Getting started.

At the moment I'm a bit unsure about how to approach this as this is my first blog post ever.

I guess I need to start with why I am actually doing this as I've always believed blogging to be a journalistic tool, not really meant for the average person. I've never understood why everyone wanted to blog when most bloggers aren't journalists or someone working in some field of marketing. Yet, here I am, writing my first blog post.

So, why am I doing this?



Well, in the past couple of days I've been sitting around doing as little as possible. I've had minor surgery on Monday and I'm at home, recovering for a couple of days before going back to my day job which is IT related.

I've been a keen photographer since my school days and one of the ways I've kept myself busy since starting my recovery on Tuesday was to sit and edit some photographs that I haven't been getting to.

I use Corel Paintshop Pro for final editing and one thing that struck me, was how little good content was available online to teach new users how to edit their photos with PSP.
Just about every photographer I know and read about uses Photoshop, so understandably there's a lot of content available to get one started with Photoshop.

But what about PSP, If you're like me, unwilling or unable to pay for Photoshop and have realized that there's a better, easier, cheaper solution available that allows you to spend more time behind the camera instead of the PC then what do you do?

I can do basic photo editing and Paintshop Pro makes it really easy and fast and to me personally its the best solution available because its specifically developed and designed for photographers in contrast to Photoshop which is a general, yet extremely powerful, graphics editing application.

The problem I'm constantly facing though is while basic editing is easy and well documented for PSP, every now and then I want to do something more advanced and then I hit a wall because there's nothing I can find on the web to tell me how to do it. I then find myself going through my Photoshop book and adapt the techniques as best I can for PSP.

Clearly this is not ideal, hence my initial reason for starting this blog.

I've decided its time for someone to change this as there are many photographers out there using PSP and they are probably struggling as much as I am. With my background in software development and experience in photography I think I can pull this off.
I have to admit though, at this moment, the task seems quite daunting.

So, the plan is to start focusing on figuring out how to do advanced stuff in PSP and post my progress and techniques used on this blog. Who knows where this will lead, maybe nowhere, but hopefully it will develop into something useful for myself and others. So lets find out, let me start the the journey with the first step.