Post processing

boycee

boycee

boycee

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After looking around I see lots of you do post processing almost to the extent of saying that post processing can make or break a photo.

My question is, what do you do to the photos.

Here's a pic I took with my 400d the other day (EXIF included)

What would you do to make it better? Or would you leave it as it is?

IMG_0128Thumb.jpg


Thanks for any pointers

Chris.
 
To me post processing is an extension of the shooting process that lets me more acurately represent what I saw when I picked up the camera in the first place. So for me the most important part of post processing is looking at a shot and trying to remember why it was shot. All the other things that changes exposure just follows.
 
Post processing is always about two main areas for me.

First of all cropping and straightening the photo so that your eye is naturally focused in the right place. Then I look at enhancing the clarity and colour to make the image come to life.
 
i really like the shot btw :) i think you should just ;eave it as it is. i think pp is just personal opinion, and everyone would do different things. he's my attempt :)

edit.jpg
 
I am really falling over on Post production.


I am using paint.net. I have thought about getting photoshop, but I woudl be lost in it.

do i really need anythign better.

Pain.net can crop, rotate resize, alter the contrast etc.

I dont have aclue what to do with saturations.

does any body have one of those handy morgue file style tutorials to link :)

I know google is there for all to use, but 99% of the time you find that word of mouth (or word of finger in this case) is always better than searching for one yourself, for finding the best guides
 
Paint .Net looks sufficient. The basic tools required for post-processing (IMO) are:

Levels/Curves Adjustment
Red/Blue/Green Filter Adjustable Black and White
High Quality sharpening
Good resizing algorithms
Cropping
Horizon Levelling

Infact even a program like iPhoto or Picasa has a decent subset of these features. Photoshop is overkill for most photographers, hence the increasing popularity of more streamlined pro apps such as Lightbox and Apple's Aperture.
 
I am only just starting to look at post processing, so far I have been concentrating on getting to know my camera and all of its features.

I am using photoshop on my pc and I also have the trial version of aperture on the macbook.

So far I have only used photoshop and I intend to have a play with aperture tomorrow but I started with the basics, such as levels, contrast, saturation, resizing, cropping etc I have not really mastered them yet but I am getting the basics. I have also been reading the photoshop tutorials on what (for me) are a bit more advanced, things like selective colouring and special effects.

I am impressed by the range of improvements its possible to make to images but some of the software is a little hard to get my head around :p
 
Dont always think a photo needs processing. Sometimes its fine.
I look for the following things.

Are the whites perfect white.
Is the photo under or over exposed.

In the case of your photo it isnt either, the whites are perfect there is no colour cast and its pretty much perfectly exposed.
Seeing as you didnt have a flash for the person in the front you werent going to perfectly expose both the sky and him.

So anything you do to that photo will be totally your choice, however there are still touchs that can improve a photo.
I.e shadows, contrast, etc etc
IMG_0128Thumb_filtered.jpg


Your photo was fine but i chose to excentuate the clouds with the shadows and highlights feature in PS, then turned the guy att he front into a sillouette.
Dont go made and change the saturation to high or the colouds to contrasty.
Post processing is best done when you adjust things only very slightly to improve them. Dont go made and make it look ridiculous.

If you want to go extreme, i would start improving that bottom left corner by cloning it out. Dont have time at the moment.
 
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wow thanks for the replies. It was my first go with my 400d but I'd been hanging around on these forums for ages. I found limitations on all but the manual mode almost straight away, so glad I knew some of the technical stuff. Biggest annoyance though, is that af/mf switch, think it's ism i need in order to fine tune auto-focus manually.

I was going for a kind of sillouette style shot, which is quite obvious, good idea on making it completely black though.

When you say clone out the left, do you mean clone from the left all the way to the large rock near the middle? making it look a bit like a clif edge?
 
Yeah basically i dont like the sky bit, so i had this in mind.
I like to adjust my photos to suit what i wanted them to look like.

IMG_0128Thumb.jpg


excuse the quick poor effort:D
 
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