Dilema image editing! should you? shouldnt you?

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shanko1984

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Chris
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Hi guys,

Im fairly new too photography and have been having a great time traveling around and getting great results, although on the odd occasion, like today i was snapping a simple shot of a lovley small tree on a ridge with a nice sky in the back ground, trying too set up the contrast enough to siloette the tree against the blue sky with a slightly lower exposure too try give the sky a richer darker colour.

My results werent bad but werent perfect either and i decided to tinker with one as an experiment, simply bringing up the contrast too siloette the tree better and brightening the picture just too make the sky pop with colour.

**So my question is where do you draw the line....i adore and stive too always take the perfect shot with only cropping the picture on occassions too square up, perhaps because i am still learing alot and feel it as cheating to manipulate the image, even though technically u are inside the camera....?***

would love too here everyones opinion, pros and cons and for the time beign i think i will have a flickr folder claiming the ones i edited and the ones i left untouched.

thank you alll
 
im afraid i no longer have the exact image i used but i had another very similar one with slight cloud coverage in the background.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_shanks0/5321057717/



http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_shanks0/5321073209/


perhaps a bit extreme in contrast? but was merley an experiment...... other ones i have done just slightly lowering contrast in b/w. if u look at the rest of my photos all are untouched except the ones which i have put in a set called "pictures with a slight tweek"

cheers and enjoy comment more than welcome
 
Don't see any problem with working on an image on the computer. The camera is just the first step. Yes, get it as best you can in the camera but sometimes it just isn't possible to get the perfect image by pressing the shutter button. In the past just as much work went on in the darkroom - look at Ansel Adams stuff. These days it's just a digital darkroom :)
 
Got to admit I'm not to keen on your edit as the sky looks way off any natural shade I've seen imo.

As to the rights and wrongs of editing that is really up to you. You can just tweak them as I believe most probalbly do, go for the complete make over or keep it straight out of camera. The only "rule" if thats the correct word to use, is don't pretend you haven't done any pp work if you have. But at the end of the day it's your picture for your pleasure so do what you like and have fun doing it. ;)
 
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I'm not mad about "tweaking" pics on the PC, apart from resizing the image for web use. I don't really go in for cropping, tweaking contrast, colour etc and prefer to try and get things right "in camera". I will sometimes adjust the WB in Capture NX2 but I'd rather get it correct in the first place to avoid faffing about later. I'd rather spend my time taking pictures than messing about with them at home!
 
I Agree i think the sky is too extreme also..i think i did that out of guilt hehe

but i did like the outcome as a bit of a "fun" image

The question was definatley directed at sublte imaging..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_shanks0/5321768888/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_shanks0/5321669008/

these two b/w had slight tweeks in the contrast as i just let that little bit too much light into the picutre which ruined the moment.

where as these next too images which i am particularly pround of have no editing in any sense they are straight off the camera

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_shanks0/5303758047/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_shanks0/5304342632/

* i definatley will keep my set that has all my edited so all will know what i have done but i also think for myself it is a good reminder to what i missed and need to think about next time in similar situation.

Thanks guys for all you comments this is a great site with great folk.

Chris
 
shanko1984 said:
where as these next too images which i am particularly pround of have no editing in any sense they are straight off the camera
Click to expand...
They may be straight out of the camera, but the camera does an awful lot of processing to get to a b/w image. I've only played briefly with b/w conversion, but I know, for example, the weights you use in each channel for colour->b/w conversion can dramatically affect the overall feel and quality of the photo. You may want to get it right "off the camera" but in reality, all you are doing is letting the camera software tweak the image to its own tastes...

There isn't a single image that I produce that has no post processing (even if it is only lens correction). IMHO, the computer (and the person driving it) is part of the creative process...
 
Thats a fair point... forgive my lack of knowllage but is what u have described less of a factor if you use Raw or is this just simply less processing by the camera but notcompletley free of processing? at the moment im am just on the standard settings for quality but someone recomended moving to a settign that i beleive is half raw half jpeg? tbh i didnt understand that and have still to look into that.
 
RAW = directly off the sensor. JPEG = directly off the sensor + whatever processing the camera has applied. You can emulate what the camera does in post processing if you capture RAW, but you can't emulate RAW if you only capture as JPEG.

It isn't clear what your camera is, but on my Canon 450D I can specify RAW only, JPEG only or RAW+JPEG. On my 5Dmk2, I can independently control RAW captures and JPEG captures (i.e. I can choose the RAW size and JPEG quality independently).

I used to shoot JPEG only, then moved to RAW+JPEG and once I'd become familiar with Lightroom, moved to RAW only. I know that in the limited playing with converting the RAW to b/w, you can make significant changes in the feel of the photo depending on how you mix the R/G/B channels into the final image (for example, taking the B mix right down can darken the sky a lot).

I view it that the only thing I have to get right in camera is the exposure. That is, make sure that the lightest parts of the image aren't over exposed and the dark parts aren't clipped to 0 (unless I'm deliberately forcing it that way to do a HDR image for example). Everything else creatively gets done in post processing. The look the camera gives when converting and storing to JPEG is just a single interpretation of the picture (try taking the same picture using the different picture modes - Standard, Portrait, Landscape etc... on a Canon if you want to see what I mean).

I don't know what software you have, but I'd shoot a couple of pictures in RAW+JPEG and see what your image processing software allows you to change on them in the RAW and JPEG formats. Typically, you have much finer control of things like white balance and lens correction when shooting RAW.
 
Im using a panasonic fz45 (bridge camera) so as u can imagine i am limited in alot of respects thou i can set up to jpeg...raw+jpeg...raw and a coulpe other ones, and as far as software im only using what came with the camera, and i havent really used it, just too upload images to be honest i really have only been into it seriously over the last month or so, so iv just been reading and trying too take it all in whilst getting out and having fun,

appreciate the info and will certainly look into it more

regards

chris
 
I like your second two images better. Not keen on the edit in the first image though. Just not sharp enough and the colour in the sky looks false. The original is not bad.
 
If you're happy wth the image then that's what it's all about. Remember image manipulation has always been a part of photography since the beginning of photography. Don't feel like you're cheating.
It's the final image that counts and as long as you're happy with it then that's ok.
If you are shooting RAW then that very fact means you have to post process anyway to get the best out of the image.
Phil.
 
It no different now than it was in film days, you either accepted how the prints came back from the lab (camera) or you developed and printed your own (Photoshop).

Both are right and neither is wrong.:)
 
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