LTR!034 – Greg Benz the creator of Lumenzia Podcast – Boutique Retouching

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*Episode Transcript







Introducing Greg Benz







Daniel: 







So for people who do not know you cause, they might know the panel they might know, maybe some tutorials from you, but they maybe don't know you by name, so let's have you introduce yourself for how you would give your elevator pitch. 







Greg:  







Yeah, so. My name is Greg Benz. I'm a landscape photographer based out of Minneapolis, MN in the States and my. My focus is a photographer is a combination of my own photography as well as being a software developer, an instructor. So I spend a lot of time learning about and teaching about using luminosity masks. I think that a lot of people. 







Kind of know me for that, but my own my own work is kind of focused on landscape cityscape type work, though I've kind of done a little bit of everything over the years, so that's kind of my. My home base is luminosity masks. 







Daniel Hager 







Yeah, and people can go to your website gregbenzphotography.com where I can learn about luminosity masks, what you're doing, but you just said You are a software developer so. 







This episode potentially could get a little bit geeky just for listeners to be aware of, so I have no problem going deep into some topics here, so just to be aware of. 







Now let's go back. So, for how long do you think you are in this using Photoshop and what was your first time discovering this program, and how did it come to be? 







From Shooting Film To Creating a Software Product







Greg Benz 







Well, for me Photoshop something I've been using for almost 20 years. I really got kind of hooked on photography when I was living in London back in 2000 and we're shooting film back then, but using Photoshop after I scanned. 







The negatives and such and it just kind of snowballed since then. So really almost 20 years for me of using Photoshop, the luminosity masking. That's something I dove into something like 5 six years ago and gotten really seriously in the last few years, but it wasn't something I kind of picked up or figured out until a little bit later. I mean, it's definitely the more advanced end of photo shop. 







Technology to help you create and to be an artist







Daniel Hager 







There is obviously techniques in Photoshop that come to people more naturally without having to spend a lot of time or not investing a lot of time and others. They require more knowledge overall to make them work for you. 







Greg Benz 







Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think as an educator and as a photographer, both my goal has been to try and understand things that are complicated and boiling down to things that are more simple. I mean Lumenzia, my software actually started as something I did for myself because I thought that luminosity masking was old too. Cerebral, too academic. 







And I wanted to work as an artist and I could sort of, you know, think with the left side of my brain or the right side of my brain. But I couldn't do both at the same time. And so you know, I'm always trying to think about techniques or tools that I can create so that when I do my photography work,