Poll - Should we bring back the PS Challenges?

[Erin Kathleen]

Hi everyone -

After being MIA for a few months, I'm back and wanted to know how y'all felt about bring back the Challenges or not. What do you think? Should we bring them back how we had them before? Something different? Or just let them die?

Thanks!
Erin

[RandySmith]

Erin - I personally enjoy how seeing how creative everyone is here, it can be truly inspiring to me. I've missed participating when I can.

Hope all is well. Welcome back.
Randy

[Jake]

I like the old way of just kind of "fixing" a picture that someone posts.
The last few challenges took way to much time, well to much time for me I should say

[PeteQ]

I liked some of the composite work that was done but I also would prefer it to be a little more directed, such as fixing or manipulating towards a central theme or goal. That way you could see the same basic result attacked from different angles and folks could give feedback about how they achieved it. Kind of like the "Help me with this photo......" threads. We all throw in and then when a good result is achieved the person usually posts how they did it.

It seems some of the past challenges were just a collection of extract and paste with no real goal other than to put something together. I'm not saying that isn't fun, but if it is approached as a way to fix or improve the photo I think that may give folks a little bit more to shoot for. And also, those are skills that most of us can use everyday. Here's an example: Say I post the picture below and the challenge is to remove those pilings as well as improve the overall image. That's pretty generic but uses techniques that we can all apply. The top couple folks could then outline what they did.

Just a thought.....

[Daniel Bates]

I'd like to see some wedding-themed ones where people could take a straight-from-the-camera image and tweak it... then post the result and a sketch of their workflow. That would be very informative!

[Roy]

Although I didn't participate (because I don't know what I'm doing), I did come to see what was going on. I like Pete's idea. I like the idea of getting educated on PhotoShop and techniques used to create or improve images.

[RandySmith]

Pete -

I like your ideas as well, however, as an additional challenge, I'd wonder if removing the pilings would actually make it a better or worse photo ? And why ? I'm always wondering if the photoshop techniques that I apply are "too" much ... I know it's all in the eye's of the beholder thing, but there may be solid reasons why certain things that appear in a photo might enhance or detract from a photo that I personally could learn from. Hope my rambling makes sense to y'all.

Thanks.
Randy

[PeteQ]

The "pilings" example was just a quick illustration that happened to be at the top of the hard drive to help deliver my point. I'd leave 'em myself.....

[RandySmith]

Pete, I understand your point with the photo and I wasn't being critical about that, I'd leave em' too, but that's the point, why would we ? I would like to have discussions along this line when we're discussing when somebody edits a photo here in these excercises to know what works and what doesn't, and why we think that way is all.

[copper]

I like the idea of a before and after photo that was said above about removing the pilings. It could and would show peps the diffrent ways they do things and what might be an easier way for someone who tried. It educates us non-expert user of PS, but even if you keep the idea of making the Contest the same (international Fest contest) at least give us the jest of what was done. I bet some of those took hours. They look great and one day I will be able to do something like that.

Just my 2 cents

[princer7]

I like the idea of a single photo edited as mentioned above. Nice to learn new techniques and also hear what does and does not work.

[PeteQ]

Originally Posted by RandySmith

Pete, I understand your point with the photo and I wasn't being critical about that, I'd leave em' too, but that's the point, why would we ? I would like to have discussions along this line when we're discussing when somebody edits a photo here in these excercises to know what works and what doesn't, and why we think that way is all.

The point of "why would we" is just simply to demonstrate different techniques. Say the above photo was the challenge and the object was to remove the pilings and make the boat blue instead of white. It's not for any other reason than to see how people attack the problem. There are so many ways to accomplish the same thing in photoshop that getting different views can help us streamline our workflow and show new ideas.

I would like to see folks really challenged with some specific outcome to shoot for so it is more objective. With my above example we all kind of have an idea what the result should look like, it is now up to us with our PS skills to achieve that. For the folks that don't know how to accomplish that, they will need to do some research and learn a new skill. I think that's a good thing! Otherwise we all tend to fall back and use only what we know and build our composite within our little worlds instead of expanding that world by being forced to find an answer to the problem. I know I did on a few of those challenges. A bunch of copying and pasting or cloning without really looking beyond my skill set at that time.

I also think that these are techniques almost eveyone can use everyday on their photos, whereas compositing is a bit more advanced. Maybe we need a basic and an advanced Photoshop skills type thing. I dunno... I'd be happy to oversee a "Photo Retouch Challenge" type thread....

[Erin Kathleen]

Well, it looks like the majority want to continue the challenge how we had it, so whoever wins gets to pick the next challenge and the rules for it (for the most part). We can have different challenges from tweaking a photo to playing with merging three photos, to everything in between. I'll set up a before and after challenge to decide who gets to pick the first real challenge. Thanks everyone for bearing with me and being so understanding! The before and after challenge will only last one week.

[forrest]

Although I don't enter many challenges, I always learn something from seeing how others handle a challenge, even if I haven't entered. My vote is to keep them, but as a newbie I can't comment on whether they should be as before.
Forrest