Quality Control Yourself

[iDad]

Even when I try to stay out of it I get sucked in :banghead:

God created heaven and earth in one day.....

The average PS artist created an image in about 5 minutes....

Hoogle created that post in less than 5 minutes...

ibclare created an image and 5 days later still working on it....

But they all declared.... "IT IS GOOD:cool2:"..... and they felt good about it... dunno about aunty, tho....


All chiding aside.....

It took decades for some of us to get where we are. Looking back over the years, our earliest works may shock us. I sometimes felt I was lazy in doing some things. But in the end, I took the right direction. Thanks to people in the internet PS community as well as the real world design community.

PS.... iDad will tell you like it is - straight from the holster. But he will also add..."Keep it up"..... :mrgreen:

 

[Spectrum]

You wouldn't tell a child - "That's ugly" or "You don't have talent to do that". Yould tell them - "That looks good"

Yes, but I doubt many people here are children. Adults need to learn that a certain standard is expected if they want praise.

Regardless how long it took them to create it, its the satisfaction one gets from doing it. It's not they don't value the viewer. To them, they're proud of what they created and feel that it should be shared for others to view and give constructive comments.

You're missing the point. If someone takes 5 minutes to slap a couple of cheap effects on a design, its laziness. I remember when I first started using PS, even designs which were not that great, I would spend hours creating and tweaking. Like I said, it is not about a person's level of experience, but how much time and consideration they put into a piece. I am referring to the pieces which were not given time and consideration, and just slapped togther.

I'll say it again, its not about experience, its about people being lazy and thinking something a 5 year old could make in PS will be praised. Its about the consideration for the viewer as well. Thats what art is. Creating something for your own enjoyment, but also for sharing with others, and if there is no consideration for them, the artist is lazy and thoughtless.

And isn't that an insult to them as well? Who are you to judge the less than artistic, common man like that?

I don't understand your meaning. "Judging" is just a PC word for a person having an opinion that someone doesn't like because it hurts their feelings, true or not.

We are not the National Gallery of Fine Arts. We are a simple internet community of devoted Photoshop enthusiasts who wants to help others in improving their craft.

So...you're saying that you have no standards then? How do you expect people to improve if truely terrible pieces of "art" aren't called as such? You don't have to be The National Gallery of Fine Arts, but we are an industry. The problem today is that every man and his dog with a copy of PS thinks they are a graphic designer - this in turn is drives down the wages of professional designers because amateurs do poor jobs at cut prices, and clients often don't know the difference and expect professionals to lower their prices too. If the amateurs are held to at least some degree of quality, then they actually become part of the industry, instead of being pests nipping at it's heels.

And like IamSam said... PSG should NOT promote an environment where members are afraid to post their works. By being harsh on them, do you honestly think they'll post another image? Is this the way to help them learn?

No, but they should be afraid to turn in true pieces of crap which have had no respectable amount of time and consideration given to them. Even as a beginner I NEVER just used a couple a filters and called the piece finished.

 

[Spectrum]

I belong to a thriving camera club We have more than 90 members in a town with a population of just 26,000 people. I have seen so many new members start with moderate skills, but in less than six months, become very accomplished photographers with the help of other more experienced club members, and feedback from competition judges. That has to be be a good analogy for a forum like this. A fantastic place for people to learn and grow. Some of the new members at our camera club have excellent ideas about what they want to achieve, but don't how to do it. This forum can give new Photoshop users the tools to realize the what they are seeing in their minds eye to their computer screens.

It also seems to me, that no mater how dire, no one is going to share work unless they are personally proud of it, so be gentle.

Thats awesome. I love helping younger less experienced people who actually want to learn (as opposed to those who have just picked up PS and already call themselves a designer, pain in the face). However I'm sure you've heard of "fauxtographers"? They are the people who take a snap of a patch of grass and call it a great shot, then upload it to Deviantart for everyone to heap praise upon. Grass is fine for stock, but its not a good shot unless you're doing some really interesting macro comp or something.

 

[Trevor Dennis]

Just don't get us started on 'Fine Art' photography. I mean what the heck does that mean anyway?!

 

[SPWA]

I don't understand your meaning. "Judging" is just a PC word for a person having an opinion that someone doesn't like because it hurts their feelings, true or not.

Erm.. That would be not.

Having an opinion is called, having an opinion. Judging someone is applying your standards on to that person & making them feel guilty for being less than your expectations.

I'm sorry you feel the way you do, but saying that just because you don't like something, it's not allowed to be viewed or posted on the internet.. people have fought Wars to stop that kind of thinking.

