It's by the grace of God, with good planning and a ready willingness to jump to a new lilypad, that I learnt about digital photography long before the first megapixel was born: about 1988 to 1990 would be when I was studying Illustrator, Photoshop and CorelDraw and the application of scanning. I attended night classes and worked my own analogue production schedule at home on alternate days and weekends. So I'm very conversant with both digital and analogue.
In my work Photoshop is used to a very minimum: replacement of sharpness from the scan step, colourimetrics, profiling and proofing (usually once, no more than twice), then final print. There is no HDR. No layering. No extravagent USM. No Disneychrome profiling. Checking of colours against my personal standard chart and final RA-4 print run with QC. If I'm happy (and most of the time I am!), it goes off to the frameshop for finishing. The amount of time spent on any digital work is very, very minimal. It always has been. I think about 30 minutes tops post-scan. And it's an old version of Photoshop that the lab and I use, too. We despise Adobe's persistent adding-on of all sorts of things that really have no place in studio work where time is often the essence, not dibbing with droplets. I am aware that older folk experience frustration and often anger when going near digital work for the first time. In my experience they don't really cotton-on and become very proficient — I'm still hammering at it with several older people grabbling with their digital cameras and trying to "make something of it" through Photoshop. So... I can only cite my case, but starting early and stickingn at it can certainly pay big dividends when you want to, or have to, straddle the so-called "great divide" of film vs digital. I work in both worlds and the entire photographic production industry, thus I see much, much more going on than digital-only or the ravenous analogue-only crowds.
In my work Photoshop is used to a very minimum: replacement of sharpness from the scan step, colourimetrics, profiling and proofing (usually once, no more than twice), then final print. There is no HDR. No layering. No extravagent USM. No Disneychrome profiling. Checking of colours against my personal standard chart and final RA-4 print run with QC. If I'm happy (and most of the time I am!), it goes off to the frameshop for finishing. The amount of time spent on any digital work is very, very minimal. It always has been. I think about 30 minutes tops post-scan. And it's an old version of Photoshop that the lab and I use, too. We despise Adobe's persistent adding-on of all sorts of things that really have no place in studio work where time is often the essence, not dibbing with droplets. I am aware that older folk experience frustration and often anger when going near digital work for the first time. In my experience they don't really cotton-on and become very proficient — I'm still hammering at it with several older people grabbling with their digital cameras and trying to "make something of it" through Photoshop. So... I can only cite my case, but starting early and stickingn at it can certainly pay big dividends when you want to, or have to, straddle the so-called "great divide" of film vs digital. I work in both worlds and the entire photographic production industry, thus I see much, much more going on than digital-only or the ravenous analogue-only crowds.