Special Guest – Damien Symonds

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Hello everyone!  Beckie here…I’m SO happy to bring you a special treat today – a brand new guest interview with Damien Symonds! I first “met” Damien through on-line photography forums and have learned so much from him regarding photo editing and enhancing.  Damien and his wife collaborate together as Belle Photography in Brisbane, Australia – and through his business (and the internet!), he has worked with people all over the world.  I hope you enjoy getting to know Damien and the information he’s here to share with us today!

Meet Damien (with his handsome little boy)!

What can you tell us about Damien Symonds?

Well, for three days per week I’m a stay-at-home Dad, and on the other two days I run my little home business, doing Photoshop stuff.

Despite my enthusiastic involvement in all things photographic, I am not a photographer, and couldn’t use a DSLR camera to save my life!  My background is in the printing industry, and for the first few years of my career I only used Photoshop to clumsily create a few logos.  On the basis of that feeble experience, I was lucky enough to get a job in the Image Enhancing department of a major newspaper a few years ago.  There I learnt Photoshop from the ground up from half a dozen tradesmen, who each had different methods and philosophies.  It was a messy way to learn!  I emerged from that job with an excellent eye for editing, but a horrible mish-mash of techniques.

From there I spent a great deal of time teaching myself the best ways of editing, and now I’m very proud of my skills.  I am developing a modest reputation as a “troubleshooter”, so people send me their hard-to-fix images.  I love that kind of work – the more challenging, the better.

My main passion is old photo restoration.  We live in an era where cameras are commonplace, and photographs are abundant.  But people bring me faded and damaged photos of their grandparents and great-grandparents, and I’m very conscious that those people probably only stood in front of a camera a handful of times in their entire lives.  Those photos are precious relics, and I’m always proud to preserve them.

Recently, my career has evolved again, and most of my time is spent delivering one-on-one Photoshop training courses with folk from all over the world.  I love to teach, and I’m determined that nobody should have to learn Photoshop the way I did (aimlessly!).  My hope is to give my trainees a solid foundation of knowledge on which to build their skills.

How did you get started in your business?

My wife (then my girlfriend) was studying photography at about the same time as I was learning Photoshop in my newspaper job.  We started a little photography business together, which I’m ashamed to say I’ve completely monopolised!  It’s much more of a Photoshop business than a photography one now.

We’ve never really advertised much, but our site has a modest Google ranking, so enough work comes our way.

What is your philosophy regarding photography and photo editing?

I have a saying: “A great SOOC is important, not for what it is, but for what it can become”
{Beckie’s note – SOOC is a commonly used term in photography circles that means “straight out of camera”, or an un-edited image}

There’s no doubt that a great photo begins in the camera.  The more you can get right at the time of shooting, the better the photo will be.  But I’ve never seen a photo come out of the camera that I couldn’t make even better in post-production.

I believe that Photoshop serves two purposes.  The first is to make bad photos look acceptable; the second is to make good photos look amazing!

What are your favorite tools of the trade?

Levels and Hue/Saturation.  Even if you took away all the other functions in Photoshop, and only left me those two, I could still do most of my work, and do it very well.

What resources do you recommend for beginners looking to develop their photo editing/enhancing skills?

The internet is wonderful, because there are resources available for everyone, no matter what “type of learner” you are.  If you learn well by reading, there are heaps of great written tutorials.  If you learn well by watching, YouTube is full to the brim with great videos that people have shared.  And if you learn well by doing, there are heaps of great training courses available.

Whenever I see people say “Photoshop is so daunting!  Where do I start?”, I always tell them to start at the Layers Palette.  It’s the beating heart of Photoshop – everything else stems from there.  Once you familiarise yourself with layers, everything else begins to fall into place.

It’s hard to have favourites.  I’m proud of all of my work; but at the same time I always look back at my edits and see things I could have done better.  Maybe the day I do a “perfect” job is the day I’ll retire!

Here are two of the very first restorations I ever did, and I’m still proud of them.  They took me quite a while to do!

{Before –> After}

{Before –> After}

Here’s a raw photo I enhanced for a customer recently.  This is exactly the kind of challenging photo I enjoy editing :)

{Before –> After}

One of the most significant improvements in recent versions of Photoshop has been the ability to adjust the white balance of Jpeg files by opening them in Adobe Camera Raw.  In the past, fixing light temperature problems in Jpeg files was difficult and clumsy in Photoshop.  But now, even people who don’t shoot in Raw format can enjoy the ease of white balance adjustments in ACR.  As long as you have CS3, 4 or 5, or Elements 7 or 8, you can do this.  If you haven’t tried it yet, I encourage you to do so.  Correct white balance makes a world of difference to the quality of your photos, and I know how hard it is for your camera to get the white balance right every time.

If you’re really serious about your photography, I encourage you to try Raw format, if you haven’t already.  The power and flexibility of raw data is unsurpassed.

The main piece of advice I can give about editing is “Start big, and get smaller”.  It’s very important to edit the photo as a whole, before doing this and that to parts of it.  Photoshop has such wonderful tools for editing eyes, smoothing skin, etc, that it’s easy to dive right in to those things, and forget to make the whole photo acceptable first.

Imagine for a moment that you were editing a photo of me.  What if you immediately whitened my teeth a bit.  Then later on you decided the whole photo needed lightening, so you made a Levels adjustment to do so.  What would happen to my teeth?  All of a sudden they’d look crazy bright, right?  I’d look like some kind of cartoon character.  It’s very important to get the overall photo looking great, before turning your attention to little details. 

Well I don’t know about you guys, but after seeing those before and after shots, I suddenly wish I could un-delete a bunch of my own photos, LOL!

To see more of Damien’s incredible work, and to read through the tips and tutorials he has available, visit his site and his blog! Some that you may be particularly interested in:

• Converting to black and white
• Fixing skin blemishes

Damien has many other tutorials available, so be sure to check them out! Even if you prefer the ease of actions to the effort of editing your own photos, there are many tutorials you might find useful! Like this one that offers alternative techniques to cloning for removing distractions and imperfections in your shot.

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing his work and learning more about the possibilities with photo enhancing and editing!  And many thanks to Damien for stopping by the Shoppe Blog for a visit with us today!  :)

BeckiePhotography, Special Guests, Uncategorized 15 Comments