Simplifying Photoshop

If I might steal a phrase from Winston Churchill, Photoshop is the worst photo editing software ever - except for all the others.

It's not just big, it's bloated. It's hellaciously expensive. It runs like a pig, it seems to consume vastly more resources than ought to be needed. The interface, which has not so much been designed as much as it sort of accreted over time, is non-orthogonal, non-intuitive, arcane, and notoriously difficult to learn (and write about). There are keyboard shortcuts that you can't read about in any book, weird tricks that are undocumented by Adobe - the list of complaints just goes on and on and on. It's so amazingly bad that I think you could just invent a complaint - "The needlegrommit doesn't interact properly with the through-flammulator", and by god, you'd discover that Photoshop CSII actually had both a needlegrommit and a through-flammulator, and sure enough, the two don't interact properly.

When I have students who want to get a toe-hold on Photoshop, here's what I tell them: there are just a few key concepts. Most of the commands are variations or embellishments on one, basic, powerful concept. Learn the one command that controls the entire sheaf of operations that stem from that basic concept, and you can ignore a whole slew of stuff. This not only pares down the complexity of Photoshop, it makes your photo editing decision process work more smoothly.

For me, those key concepts are: curves, layers, layer masks. Those are the fundamentals; they're the foundation on which everything rests. Without mastery of those key concepts, it's an uphill struggle to make any headway at all on working with Photoshop.

Take curves, for instance. All tonal adjustment in PS is based on curves. If you've got curves, you can throw out levels and brightness/contrast. Combined with the ability to make selections, the curves tool can replace the dodge tool, the burn tool, the sponge tool. But if you have mastered levels, brightness/contrast, the dodge tool, the burn tool, and the sponge tool, you STILL haven't got the expressive power of curves. Why learn levels, brightness/contrast, dodge, burn, and sponge when you can just learn curves and selections?

The problem with Photoshop isn't that it's insufficiently powerful and expressive. The problem is that it offers too many ways to get the job done, and not only do people founder when trying to decide how to get the job done, the unnecessarily broad range of choices distracts them from the real task, which is deciding what needs to be done.