Post process and the hobbyist

I am retired, and a hobbyst whom sometimes has "clients", and always wanted a "darkroom".
All my shooting is done in raw so everything published is is post processed.
I use Lightroom, and Photoshop (if need be).

For the purely personal day to day photographs - like a dawn shoot or flower photographs etc there will not be many to look at (50?) and only 2 or 3 to publish. So that means I only have 2 or 3 to process.
Proceesing will mostly be cropping, levels and sometimes a bit of contrast adjustment (if needed) and sharpening (alwatys) before publishing. It doesn't take long.

For shoots for other people (like classical music concerts) I will normally shoot about 400 photographs and about 50 - 60 will be published. Processing takes a bit longer as they will always need some noise reduction, sometimes selectively, due to shooting at high ISO's. Processing and uploading to my web site will be completed by 2-3 days after the event - so links can be included in news letters etc.

For large shoots of sporting events (motor racing I will be shooting a maximum of 2000 pics/day so 3-4000 for a weekend.
Important "clients" (usually drivers) will have images available by a day aftter the event (this will probaly be about 40 images in total). Another 50 images will be uploaded to my site within 4 days after the event so links can be included in news letters etc.
After one year all the remaing unpublished, and those for which no enquirires have been recieved, images are deleted.

For the large personal projects like vacations the processing may take weeks to complete. However I regard that as very enjoyable and a chance help recall good memories.
Most of the images will be published over the years.
 
One thing I haven't mentioned in my previous posts in the thread is that PP is for some people a major area of interest. Not only as a means of rescuing shots which were less than perfectly exposed but also as a creative process in its own right. Of course, there were similar distractions back in film days but modern PP software makes it far easier and so more accessible to anyone with a computer than it was in a smelly cupboard with rather limited light!
 
Not really in response to the OP's question, which really is answered. No-one ever seems to mention 'pre-processing'.

Modern cameras have really powerful processors built in, and if you have the time to invest creating custom 'styles' is a valid alternative to adding presets in post processing. It just takes more care at the taking stage.making sure your wb and exp are correct and selecting the appropriate picture style.
 
Phil V said:
Not really in response to the OP's question, which really is answered. No-one ever seems to mention 'pre-processing'.

Modern cameras have really powerful processors built in, and if you have the time to invest creating custom 'styles' is a valid alternative to adding presets in post processing. It just takes more care at the taking stage.making sure your wb and exp are correct and selecting the appropriate picture style.
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Not many people actually know what they want at that stage though. Plus... wouldn't that apply to only JPEG shooting?
 
Pookeyhead said:
Not many people actually know what they want at that stage though. Plus... wouldn't that apply to only JPEG shooting?
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Well there's 2 strands to that point.
Plan better, and then shoot RAW and JPEG, if your JPEG offers exactly what you had in mind you don't need the RAW, if you'd got it wrong, PP can sort out a different result from the RAW file.
 
Pookeyhead said:
Not many people actually know what they want at that stage though.
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It's strange really, probably the 30+ years of shooting on film and the conditioning it gave me, but pre-selecting the "look and feel" of the shot (by choice of film - Velvia / Portra / Acros / Kodachrome or whatever) is just ingrained... I'd personally LOVE some easy way of creating custom colour responses that I could have on the Digital, and just dial them in for a shot - I'd probably shoot raw + jpeg, and end up processing the raw when I got home and on a proper computer, but the custom mapped jpeg's would be a nice easy "preview" or starting point...
 
TheBigYin said:
It's strange really, probably the 30+ years of shooting on film and the conditioning it gave me, but pre-selecting the "look and feel" of the shot (by choice of film - Velvia / Portra / Acros / Kodachrome or whatever) is just ingrained... I'd personally LOVE some easy way of creating custom colour responses that I could have on the Digital, and just dial them in for a shot - I'd probably shoot raw + jpeg, and end up processing the raw when I got home and on a proper computer, but the custom mapped jpeg's would be a nice easy "preview" or starting point...
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So long as it's in my head... I'd rather have the blank canvas of a raw to work with. For me that's more in keeping with how I used to work in black and white film. I'm with adams on this one.. the film is the score, and the printing was the performance. Not that I ever did (or do) change much, but subtle things like contrast choice, depth of blacks etc... I'd rather have full control of that post shoot.
 
as I said David, I would very probably end up going back to the raw files myself... it's just that if I had the "starting point" of the jpegs, just to jog my memory as to what I was trying to get as an end result a month or so down the line when I actually got around to processing them, it'd probably help my failing memory :lol:
 
TheBigYin said:
It's strange really, probably the 30+ years of shooting on film and the conditioning it gave me, but pre-selecting the "look and feel" of the shot (by choice of film - Velvia / Portra / Acros / Kodachrome or whatever) is just ingrained... I'd personally LOVE some easy way of creating custom colour responses that I could have on the Digital, and just dial them in for a shot - I'd probably shoot raw + jpeg, and end up processing the raw when I got home and on a proper computer, but the custom mapped jpeg's would be a nice easy "preview" or starting point...
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I think you may be looking at something that Fuji have implemented in the X cameras. The x100 i had had 3 pre-sets, Velvia Astia and Provia. The newer cameras also have a 'chrome' preset intended to mimic kodachrome
 
