can't remember the program now) that I synced with their songs and recorded to the VHS tapes they brought in

I still have some unclaimed ones

Where are they? I have ~500, mostly unlabeled

Digression Regression Obsession Confession Depression

[DemoTex]

3. I have taken courses before ..

But I now use Lynda.com and CreativeLife. I think CreativeLife is the best.

[brush]

4. There are tons of Photoshop tutorials on Youtube. The good thing now is you don't...

have to buy the program like you used to have to do — some $600-700 bucks.

Now you rent it online from Adobe's cloud. A single program is $30-40 a month. You can also get the whole Adobe Creative Suite, for more of course.

They started this about 4 years ago to the chagrin of many in the graphics and photo industries as we owed our own versions of the programs on our computers. The advantage being we didn't have to pay to upgrade every time Adobe upgraded from say version 5.5 to version 6.0. Many skipped even two upgrades or more.

Good 'ol Adobe figured out how to stop that. They stopped selling the entire program. To get it you have to sign on to "rent" it by contributing to their continual, monthly revenue stream.

Oh well, at least we get the new upgrades automatically — unless you fail to pay, then you've got nothing unless you kept you old self-owned version somewhere.

[womanofthehills]

8. If you just want Photoshop and Bridge it's only $10.00 a month

I'm a photographer and for me it's a great deal.

[brush]

16. Ten bucks is great. That's down from what it was.

Last edited Sat Aug 5, 2017, 09:54 AM - Edit history (1)

I know it's cheaper for students and faculty.

[mopinko]

6. adobe's website has good tutorials as well.

lots of classes out there, tho. i am pretty self taught, but i went through the continuing studies program at the art institute of chicago. reasonable prices w great teachers.
dont know if other art schools have similar. community colleges are great for that sort of thing, tho.

[Gabi Hayes]

7. Harper! Taken classes there

Thought about that

Thx!

[mopinko]

14. oh yeah. harper will have it.

great place. i <3 community colleges.
i went to waubonsee.

eta- w a student id, you can get anything adobe half price.

[eleny]

2. PhotoImpact was always my favorite since I discovered version 3 eons ago

But PI is no longer supported. So I'm migrating over. Still love the challenges of Painter. Digi art programs have a lot of depth. No surprise you get into something every day.

And I've been sewing since I was about 6. I'm much older now! Something new with that all the time, too. Sewng, serging, coverstitch, making felt. It's a big world.

[NastyRiffraff]

5. Great news!

I've been using Photoshop for years, since v3.0. Glad to know it's good for my brain, although I can't see any results yet!

[brush]

17. Since 3.0, wow. That's about when they introduced layers, right?

[NastyRiffraff]

19. I'm pretty sure it was pre-layers

It's been a long time, so I'm not 100% sure.

[Generic Other]

9. They have never seen me Photoshop

[Expecting Rain]

10. I used Photoshop for over two decades...

...but after paying for PS3, PS5, PS7, CS1, CS3, and CS6, I wasn't a happy camper with Adobe's new rental program.

The problem was, I needed professional image editing software. I tried a "not bad" image editor called "Pixelmator" for Mac. Not bad,. I'd recommend it to friends who wanted a high-end amateur program, but not for me.

Then Affinity Photo was released. I love AP. $50 in the app store ($40 on sale) and I own a very powerful professional grade image editor that I love. I also got Affinity Designer (a vector graphics program) that complements AP beautifully. Unlike Illustrator, that I didn't enjoy using (and wasn't good with), Affinity Designer is very fun for me to used. And I've gotten fairly deep.

For those seeking Photoshop quality, but don't desire a monthly bill, the Affinity products are awesome. And now in Windows too.

[Tracer]

13. I have Affinity and like it too.

My one complaint is that their measurements don't include picas. (After years being a graphic designer, I THINK in picas!)

[brush]

18. I was bummed on Adobe's rental policy too. Thanks for the tip on Affinity products.

You mentioned how Affinity Designer is a vector program like Illustrator, do they have a program equivalent to Adobe's InDesign?

[Expecting Rain]

20. A product callled Affinity Publisher is in the works.

Publisher will do page-layout, etc.

Affinity says they will "hopefully" have a public beta by years end, but their announcements are often optimistic.

Upon first release, I suspect Publisher will fairly basic compared with the sophistication of InDesign.

But Affinity's aim is to compete head to head with Abode by releasing professional software, and each program gets better and better via (free) upgrades.

I'm sure many professionals will stick with Adobe due to workflow, or critical features, or inertia. But I'm absolutely loving the Affinity products. They have implemented changes and feature requests that I've asked for, and maintain a great forum to address issues and to provide support.

One nice feature of Affinity software is that the code is all fresh and modern, with the result being very snappy responsiveness.

[hunter]

11. If Photoshop/Lightroom enhances cognition, imagine what GIMP can do...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP

https://www.gimp.org/

It's free and Open Source.

It's not Photoshop, it's not a copy of Photoshop, and its user interface is unlike Photoshop (although a few people have created modified GIMP versions and plug-ins that make it behave more like Photoshop.)

To people raised on Photoshop, GIMP's controls can seem non-intuitive, but Photoshop looks just as non-intuitive coming from the other direction.

I was using GIMP before I had any good reason to use Photoshop. I was mostly manipulating images for the internet, which GIMP excels at, and had no need for CMYK (or more colors) offset press ready stuff. (GIMP has only Partial CMYK and LAB handling abilities.)

