When something that's been troubling you for ages has a simple solution? I've been struggling for ages to add plausible catchlights to a subject's eyes in PP to give the image a bit more "pop". Try as I might, the results looked hideously false and too obviously artificial.
Well, last night I was reading a magazine article, and it turns out that all I've been doing wrong is keeping the opacity of the catchlight at 100% and failing to "feather" the inclusion. Set opacity for about 30-50% and a pixel or two or three of feather and - voila - plausible and effective catchlights. So simple, yet makes a big difference.
I have been using Photoshop on and off for about a year now, mostly, I hope pretty effectively, and things like that make you realise how much you still have to learn. I need to be more systematic in my approach, as I realise that my learning speed has definitely slowed with the passage of years...
NEW COMMISSION
I have just been commissioned to produce a short leaflet explaining how the dispensary in a local GP surgery works. It is surprising how little attention most members of the public give to understanding how these things work: I suppose because they mostly work well, they are taken for granted. But it is remarkable how casual the public are about things like medicines - they often have no idea just how dangerous some of the things they take routinely are, or the consequences for the medical profession of "getting it wrong"!
This leaflet will be the latest in a short series produced for this particular surgery. If the primary care sector wasn't so hard up, I could see this becoming a major line of work.
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