after having done photo retouching/enhancements (glamour, etc) in photoshop for a good 6-7 years now, assisting photogs with their transition from film to digital, working with all sorts of digital files, etc. - i feel like ive truly mastered the retouching process, yet surprisingly, am not sure where these skills can take me.

started out at a big photo lab that handled tons of school photography images and am now employed by a single photographer working full time, performing all his production work. everything from importing RAW files, edit, retouch, color correct, print (Inkjet.. "Giclee" if youre feeling fancy), mount, frame and deliver- everything but take the pic.

so what more could this career do, and how do you go about advertising yourself as a 'photoshop specialist' or something like that?

ive searched the local job postings and the ones at monster.com- and it seems to be slim pickins for this kind of work..

There's a lot of money to be made in training photographers in all things digital. We have a photographic studio (weddings and portraits), and have learned digital from scratch, but I already had a high level of computer literacy, so we had a head start.

Our local lab keep asking me whether I'd consider training many of the local photographers on a freelance basis, in anything from setting up a clear workflow to all things photoshop and how to send files to the lab. I don't have time to get involved, but if you're looking for where to go next, that might be worth considering.