Post processing?

nightrider1470

nightrider1470

nightrider1470

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I all ready own a Panasonic x920 which is a decent camcorder from all accounts :) I am about to buy a half decent camera as well.

Now I am a total rookie here! but is there any software that kind of auto enhances images or even camcorder video`s with a few clicks? or is the world of post processing a long learning curve of hours of testing?...... It can just be really daunting when I dont hardly undeerstand half the features on my camcorder! mind the actual software :)

I currently own Sony Vegas Pro and I should buy photoshop for my pictures?
 
While Lightroom can colour correct video, I don't really think its an ideal solution and the best way of doing so. Adobe also has SpeedGrade now which is their video Colour Correction software which will be integrated into the Creative Suite.

Ultimately the easiest way of doing it is from whatever piece of Non-Linear Editing software you are editing the video in. Most these days tend to have presets to change the grade. There are also those that will do an auto-balance of the colours. I know Final Cut Pro will do all this. I'm sure Adobe Premiere does to and I would image Sony Vegas which you already have does as well. Further to that, even free software like iMovie will give you colour presets.

A basic enhance is pretty easy. Where it gets more difficult is if you are trying to balance colour across an edit of clips which may have totally different shooting conditions.
 
A related question
If you disregard cost.. Is photoshop (one of the) best options for editing?
 
al4x said:
A related question
If you disregard cost.. Is photoshop (one of the) best options for editing?
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Can't comment on video, but for photos, in my opinion absolutely not.

Lightroom has facilities to make your life easier from a management/workflow point of view - Importing your photos, organizing them into a catalogue, selecting which ones to keep, metadata searches, etc, etc. Then the develop/post production options are all there organised together in logical groups.

If you were going to do this for 100s of photos, just opening each one in photoshop would be a pain, even with bridge. Then I would be wondering why I've done that in photoshop or where the adjustment option is.

99.9% of the post processing I have done is in Lightroom. The .01% might be the odd person I would like to remove from a landscape for which the photoshop edit facilities are better.

Photoshop is an amazing tool from a composite creating and image manipulation (add+remove things) point of view, but totally overkill for photo post processing.
 
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Genoma said:
Can't comment on video, but for photos, in my opinion absolutely not.

Lightroom has facilities to make your life easier from a management/workflow point of view - Importing your photos, organizing them into a catalogue, selecting which ones to keep, metadata searches, etc, etc. Then the develop/post production options are all there organised together in logical groups.

If you were going to do this for 100s of photos, just opening each one in photoshop would be a pain, even with bridge. Then I would be wondering why I've done that in photoshop or where the adjustment option is.

99.9% of the post processing I have done is in Lightroom. The .01% might be the odd person I would like to remove from a landscape for which the photoshop edit facilities are better.

Photoshop is an amazing tool from a composite creating and image manipulation (add+remove things) point of view, but totally overkill for photo post processing.
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I have it and have been using it a bit but do find it a bit of a pain to get used to. so you would say go for light room even having photoshop?
 
Lightroom and PS work brilliantly together. LR for image organisation and whole-image adjustments, PS for anything complex where you'll need full layer control or stitching. I wouldn't have one without the other.
 
al4x said:
I have it and have been using it a bit but do find it a bit of a pain to get used to. so you would say go for light room even having photoshop?
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Software like Lightroom and Aperture manage an entire database of images for you, which you can keyword and organise exactly how you want. They offer many of the controls you will find for colour correcting and processing that you will find in Photoshop, however the line is drawn at the point of heavily manipulation and compositing. As somebody already pointed out though, for 99% of photography, it does exactly what you need.

Its really the organisation that makes it though, with Photoshop you are mostly tending to open one image and editing it at a time, while managing the folder structure of what you are working on. With the likes of Aperture and Lightroom, it handles all that and you can create multiple versions of a shot to try different things without destroying any originals.
 
ok, looks like light room is very useful, yes PS is a PITA. my desktop has a pair of SSDs, but the laptop does not.

im sure it does this fine, but one area im really looking at personally is stacking in macro. i have read PS is pretty good at it, im assuming LR is too? better??
 
nightrider1470 said:
I all ready own a Panasonic x920 which is a decent camcorder from all accounts :) I am about to buy a half decent camera as well.

Now I am a total rookie here! but is there any software that kind of auto enhances images or even camcorder video`s with a few clicks? or is the world of post processing a long learning curve of hours of testing?...... It can just be really daunting when I dont hardly undeerstand half the features on my camcorder! mind the actual software :)

I currently own Sony Vegas Pro and I should buy photoshop for my pictures?
Click to expand...

You have all you will need with Vegas Pro. It's not that easy to use at first but with time and some faffing it will become easier and more rewarding.
 
al4x said:
ok, looks like light room is very useful, yes PS is a PITA. my desktop has a pair of SSDs, but the laptop does not.

im sure it does this fine, but one area im really looking at personally is stacking in macro. i have read PS is pretty good at it, im assuming LR is too? better??
Click to expand...

Lightroom won't do stacking no. That requires composite images / layers and some very clever Photoshop algorithms.

This is when Lightroom and PS work well together. You can select a stack / group of images in Lightroom and open them in a single document / multiple layers in Photoshop. It does this well for panoramas for example.
 
Lightroom can do most things other than HDR and Panorama merges or Focus stacking from multiple images.

When you learn your way around PS then there's a lot of things that can be done more easily or quickly than in Lightroom but that's about it so far for me!
 
Phal said:
Lightroom can do most things other than HDR and Panorama merges or Focus stacking from multiple images.

When you learn your way around PS then there's a lot of things that can be done more easily or quickly than in Lightroom but that's about it so far for me!
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Really? What things? (genuinely curious)
 
Just the selection of certain parts of the picture for instance. The selection tool becomes rather nice when you learn to use it (I'm just starting to). Ghetto HDR can be done by merging layers that have been increased/decreased in exposure or just polarised from what I remember. Almost 99% of the people in this forum will know more about PS than I do but I definitely know it's a powerful tool. A lot of Lightroom is about the whole processing process rather than editing the image where PS specialises.

I prefer to do most of my adjustments in Lightroom but I've found that both PS and stuff like DxO Optics can be very useful.
 
It does? Made by Adobe or 3rd party ones? A while ago I had a quick look for plugins but all I found were processing plugins for different styles :/
 
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