Lauren and I recently visited the Yousuf Karsh exhibit at the Alberta Art Gallery. Karsh was a well known Canadian photographer based out of Ottawa . He’s probably best known for his portrait of Winston Churchill – the one where Karsh took Churchill’s cigar away and Churchill gave Karsh a surly look.
Wandering around the exhibit we came across a lot of Karsh’s darkroom supplies, and it got me thinking about how lucky we are today.
Karsh was manually dodging and burning film negatives! It’s hard for me to imagine how tedious and time consuming making and editing prints must have been.
Times have changed and with them the tools we use to work on photos. One tool that is indispensable in digital photography today is the Wacom tablet.
Using a stylus to essentially draw on your images (dodging and burning, retouching) may feel unnatural at first but ultimately provides a level of dexterity, precision and speed not possible with a mouse.
The best way I’ve heard the benefit of using a tablet described is being the same as the difference between painting with a pen and a brick.
If you haven’t tried a Wacom tablet, test one out at a computer store (I think Best Buy carries them). There are very affordable intro models (which function great) as well as larger professional tablets.
Even if you only consider yourself a hobbyist, this is definitely a powerful tool to think about adding to your workflow.
I’ll be honest, we don’t go anywhere without our tablet! We each have large models for use at home, and a small, travel sized one for when we’re on the road. That’s how much we love using them!
Do you have a favorite digital editing tool that you can’t live without?
