The group has agreed with me that we need to tackle the “elephant in the room” that is Adobe Photoshop. Most of us have subscribed to the Adobe Photography Plan that gives us access to use Photoshop alongside Lightroom (both Classic and Mobile), Bridge and other software, but we have shied away from learning Photoshop. This month’s meeting on January 17th, saw us take our first tentative steps to remedy our “failings” (or at least my failings).

We watched two videos that demonstrated that a quick flip into Photoshop to use a couple of tools, didn’t need any in-depth knowledge of the package to get started. One described and showed how Photoshop’s new Remove Tool compared with Lightroom’s Content Aware Remove Tool. This sparked a fair amount of discussion as to whether the subject chosen for removal could have been better removed in Lightroom by the Clone Tool, but I think there was general agreement that the end-result using the Photoshop Tool was better, and for me at least the way the tool worked was much easier.

The second demonstrated some tips that could be considered when doing Generative Fill in Photoshop. This is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) enhanced tool that enables quite considerable changes to be made to an image. In this case the subject in the photograph had their clothes changed and they were “moved” from a park setting to a hospital hallway. Would we ever want to do that? Unlikely. However the techniques can be more widely employed with our photographs to “improve” them.

Next time we will start a slow (no doubt) progression through learning Photoshop for Lightroom Users, relying heavily on a series of posts from Scott Kelby’s “Lightroom Killer Tips” as well as dipping-into his book of the same name.