About Julieanne Kost

Joining Adobe in 1992, Julieanne has learned her craft through hands-on experience and now serves as the Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist. Spanning digital imaging and illustration, her role includes customer education, product development, and market research. She is a frequent contributor to several publications, a speaker at numerous design conferences and tradeshows, and a teacher at distinguished photography workshops and fine art schools around the world.

Herself a passionate photographer, she combines her background in psychology in creating artwork, seen in several showings and published in several magazines. She is also the author behind the Comprehensive Photoshop CS3 training DVDs published by Software Cinema and author of Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking published by O'Reilly.

In her work, Julieanne Kost is able to combine a passion for photography, a mastery of digital imaging techniques, and with a degree in psychology, finds within herself the raw components of visual emotion. Her explorations run quite the gamut, some as mundane as textures she finds grotesque — and therefore challenging to look at much less utilize in her work — to exploring the inner workings of her own skeletal system.

Individually, the ingredients don't lend themselves to an end result. They are merely components of a larger message, though what that is may not be clear at the time the photograph is taken. The individual images are snippets of an emotion, reaction, or sensation. A texture, combined with something as simple as a photograph of a scar, can yield the visual sensation of the wound that caused it. Since physical pain cannot be "remembered" the same way it was felt, this is a visual placeholder. Julieanne's work is an exploration of the sum of these parts — textures, light, shadow, and raw emotion.

From a technical standpoint, Julieanne has also been forced to put her knowledge to the test. Her experience in the digital realm has shifted from academic to practical. She must now practice what she teaches. It becomes her own means to an end. What she sees in her head must then translated to pixels, masks, and blending effects.

For Julieanne, a computer isn't merely a shortcut for what is possible with a camera. Instead, it's about exploring what's possible in no other medium and taking advantage of the flexibility and options for creative exploration. The computer has been properly relegated to just another tool. However, with the digital realm being so forgiving and offering so many options for exploration, it is here that discipline becomes part of the challenge. The paint is never dry, the exposure is never fixed, and the print is never final. All of it can be done differently at any point. Here, the art form is knowing when to stop. It's about realizing when you've said what you set out to say.