If someone is lazy, fine, they are lazy. If you don't like their stuff, fine, you don't like their stuff.

 

[Spectrum]

PS and photography are quite subjective forms of creative art. I think Picasso is horrid, but I love Annie Leibowitz...Different tastes for all, That is why photography is loved by people with passion, and that passion can show up in our work...AND why we can be so passionate against what we don't like.

PS work is far less subjective than traditional art. There is a saying "Artists are interpreted, designers are understood." This means that due to the need in many PS pieces for convincing realism, PS work is almost never cut the same slack as say...paintings when mistakes are made in form and blending. Technical mistakes in impressionism for example can be ignored because its about the feeling, and not so much the precision of the technique. Make even a small mistake in a complex image composite, and it is quite obvious, especially with faces. People also aren't expecting absolute realism with paintings, they are with images.

As a professional designer, I applaud anyone taking up PS, even as a hobby. It is no small task. What I pisses me off, is them calling themselves a designer after 3 months of PS use, and submitting pieces which CLEARLY have not had much effort put into them. Dv8_fx has said people shouldn't be afraid to submit beginner work, and I agree completely. I would hate this place to turn into CGSociety.org (who are quite frankly, a bunch of arseholes), however, regardless of skill and experience level, when I see that there has been no EFFORT made to create something enjoyable to the viewers, something should be said. It doesn't need to be "That's a piece of crap, go away and come back when you're a real designer." More along the lines of "I think this piece needs a lot more work and consideration before its ready for posting."

 

[Trevor Dennis]

Spectrum, a lot of the blame can be laid on the colleges or polytechnics or whatever institutions roll out fresh ‘graphic designers’ onto the market. I can sit here and think of several examples of people who make me cringe that they dare to call themselves professional photographers and designers. This is not people who share their work on forums like PSG, but people who advertise their services to local businesses. I have long been convinced that self-belief and ruthless business ethics, are _far_ more important that actual ability when it comes to succeeding in such ventures.

 

[Spectrum]

Spectrum, a lot of the blame can be laid on the colleges or polytechnics or whatever institutions roll out fresh ‘graphic designers’ onto the market. I can sit here and think of several examples of people who make me cringe that they dare to call themselves professional photographers and designers. This is not people who share their work on forums like PSG, but people who advertise their services to local businesses. I have long been convinced that self-belief and ruthless business ethics, are _far_ more important that actual ability when it comes to succeeding in such ventures.

Many people will view this site. Casuals viewers, people looking for a wallpaper for the desktop, people looking for a designer to hire and wanting to check the general quality of work out there. I wanted to get it out into discussion because nobody seems to have raised and, and obviously some people agree it needed to be discussed. I think we've all made the points we needed to, and anything further is just a debate, not a discusssion. Good to hear your of your experiences though, and I agree many courses are inept, but the biggest problem is not enough places for design students to intern with working studios. Its all theory these days, no real industry practice.

 

[Inkz]

Ok guy's...

Please get back on topic and play nicely.

Otherwise the topic will be closed. And NO MORE comments about race, colour etc.

 

[Tom Mann]

I don't feel like wasting my time enumerating a long list of errors of logic in your statements including red herring fallacies, irrelevancies, and many of the other classic fallacious techniques of sophists, but here's one example.

You're missing the point. If someone takes 5 minutes to slap a couple of cheap effects on a design, its laziness.

Much of your general argument centers on the concept of laziness. However, intentionally or not, you missed the last 7 words in the most common definition of laziness (and the very first one that I found):

"Laziness (also called indolence) is a disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to do so."

Without knowing the person, tell me exactly how anyone (especially you) can possibly know whether a graphic posted on an internet forum is from a beginner who has put hours into learning how to do something that a more experienced PS user could do in 5 minutes, versus the same graphic posted by an experienced person who truly took only a couple of minutes to slap on a push-button effect. The 2nd person is lazy. The 1st is not because he doesn't have the ability of the more experienced person, yet you equate them.

If you are doing this intentionally, you are a troll. If you are not using flawed reasoning intentionally, then you have both a fundamental problem with logic as well as an arrogance and inability to listen to the other side of an argument often found in college-age males.

In either case, you have dug your heels in, in spite of no one supporting any of your more recent posts in this thread. So, for me, further discussion on this topic is essentially guaranteed to be non-productive.

T

 

[Spectrum]

I don't feel like wasting my time enumerating a long list of errors of logic in your statements including red herring fallacies, irrelevancies, and many of the other classic fallacious techniques of sophists, but here's one example.



Much of your general argument centers on the concept of laziness. However, intentionally or not, you missed the last 7 words in the most common definition of laziness (and the very first one that I found):

"Laziness (also called indolence) is a disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to do so."

