A Major Milestone Thanks To Adobe Photoshop 7, CS, CS2, CS3, CS4, & CS5

I guess I could also put Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1, 2, and 3 in the title.  The "milestone" we're celebrating is the 300th post here on The Kayview Gallery" dealing with some information about the Adobe products we use.  Today's image is the one that started it all.  Is it up to snuff with how it would be done today?  Probably not, but (hopefully) that shows some growth in the past couple of years.  There's another checkpoint coming up next week.  May 12th is the date of the first post.  In the beginning I was happy if anyone gave the posts a click.  Now there a growing, loyal group of folks who read the posting on a regular basis.  I doubt if anyone has gone through the entire forty plus pages (seven first paragraphs per page) and that okay.  Some of the things I was espousing at the beginning I'm pretty much a crusader against these days.  I guess that means there has been a progression in the understanding of how to do things better and/or easier.  The image of the Layer stack shown along with today's image shows that at the time of the first posting I was fairly big into Adjustment Layers and Clipping Masks.  Today, using Smart Objects, the stack would look very different.   If you'd like to learn about the secret of today's image, hit the "read more".

The title given to today's image was "Just About Closing Time".  It could happen!  The reality is that the shot was taken a little after one o'clock in the afternoon on an overcast day.  I showed the image to a commercial photographer I know and he bought into it being a night shot.  When I told him the time it was taken, his big question was "but how did you get the detail in the store through the windows?"  The easy answer is that he saw what he thought he saw, not what really there.  The detail "in" the store is a reflection of the buildings across the street.  Take a look at "through" the window on the left.  At the bottom you can see what might be bins or a display case.  At the top there's lights.  The lights were there and were emphasized to be seen through the window.  That's probably the key to the illusion.  Just under the lights is the reflection of the railing of the upper balcony of the other building.  Without being told, you can accept it as being what's known as "top stock".  Extra stock that doesn't fit in a normal display rack. 

There was a lot of work put into today's image, but I'd estimate that I could take out at least one third of the lines using methods I use today.  Education at the gallery never stops.  Too many people get to a level where they make money using Photoshop and stop.  That means they using methods that are obsolete by today's standards, but the money keeps flowing in, so what do they care?