Do you edit your pics?

cambsno

cambsno

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Name
Simon
Edit My Images
Yes
I obviously do when shooting digital, but feel guilty when using film!!!

I try to limit edits as I feel that taking say a film like Portra and boosting saturation or putting into B&W is a waste - why shoot film in that case if you are going to massively change the films qualities?

Do you guys edit much?
 
The vast majority are sharpened slightly (this is to compensate for scanning), and I may tweak the exposure, highlights and shadows to get the best out of the photo.

Dust and spots as well, although that's just to mitigate for the scanning process again.

Nothing drastic, although I don't think there's a specific need to be puritan about it - after all, before the age of digital, image editing was just as pervasive, albeit using darkroom techniques rather than Photoshop techniques.
 
Additionally, referring to your post, sometimes the film choice you have loaded may not be suitable for the shot - again, where post-processing comes in useful. Some shots would be great with Ektar, but that's all well and good when you have only Portra loaded in your camera - so why not boost the saturation to better match a better looking shot?
 
The reason why I shoot film is because it minimises my time editing! I used to spend hours messing about with curves in Photoshop to emulate a film look - but you never really get that close. It was even worse with black and white. Now all I do is correct the levels, add a slight S shaped curve to up the contrast a tad, and clone out any dust.
 
Cut and Paste, Cropping, Dodge, Burn, Re-touch are all old Darkroom techniques. I'm happy enough to use them on my scans.
 
Dust and scratch removal in photoshop using the healing brush and very rarely adjust colour balance at all, also every blue moon I will remove something unsightly, I was at bambourgh Castle a while ago and took a lovely pic of the gatehouse but on developing and scanning it had a horrid little stupid red sign on a wall something lke no ugly kids climbing on the cannons so I cloned that out.
 
Very little but mostly because I dont know my way around photoshop! Lately I have been adding a little contrast after critique on here but only to replace the softening caused by scanning.

I dont even like to crop really.

Mark
 
I do post process and I have a we established routine, some LR4 tweaks in exposure and contrast depending on how well exposed the film is, followed by some levels tweaks that which are about managing the scan. Some sharpening again to manage the scanner output. Like Trevor I do some dodging and burning mimicking what I did in the Darkroom back in the day, a shift then to PS to remove dust and scratches, I prefer doing this in PS rather than LR. Finally store in archive and upload to Flickr. I probably use less than 10% of the capacity and capability of LR and PS and I wear that badge with honour:lol::lol::lol:
 
Sharpening, dust/water mark removal and curves/contrast all in LR. If I'm feeling saucy I might play around with some other sliders but very very rarely.
 
Not puritan about it by any means - but yes, I'll edit the shot to get whatever I "saw in my mind". The better I got at working with film, the less I seemed to have to do, an I did enjoy the challenge of getting things as close to my pre-visualisation on the film...

...but if I've potentially a good picture, that I've only captured on film, which untreated is a mediocre image - hell yes, I'll give it a good work-up in whatever tools I have at my disposal.

If I've something in mind that will end up needing some pretty serious working up, I tend to just shoot in digital anyway - purely from the speed/convenience side of things.
 
If I want a print, I'll do it in the darkroom.

For on line, I find that the scanned negatives are generally pretty poor. Probably due to poor scanning technique. So, yes I do edit them in photoshop, but usually only to get them back to where they should be to look like the darkroom prints.
 
To be honest I don't think there are many film shooters who don't edit their scanned images to some degree. If you're letting the software do all the work and running everything in auto then you'll only ever get what the software 'thinks' is right which possibly won't be quite what you personally think is right. I try tweak my scanning settings to get as good a scan into the computer as I can but I still almost always end up making slight colour or contrast adjustment.
 
Hi, I do whatever I would have done with an enlarger in a darkroom ie cropping, boosting contrast with harder grades of paper, burning, dodging, etc, etc.

Plus a bit of sharpening to compensate for the the loss of sharpness through scanning.
 
Whatever I need to, to get the photo to look how I want it to
 
WHS ^^^^

Ansell Adams could spend days dodging and burning to get an image how he saw it in his mind, if its good enough for AA its good enough for me.

Andy
 
PMN said:
Surely you don't have a big enough stock of film to retake it that many times?
Click to expand...

Can someone get me a Doctor, I've just been burned... :gag:
 
I predominantly use Lightroom 4 and run through each of the tools in the develop tab from top to bottom (which is how Lightroom was designed to be used) and make whatever adjustments I deem to be necessary to improve the image.

At least that's the aim anyway.:)
 
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