Without knowing the person, tell me exactly how anyone (especially you) can possibly know whether a graphic posted on an internet forum is from a beginner who has put hours into learning how to do something that a more experienced PS user could do in 5 minutes, versus the same graphic posted by an experienced person who truly took only a couple of minutes to slap on a push-button effect. The 2nd person is lazy. The 1st is not because he doesn't have the ability of the more experienced person, yet you equate them.

If you are doing this intentionally, you are a troll. If you are not using flawed reasoning intentionally, then you have both a fundamental problem with logic as well as an arrogance and inability to listen to the other side of an argument often found in college-age males.

In either case, you have dug your heels in, in spite of no one supporting any of your more recent posts in this thread. So, for me, further discussion on this topic is essentially guaranteed to be non-productive.

T

Tom, anyone interested in becoming better at PS has literally thousands upon thousands of great tutorials to help them achieve the look they are after. They are all free, and found easily on Google, YouTube, etc. Failure to use free and easily accessed resources to better a piece IS laziness. I'll leave it there.

 

[dv8_fx]

I am quite familiar with CGSociety - an excellent community. And it would be bad form to trash them or other forums.

And it's also bad form to be trashing each other in an intelligent discussion. May I remind everyone to be civil .


As a whole, everyone is welcome to their own opinion .

But for this forum's purposes, we are not about to lay it hard on people . Yes, we have standards. But we make it a point not to make it too high.

As you've mentioned in your opening post - we all have different skill levels. Don't expect everyone who comes here to be at par.

As you pointed out and as Hoogle mentioned, there are a lot of self-proclaimed designers. And no matter how much we discuss about them, face it - THEY ARE AND WILL BE OUT THERE. But from one in the industry, their presence isn't enough to take a big chunk from the pie. I encounter them but in the end, it's quality , experience in presentation and a relationship of trust I build with clients that counts.

 

[Spectrum]

I am quite familiar with CGSociety - an excellent community. And it would be bad form to trash them or other forums.

And it's also bad form to be trashing each other in an intelligent discussion. May I remind everyone to be civil .


As a whole, everyone is welcome to their own opinion .

But for this forum's purposes, we are not about to lay it hard on people . Yes, we have standards. But we make it a point not to make it too high.

As you've mentioned in your opening post - we all have different skill levels. Don't expect everyone who comes here to be at par.

As you pointed out and as Hoogle mentioned, there are a lot of self-proclaimed designers. And no matter how much we discuss about them, face it - THEY ARE AND WILL BE OUT THERE. But from one in the industry, their presence isn't enough to take a big chunk from the pie. I encounter them but in the end, it's quality , experience in presentation and a relationship of trust I build with clients that counts.

Thats a fair assessment, except for CGSociety. I have met and known too many people who have had experience with them, and described them as snobbish and elitist, not even allowing people to hold accounts if their work isn't perfect, and very rudely insulting the artwork of those who are not very experienced, instead of honestly evaluating it. It would be trashing the forum if there were no experiences to base it on, and maybe the people I've spoken to have just had an unfairly poor experience, but I hear more negative than positive views on CG - not the artwork, but the attitudes. Perhaps that has changed in recent years.

 

[ibclare]

Ah, this is a great discussion. We state our opinions, hear those of others. If we are rationale people, we consider them, and perhaps temper or alter our own opinions. Or not.

In any event, I do try to encourage members. I learned this well when Sir Maximus was active and a moderator. He always told me to keep up the good work (as dv8 mentioned about iDad). But my encouragement to PSers also incorporates critical, thoughtful, and sympathetic criticism -- along with exhortation to work hard and improve. Like others, I will explain how I do something, give pointers on maybe an easier way to use PS, demonstrate the results of what I mean by showing images, screen shots, and giving explanations. Many of our members do this and make me very proud of them and happy to have such a great team on the forum at this time. I hope you will grace our presence for a long time. New members see your example and follow it. That is the only way to keep people coming back, knowing they can count on us for help, and giving their own advice when they can.

My 3 Ps or PS are practice, patience, and play. Something most of us are keenly aware of and our submissions show this, especially when we ask for critique and take it to heart. Hershy is new to PS, not to artistic expression, being a painter. He has picked up PS with great enthusiasm. He is a dogged learner, constantly productive, and has produced ever more skillful and ingenious work in a short time. Don't blush kiddo. You're just one example, lol. Not everyone has this ability.

