Anyone here make a living with Photoshop?

Question

Does anyone here make a living with PS (or close to it)? I don't really mean in combination with anything else (like a graphics arts degree, or "I use it along with these six other programs I'm an expert in, too").
From what I'm gathering, relying solely on PS for income would leave one starving, and I understand that an employer - if one isn't a freelancer - would want an employee to have multiple areas of expertise.

Answer 1

I'm 53 now so that made me 38 when I started using Ps. Not that far off from where you are today. All I can say is that it happened very gradually for me, first just playing around then trying to emulate what prepress houses were doing for my clients at the time on images I had shot, to finally doing small jobs myself, usually learning just enough at one time to figure out how to get that one project done.
Then after reading the early Real World books and later the Professional Photoshop series, I began to get a grasp of what it took to start to take on the responsibility of taking on projects where my contribution was a small part of a much larger budget - annual reports that cost a quarter million to print, large campaigns for public utilities that had billboards, busboards and ads all across L.A. I had to step up my game and not just be "as good" as those prepress and retouching houses that my clients used to use, I had to be significantly better. This involved not only being able to do anything they through at me but also saying yes when when they told me I could say no. It also involved learning as much as possible about digital color, digital color management and how to make digital images reproduce their best wherever and however the clients wanted to print. And that led to investment in hardware and software - tens or thousands of dollars in spectrophotometers and color management software that gave me a competitive advantage over my competition and tools that even though many print shops owned, very few knew how to use. It's that constant pushing forward and drive to improve your skills that keeps you interested in a very fascinating place in history.
There's room for anyone good, and even if you're just starting out, and somehow consider yourself mid-career, that's no reason to give up. Before you know it, you'll be able to offer services that others aren't willing to do for themselves and if you don't try to take on too much at once, you'll look back in a couple of years and ask yourself why you were so worried at the time.
There is so much more good information and better, less expensive tools readily available that it's easier today that ever before. Hell, I can remember participating in a Monday night live AOL chat where Chris Cox, the Adobe engineer was the guest and asking him when they were going to start supporting ColorSync and ColorSync profiles, to which he replied something on the order that that was not a very good direction to go in. My how things have changed.
I just finished what it probably one of the most difficult Ps jobs I've done to date - the 2010 Manhattan Wine Auction Poster - for Manhattan Beach, Ca. not Manhattan, NY. It really pushed the limits of my own capabilities, both in the actual shooting and certainly in the digital post production. Here's a link to their website which has the poster on the first page.
http://manhattanwineauction.com/
This was every bit as hard as it looks but most importantly, involved another helicopter ride, taking the doors off a Robinson 44 and hanging out over the ocean. There were three bottles of wine involved in what you see here - a bottle of two buck chuck from Trader Joe's that I drilled a 1/4 inch vent hole in to facilitate a smoother pour, an opened $400 bottle of wine for the open neck and a full bottle so it wouldn't be too transparent - all blended together to form one perfect union. The splash was from a rubber ball dropped on a fishing line into a washtub full of wine colored Kool-Aid and then the concentric ripples from a can of Dust-Off compressed air shot into the same washtube, all photographed with the Canon 1DsMKIII and a 90mm Tilt-Shift lens with a Broncolor strobe that had a 1/7500th of a second flash duration to stop the action. I populated the pier with people from alternate aerial shots and finally used surfing shots from Body Glove for the three surfers at the bottom. The final file was prepped for printing at Lithocraft in Anaheim using a custom profile I made for their press and the printed piece looked as close to what I saw I my screen as anything else I have taken to press.