Rapscallion said:
I think you may be looking at something that Fuji have implemented in the X cameras. The x100 i had had 3 pre-sets, Velvia Astia and Provia. The newer cameras also have a 'chrome' preset intended to mimic kodachrome
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I recently bought one of their x-m1's :)
 
TheBigYin said:
It's strange really, probably the 30+ years of shooting on film and the conditioning it gave me, but pre-selecting the "look and feel" of the shot (by choice of film - Velvia / Portra / Acros / Kodachrome or whatever) is just ingrained... I'd personally LOVE some easy way of creating custom colour responses that I could have on the Digital, and just dial them in for a shot - I'd probably shoot raw + jpeg, and end up processing the raw when I got home and on a proper computer, but the custom mapped jpeg's would be a nice easy "preview" or starting point...
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What digital format do you shoot Mark? With Canon you can tweak the picture styles, I'd be surprised if other manufacturers didn't have a similar feature.
 
I don't take many images on a day out/event/etc & when I do I'm a 'chimping' sort of person really. If it don't look good/right on the LCD then I'll happily delete it there & then most of the time. I used LR5 & out of a dozen or so presets I have I tend to use the same 2 or 3 most of the time so I can edit 30 or so images from a car meet type event this morning in the time it takes to drink a coffee or JD & Coke :)

Do whatever you enjoy ;) If that's shooting jpeg with in-camera PP then that's perfectly fine & acceptable in my book. Just because I shoot RAW & edit in LR5 doesn't mean everyone else has to ;)
 
About ten years ago I realised that I hated post processing. So I upgraded back to film.


Steve.
 
Phil V said:
What digital format do you shoot Mark? With Canon you can tweak the picture styles, I'd be surprised if other manufacturers didn't have a similar feature.
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Well, my main system is with Canon - I think I need to spend a bit of time playing around with the Picture Style Editor on the computer and tweak the presets to what I fancy Phil...

It's something I only really thought about since just after Christmas this year, when I bought the little Fuji X-M1 as a "holiday/walking trip" camera, and spotted the presets named after various Film's that pretty much instantly told me what to expect - A "Velvia" preset just meant more to me than "Landscape", as did "Astia" rather than "Portrait"...
 
TheBigYin said:
Well, my main system is with Canon - I think I need to spend a bit of time playing around with the Picture Style Editor on the computer and tweak the presets to what I fancy Phil...

It's something I only really thought about since just after Christmas this year, when I bought the little Fuji X-M1 as a "holiday/walking trip" camera, and spotted the presets named after various Film's that pretty much instantly told me what to expect - A "Velvia" preset just meant more to me than "Landscape", as did "Astia" rather than "Portrait"...
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I've never had a go, but there's a Canadian wedding photographer on another forum I frequent, his go to camera's are still 40d's and his dream workflow is to shoot JPEGs he can deliver, and he's working towards it. It requires a more disciplined shooting style than I could muster, but I still think it's be doable by many.
 
Steve Smith said:
About ten years ago I realised that I hated post processing. So I upgraded back to film.


Steve.
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With digital I prefer the get it right in camera route though will heal the inevitable dust spot now and then and am also prepared to except that even viewnx even does a better conversion from Raw that the camera jpeg provides, however with film I'll spend more time pp basically to remove dust etc from scans on 10x8 I personally don't think it follows that people will pp less with film unless people just hand it over to a lab and say crack on.
 
abbandon said:
With digital I prefer the get it right in camera route though will heal the inevitable dust spot now and then and am also prepared to except that even viewnx even does a better conversion from Raw that the camera jpeg provides, however with film I'll spend more time pp basically to remove dust etc from scans on 10x8 I personally don't think it follows that people will pp less with film unless people just hand it over to a lab and say crack on.
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As someone who still shoots, soups and scans my own stuff (up to 120, I've pretty much made a financial decision not to carry on with the LF stuff anymore, now that clients aren't asking for it and paying through the nose for the priveledge) I can honestly say I spend as much if not more time on PP with film stuff - especially as, to me, the whole scanning part of the process is a pretty fundamental part of the PP process - it's not really comparable with "uploading from a CF card onto the computer", getting the scan right is an essential part of what the end result is going to be with any "hybrid" film/digital workflow... Of course, I COULD just go back to shooting film only on B&W and printing my own stuff if I cleared a space for a wet darkroom, but I think I've scratched that itch before, and don't really relish going back to it. Plus - I love looking at stuff on Velvia slides... and Cibachrome isn't really an option for hard-copy anymore, so hybrid has to come back into play...
 
abbandon said:
I personally don't think it follows that people will pp less with film unless people just hand it over to a lab and say crack on.
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It depends on what you refer to as post processing.

I prefer to print with an enlarger but I do not consider it to be post processing... but in a way, it is really.


Steve.
 
Phil V said:
I've never had a go, but there's a Canadian wedding photographer on another forum I frequent, his go to camera's are still 40d's and his dream workflow is to shoot JPEGs he can deliver, and he's working towards it. It requires a more disciplined shooting style than I could muster, but I still think it's be doable by many.
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Yes, if you put the work in to understand what the camera can do and how best to exploit it, JPEGs straight out of the camera can look great. There is one serious limitation though that works against optimum image quality - in-camera JPEGs chop off at least one stop of highlights, permanently lost. That's a big drawback if you want to extract every last drop of image quality and use ETTR technique (Expose To The Right, of the histogram).
 
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