But I agree with Spectrum. Laziness is rampant, not just here on the forum or in PS, but in this modern culture. I don't place labels on people, but the evidence is in our face. Sure, we can make excuses for their beginner status and maybe their pride. But arrogance, closed-mindedness, deafness to critique, if you ask me, is the result of children being coddled and of expecting instant gratification.

As I said before, when I encounter such attitudes and sloppy work, it is my personal decision to just get the heck away from the thread and let others remark on it if they feel the inclination.

I don't agree with trashing members no matter what they display. No mater how tempted to say, holy crap that is crap, I jsut seal my lips, close my eyes, and disappear. That is my individual way to deal with it. Don't. I'm not hiding my head in the sand. I am just not berating someone who may really be an artist. Don't get me started on that subject, or I will bore your eyes out. (art history, looking & seeing, copying masters, doing the work, self-criticism, ruthless self-editing . . . Oh I said I wouldn't lecture!)

So censor and judge all you want, just don't share your nastiness on the forum. As Inkz said, it won't be tolerated. Your remarks will be deleted, and if the behaviour continues, you risk being banned. If you love Photoshop Gurus Forum as I do, you may want to avoid that risk. Just saying.

On one other subject, we do get the most ridiculous of freebie requests sometimes. As mods we do our best to evaluate requests, welcome reports from you guys (click the yellow triangle on the lower left of the reply window, enter your comment, and all us mods and admin will be emailed your report.

By the same token, if I feel a request is harmless, but in my judgment, totally inane, I just clamp myu lips and go elsewhere.

Tolerance is important online, as is discretion. Practice your best to emulate Miss Manners (JK sort of) and speak when you really need to.

If we listen to the Spirit, then we will know when the Spirit Moves Us!

 

[agentmoeller]

But I agree with Spectrum. Laziness is rampant...!

Remember, Clare, this new generation is the "Everyone-gets-a-trophy-for-showing-up" generation.

 

[ForeverFallenAngel]

No comment

 

[Hoogle]

@ ForeverFallenAngel

​

your 1 of the types of members I was aiming my post at we are a community to help get people started and improve on their techniques and maybe cut the bad habits early on with. This is exactly my point people that do not know there way around ps it is a daunting experience learning what just a few of the hundreds of tools available do. Of course it will take someone like you longer and more effort to produce what some of us can whisp up in 5 mins. But this is why you are here to learn and improve. I would much rather help someone out wanting to learn and give you all the time I can spare as I know 1 day you will hopefully do the same for new members that are joining up that are in the same boat you are now.

But I have to say they say it is not the tools that make a good piece of work is the artist, this is true to an extent but you are not helping yourself doing this all on an ipad where as this is a good start and will help you decide if you like the software and which direction you would like to go in with your art all be it manipulations, photography etc.

I strongly suggest getting a more pc based version of photoshop these can include photoshop, photoshop elements or if you cant afford the software which trust me I understand it is a big expense to pay for someone just starting out and isnt justifiable at first you can look at cheaper free alternatives such as Gimp which is based on photoshop and is perfectly good to get you going with image editing ok admittedly it is not as powerful as photoshop but it is free and it doesnt have the billions of dollars backing it that adobe does with photoshop but it will get you use to how layers work and blending modes etc.

and if you can afford $9.99 a month then you can sign up to adobe creative cloud and get the photographers package which gives you adobe photoshop (full package) and adobe lightroom 1 of the main go to programs for photographers for batch processing and editing images for photography side ( I tend to do all my photography editing in lightroom and only bring out photoshop for major edits.)

 

[Paul]

TO THE OP:
Working from your thoughts then NO member would ever post an image anywhere ever, as a true artist is never satisfied with what they have created.
I would be horrified if members flatly refused to post an image they had worked on because they feared a backlash from others who to be blunt have no real grounds to be talking that way, this sites a help and encouragement board having a laugh along the way.
So you can honestly say that every image you have created as been your 'masterpiece' a work you are absolutely content and happy with, one that you spent days in creating weeks even? Then bully for you my friend, but like 99.95% of members here, we do it out of love for the program, we all feel we have to share what we have made with other members and beyond, none of us are perfect and to spit out comments like what you started with is nothing more than insulting.

 

[ForeverFallenAngel]

No comment

 

[Paul]

Hey Hoogle I posted this before I saw you're comments on my post and I feel you gave fair feedback which I was grateful for I'm limited to an iPad as my PC broke trust me if I could do it via PC I would but I can't until I get it fixed

Photography is my passion I can draw too so I think I'll just stick to what I'm good at n forget the PS for a while till I have the right tools

Lisa


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk - now Free

I don't think that is what H meant in reply, you keep doing what you are doing and when you get the pc back up and running let's take it from there.