Photoshop Bad For Your Health?

[plantphoto]

Just finished my latest image called Last Sacrifice Of Dienekes
It's taken a good 4 days of intense comping & retouching to complete and I feel numb !
Apart from the nagging off the wife I wonder how bad this type of intense photoshopping is for you?
Simon

[Doug Nelson]

It messed up my hand until I got a wrist pad. I had to wear a wrist wrap for a week or so while I worked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury

[plantphoto]

I mainly find I get a pain in the base of my neck (traps) after a few hours.
Si

[DJSoulglo]

A good chair, good desk height (VERY IMPORTANT), good monitor height and a tablet really help. If I work with one of those damn mighty mice it kills my wrist/shoulder in 10 minutes flat. A good Logitech G5 mouse I can work with for a good while. This was when I was still doing layouts and illustrations, now that I only retouch, I only use a tablet.

So yeah it can be really bad for you, as can any deskjob.

[Chain]

I can use a good mouse forever (I use a logitech MX518). I pivot my hand on a little smooth "bump" at the bottom of my hand just before the wrist, so I only use my wrist for moving the mouse (high mouse speed is a must). Ok, maybe not forever, but I have tried like 5 hours of quick-paced FPS non-stop and at the end i had almost worn out the skin on my little "bump" so i put a band-aid on before continuing. Rest of hand was fine :P
Using a wrist support kills me in about a minute as it puts pressure on my tendons. I'm sure this varies for everybody... A pen tablet starts to hurt after a while for me, but that's just because i hold the pen in a very wrong (tense) way...

And yeah, good desk/chair/monitor position is crucial. And change position now and then.

[Markzebra]

As soon as your body starts giving you these warning signs STOP. Give it a rest. Generally tends to happen without fail to people who go very quickly from never having really retouched at all, to doing a lot of intricate work. I've seen this first hand a number of times.

In my opinion trying to do things like dodge and burn with a mouse would be a recipe for disaster.

[Chain]

Yeah, if it hurts, stop.

[Andrew Lawrence]

If I'm doing work at home, I try to take a break every hour or so and do some exercising/stretching....... it helps make me less tense and I feel more energized when I sit back down. Plus it allows your eyes to refresh a bit while your not staring at a screen. I think I heard Chris Orwig say something like we forget to blink as often as we should when looking at a computer screen and that strains our eyes a lot.

Also, when I'm doing something really tedious and proper screen brightness is not of importance for the task. I'll take my screen as dark as it can go, there's a great program for mac called "Shades" that allows you to dim it even darker than your computer will go, this really helps out.