I know it's hard to filter the good advice from the bad, especially when you're a beginner photographer. Everybody has an opinion everywhere you look and one of the hottest topics is post processing. Some say you should treat it equally to your camera, others recommend using it only for minor adjustments after you get the shot right from the camera.
I'm not here to tell you which option is better. Instead, I want to share a video that was brought to my attention recently. The title is "100 year old lady made young and beautiful again".
Obviously I thought it was a bad joke, but unnatural forces persuaded me to play the video.
To keep it short, you are about to witness the power of Photoshop in the right hands. Working on a portrait of what appears to be a very old woman, with the obvious signs of old age showing on her face, the person behind the computer manages to come up with a final photograph that looks nothing like the original.
The video is of course fast forwarded, but my humble experience tells me that whomever was behind the buttons spent a few good hours doing all the work. The techniques aren't that difficult if you break it down, yet you do need a bit of practice to get to know how to use all the tools that were used in this video. What you do need to achieve such a radical transformation is patience, and I mean a lot of it. If you have that and you can tolerate a bit of damage to the quality of the original file, than you might be on your way to doing some Photoshop surgery yourself.
Enjoy! After watching, leave a comment about what you think of this Photoshop transformation.
(via PhotoshopSurgeon)