Why use Photoshop?

Adobe Photoshop is the tool in your camera bag you don’t bring with you.

Before taking any photographs go into your camera settings and make sure you’re shooting in RAW. RAW is a file format that captures all the image data recorded by the sensor, not like Jpeg, which is compressed. Raw gives you the best quality and with the Adobe cc, you can take a photo you thought wasn’t exposed correctly and bring back what you thought was lost.

RAW setting on a canon camera

Be organised with your photographs. Keeping your photos organised is very important, each digital photograph there will an imprint of metadata, this is the RAW information about the photograph. Depending on your camera you will have, shutter speed, aperture ISO, lens and focal length and sometimes location the image was taken. In Lightroom, you can create collections. Collections pretty much are an album, label the collection and drag and drop the photos you wish to be apart of that collection keeping your photo organised.

Before Lightroom

After Lightroom

Before Lightroom and Photoshop

After Lightroom and Photoshop

Straight from Camera

After edit

Be Creative

You can be very creative with photography, either in-camera or in post. Long exposures, double exposures, light painting. They are the kind of things you can do in-camera. in post you can do all that in theory and then some. 

This is both light painting and long exposure. Very simple really, just make sure your camera is on a tripod the room is dark. With a touch while the shutter is open light paint. Going over areas you want to stand out more. 

Shot with flash and low ambient light to bring out the subject. I then moved the image into Photoshop and edited in the sparkle effect. You can do sparkles in the camera but that would mean doing a long exposure and overexposing the subject, not the look I was going for. 

In photoshop you can create actions and even purchased action from the website. This image was created by using an image from Unslash.com and the Energy action by Seven Style. You can see and buy more actions by Seven styles by clicking here. With all actions, you can tweak them to your own style, add things and so on. 

Photoshop has changed photography for the better. Be it removing spots to doing extreme things like above. The best photographers now days must be good at photoshop. 

Watch photography

Now-a-days if you want to tell the time you'd look at your phone. The smart phone has changed everything from taking photos, filming videos, browsing the internet and telling the time and so on. Well, people still wear watches, and people still pay crazy sums of money for them. As a person who doesn't wear a watch but is still fascinated by the repair process, Jewellery and Watch photography are on the same line. They are both small products that need good eye catching images to sell. The more detail in a photo of a watch can definitely increase the potential of selling the item. 

The best way to shoot a watch is on a photography table, having a main light and then a few other lights to pull out the detail. Always find out what background the client wants first. In each shot you need to highlight the brand, making sure it is visible and if you need an extra bit of light and don't have any more lights, then you can use a reflector and if you don't have reflectors a white card will work nearly just as well. All product photographers have white card. It's something you'll use for the first time and think why wasn't I using this all the time. Like all products you photograph you should always focus stack the images. You can use Helicon focus or photoshop. I recommend Helicon Focus. 

I took some shots of a watch repairer, or horologist, to use the proper term.