refine edge - hard image need help learning

[Tom Mann]

I am new to CS6 and the reason I switched from anything else is that I got tired of plug-ins, ready made solutions that do not do what I am looking for. I am/was a portrait photographer and I am rather puzzled if not a bit disgusted by the 'edits' offered and sold as 'great' or 'professional'.

CS5 has a steep learning curve and this is why I am here, to learn CS6. I am getting lost in the multitude of ways to achieve anything but I hope to be able to stand on my own two feet soon.

You are absolutely on the right track by seeking to increase your knowledge of PS. By your own admission, you know little about PS, either CS5 or CS6, and aren't sufficiently familiar with the various tools to know which to apply in various situations, and especially the unwanted side effects every tool produces, etc.

However, IMHO, your opinion about plugins is, IMHO, overly harsh. Unfortunately, plug-ins, like many other tools in PS, can only be used effectively once you have a very good overall working knowledge of Photoshop itself.

It sounds like you thought / hoped that plugins could be used in a "one-click" miracle mode, as their developers would have you believe. However, as you've discovered, applying them in this way will rarely produce the effect you want, which is probably the effect featured in the advertisements for that particular plugin or action.

There are many reasons for this, but a very important one is that seemingly small variations in the starting image (eg, the image *you* want to modify vs the starting image shown in the advertisement for the plugin) often will have a profound impact on the output from the plugin or action. Because of this, I will often bring an image to what I consider a "standard state" before even attempting to use any plugin on it. In addition, afterwards, I will almost always use the opacity, blending mode, and the blendIF layer sliders in PS to tailor the output of the plugin to what the image needs.

You might want to reconsider your strongly negative comments about plugins (eg, "disgusted") until you have a year or two of serious study and practice with PS under your belt and then play around again with a nice selection of several dozen actions, plugins, etc. Dismissing them like you did is like the old saying, "throwing out the baby with the bathwater". There are huge numbers of pro event and sports photographers (ie, who need to make a living from their photos) who regularly use plugins, actions, etc.. If plugins didn't do what they wanted and save them time in the process, they would drop them like the proverbial hot potato.

To get a feel for this, just go to Google Images and search "wedding photography". When I did this, I was presented with the attached page of hits. Each of these images could be done with the native tools in PS, but I can almost guarantee you that when the photographer has taken 1000 or more shots, they probably used actions or plugins on each of these to speed up their workflow and allow them to move on to the next wedding. Wedding pros simply do not have the time to sit around and painstakingly tweak a relatively small number of photos as do amateurs and studio portrait specialists. To stay in business, wedding and other event pro photographers need to get the product out of the door while maintaining reasonable quality. Actions and plugins allow them to do this.

Tom M

PS - You mentioned that you are/were a portrait photographer. If, by some chance, your experience was mostly in the controlled environment of a studio producing classic portraits, then you likely will have hardly any need for plugins / actions. However, realize that classic studio portraiture is only one very small facet of the entire field of pro photography.