AMA 6, the tablet

An email from Pete, a reader in the Chicago area:

Hey Keith,

I am a long time reader of your blog and I would like to hear, in the coming months, how that tablet is working out. I also recently retired from full time work ( tax accountant), however I still help out during busy seasons. I use Lightroom for photo editing and really like it, but I recently read about the tablets and almost bought one for Christmas. 

Keep up the great work

Thanks for writing, Pete! I always love to hear from my readers.

As you suggest, the tablet is an ongoing project, and I'll certainly be blogging about it. To sum up, so far, so good. It's tied in with using photoshop for more detailed editing, so there'll probably be some of that as well. 

So far, the trickiest thing has been managing taking the pen off the tablet without it jerking a little in one direction or another. My thinking is there are two possibilities. One is that my fingers haven't learned to pick the pen up straight. Two is there may be settings that help mitigate that problem. It's a bit annoying to move a slider to exactly where I want it, and then it jerks one way or the other as I pick up.

I've been thinking about the whole photo editing thing. Some photo editors never use the global edits. They go in and edit piece by piece, a bit here and a bit there. I don't get that, to be honest. Maybe I'm insufficiently picky about my photos. I generally use the global edits, and tweak where it's necessary. Before the tablet I was rarely happy with the results and lived with the flaws. Now I've fixed a few things and I'm gaining confidence. Maybe they really would look better if I went in bit by bit and brightened that bit of shadow, or increased the contrast over there, or tweaked individual colours. 

Some of the Lightroom or Photoshop 'how to' videos show people making adjustments to specific parts of a photo and where they've done it to illustrate the effect, I get it. It's too much and they say so, because it's done for the video. But then they demonstrate on an actual photo and I don't really see a difference. 

For my photos, I think to myself, how will this be seen? The vast majority of my photos are never seen by anyone but me, since I look at them once and decide they aren't worth editing for whatever reason. Of the remainder, the vast majority are viewed on my blog at a social media resolution. To be honest this hides a multitude of sins. There's no point editing for detail nobody will ever see.

There are a few that are put onto Facebook or Instagram. There are a few that get saved for the cover of our community newsletter, and that's done at 300 dpi, but sized at a medium resolution. Only a very few get printed or viewed in a way that reveals every subtle detail/flaw, and are good enough to warrant a detailed review and tweaking bit by bit.

I suppose I should put a photo of the tablet here, with setup for the keyboard and trackpad, but my desk is a disaster area just now. I can't even see all of the tablet for papers. Instead, there's this. I was considering tweaking this using the tablet to make the blue really pop. Really, really pop. Not just the big bit you can see, but all the bits off to the right where the blue peeks between the leaves. Then I thought about how that would look kind of fake. I'm totally not a fan of fake looking.

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