I am a student and would love if you would answer 3 questions for an assignment I have.
Thank You,

Mary Alice

1) What is your background?


2) What is your typically workflow?


3) Do you use any actions & if so for what?

1) Background: Prepress tradesman (four year apprenticeship in all facets of prepress, of which Photoshop is only a small part). Learnt retouching on-the-job, then honed skills by reading web tutorials and forums like this. Now working in magazines and newspapers.

2) Workflow: Page designers size pics and send to me, I enhance and send back. Usually basic "clean and clear" enhancement, plus occasional basic artistic retouching.

3) Actions: Yes, all the time, for speed and efficiency. Eg F10 Unsharp Mask, Shift-F6 Save Clipping Path, Ctrl-F2 Save working file, etc. No big complex actions, just quick time-savers.

Hi mawasden,

1) Background: amateur photog since '64. 15 years advertising and PR management (principal to dozens and dozens of photogs). Quit the rat race and been into 15 years of freelance photography and photo editing since then. Working for companies and mags. 2 or 3 weddings max per year.

2) Workflow:
Round 1: trash technically unusable photos,
Round 2: first edit/enhancement of remainder (rotating and cropping),
Round 3: final selection and edit/enhancement (rarely more than 10% of the original number of exposures).

3) Actions: no. Everything is manual.

1) Amateur photographer for some time, editor of a digital software review site
2) Sort out bad pics, set white balance and convert the rest. Choose the best out of those. Some are just shown in the gallery then. Some are used for tutorials later.
4) I use only 1-2 step actions when dealing with big bunches of images. It's mostly resizing or cropping