My favorite GIMP accessory is G'MIC.

[Expecting Rain]

21. I found GIMP so convoluted and inefficient that to pay $50 for Affinity Photo...

...felt like some of the best money I've ever spent. Seriously.

And AP has full CMYK and Lab.

AP feels like moving decades ahead compared with GIMP. With any software there is a learning curve (good for the brain?), but I think you'd be astonished by how advanced AP is compared with GIMP.

[hunter]

22. GIMP has everything you need, especially if you are doing scientific work...

... and have experience converting your own raw data sets to imagery. Since everything is open in GIMP you can create plugins to do the job directly, in any programming or scripting language you like. Gimp evolved as a framework organizing many smaller scripts and programs used in image processing. Many of these scripts and programs were originally created following the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it very well.

Affinity Photo, like all software products for Apple machines, seems advanced until you ask it to do something it hasn't been designed to do, or worse, it does something you don't want it to do. Then you end up waiting for the software's developers to add the feature you want, or at best you muddle through in some scripting language you may not be familiar with.

GIMP users who have any programming skills can make GIMP do whatever they wish building on existing command line programs, or by writing their own. (An example of that is G'MIC, which is also a standalone image processing toolkit.)

Maybe the problem with GIMP is that so many tools are included in the base installation, tools written by many developers who each had their own ideas about how things ought to be done. Even more confusing for casual users is the use the mathematical names for their tools. (What the heck is a convolution matrix?)

Quite a few developers have rearranged GIMP to make it work more like easier-to-use paint and photo manipulation programs, but then it isn't GIMP.

In the past GIMP has been limited by its 8 bit per channel color and alpha. That's what's been limiting its LAB, CMYK and other color space abilities. This is GIMP showing it's age. When GIMP was created manipulating high bit integer or floating point imagery was the realm of super-computers. Current development branches of GIMP use floating point numbers internally.

This sounds like a terrible advertisement for GIMP, but once you understand that GIMP is a big noisy marketplace and you only have to pay attention to the tools you use, you can do sophisticated image processing for free on an old machine, or even a $35 Raspberry Pi.

Alas, GIMP is a desktop program, so it's not available for IOS, Android, or Chromebook. I haven't found a Chromebook photo program I like. There may be something in Android (coming real soon to my chromebook, google promises...) but so far I'll turn on my desktop machine and use GIMP whenever I want to do some image processing.

[Expecting Rain]

23. If a user wants to be forced to write his or her own code...

to support operations and features an archaic piece of software, then have at it.

Personally, I think GIMP is beyond kludgey. To me, it's worth what you pay for it, which is zero.

Affinity Photo doesn't "do things you don't want it to do." LOL. It is an incredibly powerful piece of software and every element is non-destructive. It doesn't "seem" advanced, it is advanced. Light-years ahead of GIMP.

It is true that users can't hack the code. But the developers have proven quite responsive to user input and have adopted several of the features I've requested.

Beyond the Mac, Affinity Photo also runs on Windows and iOS. It won't run on Raspberry Pi, but really?

"Free" isn't always the best value. The inefficiency of GIMP and its limitations would cost a lot more in time, frustration, and limitations that $40-50 in my estimation.

[hunter]

24. All the stuff you want and the kitchen sink is probably in GIMP already...

... it's just not that easy to find sometimes. No code writing necessary.

I was talking about using data directly, or experimenting with new or non-standard scientific image formats just as casually as you would jpegs; for example WebP.

I wasn't talking about "non-destructive" as in "undo," I was talking about things like unwelcome artifacts, tools doing more than I asked of them in inscrutable ways.

When the iPad came out I was predicting photographers would embrace it and they did. A few people, even here on DU, argued that photographers would never use iPads for photo manipulation except in the most basic ways, and especially not interactively with clients.

Generally I've got no problems with paid software.

But not everyone lives in a state of first world affluence. For people who can't afford any of it, either computers or software, GIMP is a powerful alternative and it's not as difficult to use as it first seems. Once you've got the basics of importing, manipulating, and exporting images (not the same as saving or loading a project), you can take it as far as you choose. There are plenty of web tutorials.

Once you understand something like how to scale an image, the rest of GIMP is pretty similar.

Scaling an Image tutorial:

http://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=282942&p=1888162

I think the GIMP way is more intuitive than the Photoshop way.

As for Macs and such, I don't buy computers so much as I find them. A Raspberry Pi was my last major desktop computer purchase in at least ten years. I tend to build my computers out of other people's e-waste. The most I've ever spent for a computer was $300 for a shop-worn and screwed up 386, at a time when the same model new-in-the box machine was $999.

So we live in different worlds. If someone gave me a new Mac, iPad, or Widows machine I'd give it away like a hot potato to someone who would appreciate it.

As it is, I've got all my old machines going back to the 'seventies, emulated on my AMD64 desktop running Linux. I don't have to get my old Atari 800 out of the garage to play Pengo.

[HAB911]

12. Excellent!

I began scanning all my old slides into PS/LR as soon as I retired. I had stored them all in plastic pages designed to safeguard them in three ring binders, bad mistake. Over 40+ years the plasticizer has broken down and gotten on the slides requiring a lot of after scan clean up. I shall redouble my efforts now!

Also bought tutorials advertised on Boing Boing Store and still learning!

[DrDan]

15. I have a friend diagnosed with alzheimers - in his mid-70's

He spends hours each day on photoshop - claims he does it to fight his alzheimers