Processing

[Markvs]

I got a very nice Digital photography book for Christmas but was surprised nearly half is dedicated to CS6

So I had a play about with some older software I have on the laptop, PSP which has many of the same elements, cloning and removing posts and signs is easy enough, Pictures are not great but taken with a budget camera from few months back when I began

My question is how much do people edit their photographs with software, Do people have mixed views on editing

 

[AJQS]

Yep people have views on editing, but the only one that matters is your own.

Stick with PSP It'll do you well. Or it will until it develops a random colour space intolerance that requires a reinstall to cure! (Guess what I'm up to?)

 

[Markvs]

I do like PSP Im using version 6 its probably free now on the internet its been out years

 

[Tringa]

Every photo I take is edited on the PC in some way.

It may be as little as a bit of sharpening but it could be cropping, levelling the horizon, adjusting levels, tweaking the colours, cloning out a distracting element I failed to notice when took the shot or combining a number of shots.

How much you want to edit is, as already said, up to you; there is no right or wrong.

Dave

 

[ultrablue187]

I edit pretty much every photo I take, mainly for white balance, cropping, minor exposure correction and sharpness. I don't like my photos to 'look' edited (apart from some cross-processing).

I guess my views fall somewhere in the middle ground - we've become so used to seeing edited photos that the majority of shots straight out of the camera look rather flat and uninspiring to us now, but I dislike heavy editing, HDR etc.

Personally, I've started using Lightroom over Photoshop for the majority of editing. If you aren't bothered about performing a lot of cloning, it can do pretty much everything you need, and the built-in workflow is quite intuitive.

 

[Phal]

I also process everything I upload now As for how much processing gets done, this is just up to me and the picture I have. Sometimes I'll want to leave it looking as natural as possible whilst at other time's I'll go a bit mad and make it look completely different.

At the end of the day I'll do whatever I can to make it look like something I like

 

[viewfromthenorth]

It all depends on the image and what I want to do with it. Here's four examples with different levels of processing.

This is just a record shot, taken with my phone. Amount of post processing - nil.


Chorl-eye by The View From The North, on Flickr

Another record shot, but this needed a crop, the verticals correcting and a bit of barrel distortion removing in Lightroom and Photoshop.


Great North Steam Fair by The View From The North, on Flickr

OK, lets start getting a bit more sophisticated. This was shot at ISO12800 so has been through noise ninja to remove some noise, and then through Nik Silver Efex Pro to convert to monochrome. It's also been cropped square to remove extraneous stuff from the frame that I couldn't compose out in camera.


ELR Nightshoot by The View From The North, on Flickr

Finally, this has multiple layers, curves adjustments, localised dodging and burning, and some selective sharpening, as well as going through Nik Silver Efex to convert to monochrome.


The Duke Of Lancaster by The View From The North, on Flickr

 

[modchild]

I try to PP as little as possible to get the IQ I want. If that can all be done in camera then thats all the better. I don't like cloning loads of the photo, maybe I get bored doing it and rush it (and end up spoiling it). If I go to a zoo and get a great shot of an animal and a bit of fence then so be it. I like my photos to be a record of what I see, not what I think I should see. That's my preference though and may not be antone elses.