Hello Paul,

: These are actual pictures of my watches. Let me explain this using
: cooking as an analogy. The raw ingredients are a nice picture of
: a watch plus either one or more other images mixed and blended
: together in Photoshop to produce the final offering. There is no
: recipe and just like in cooking, you taste as you go along but
: in my case its my visual perception and preconceived idea that
: determines if it needs some more or less of this or that until I
: think it meets my expectation. Even though I may use the same
: ingredients and repeat the process it will never be the same as
: I do not save anything until I am happy with the end result.

Thanks for the info. That's art.

I hope you did not misunderstand me: I do not bash the Photoshop work. I also do it, not (yet?) for watches. I experienced that it is extremely difficult to create such a composition (watch before a special background) in real world. For instance: how to let the watch float without exposing any holding stands, strings, etc.

: It
: may take up to 10, 20, 50 or more steps to produce an image and
: I don’t record these so it’s a spontaneous process.

For processing my watch photos I use Lightroom, which permanently remembers the history of actions on an image. In Photoshop you may store the protocol of actions into the meta data of a file (see general preferences).

: Photoshop is an amazing tool but like any media you need to a.
: know how it works and b. have a good idea of what you want to
: create in order to achieve some degree of success.

I continuously switch between play/learn mode and goal-oriented mode :-)

Cheers,

Mick