Hi, guys. I'm fairly new to the site.I have several pictures I feel are 'Caedes-worthy' , but they do not seem as rich or sharp as most I see here. Is everyone here retouching before posting? If so, I would like to know what is being done so I can join the club. I can give links to the on-line album of the pics if anyone is interested, but I don't want to upload them in their current state.

if your using an image editing program - a quick auto contrast or auto colour can make a dramatic change. as far as sharpening goes - use unsharp masking or smart sharpening if you have the latest Photoshop. dont go overboard on unsharp masking as it can look very false and grainy - as a rule of thumb use a high percentage - say 150-200% but a very small pixel size - 0.5-1.5 pixels at the most.

I usually limit my editing to auto-contrast, a slight saturation adjustment, and of course some cropping. Doing much more doesn't stay in the spirit of pure photography in my opinion and would be more accurately called a photo manipulation.

sometimes a bit of a sharpen is needed I feel as many digital cameras tend to soften the images even in RAW mode. This seams to vary wildly though - I have an EOS 350D and a 20D both are similarly specced cameras but the 350 tends to produce much softer images.

I think it is great that you are asking for help. I also think that it says much of your good judgement that you are willing to consider the image quality before uploading it. Some members do not seem to share your commendable self-control ;-)

Post the links by all means. I'm sure that some of the excellent photographers here can give you some suggestions.

*deleted* -by caedes

Oooh...You might want to edit your post so that the URL's are contained within HTML tags, before Caedes kills you. The screen is all stretched.

e.g.

<a href="my_url">Link text</a>

I've got a feeling that you need to be a webshots member to get into those addresses. Then again, it might just be my gross incompetence.

Update: I joined webshots (what the hell, it might come in handy). But I still can't access the links above. It comes up with a message "The Webshots page you have requested has either moved or no longer exists". Perhaps you can just direct us to the gallery page?

Sorry my last post was from my page while logged in. here is the first:
http://community.webshots.com/photo/192413376/192435471OKhpSZ
and here is the second:
http://community.webshots.com/photo/192413376/407828878ZdaCya
sorry , but I don't understand how to do the tags. what the heck:
before
after

Either way, these links should work. THank you for your help and patience.

Well, that pic looks very good to me. Maybe some of the photographers here will make some suggestions. I like the colours on the touched-up version, though not so much the blue background. I think maybe you should try to selectively up the saturation on the butterfly, flowers, etc without doing the background so much. The pic is pretty small too. Do you have a bigger version?

Anyway, I'm not the best person to be critiquing photographs.

My first guess is that you boosted the contrast too high on both versions. The colors are unnaturally rich and bright. If you still have the original from which these both came, you might want to re-adjust it but with a lower contrast setting. The program, Irfanview is the best all-around photo editing program I've ever used. It's small, light, configurable, lets you adjust contrast, color saturation, brightness, gamma (you'll see what this is when you mess with it.), and image size. It also allows you to apply effects like greyscal, fine rotation, and a host of minor special effects. Best of all it's free and it runs very well on a low-horsepower computer like mine. By the way, drop the developer 10 bucks if you like it. He's a great guy, and lives in Bosnia.

Thx, guys. I found the original picture and scanned it at the highest res, and only slightly touched it up. By the way, CaptainHero, this was taken in North Carolina, and those are the Blue Ridge mountains in the background, so that's pretty close to reality. But I am uploading the improved version, along with 2 other pics that get a lot of traffic on my Webshots page.

Great, I'll go look at your upload.

Judging from the comments people have made on your photo, you don't need too much help..... I notice this was shot on film rather than digital - did you scan from print or negative? I've never got a really sharp image from print - a neg scanner gives better results, but still not as sharp as a digital shot, somehow (although a better scanner than mine might help). So far as my retouching goes, my main adjustments are contrast (I use the "tone map" command in PhotoImpact as it gives more control than "Adjust contrast") and Unsharp Mask. Adjusting these is no more "manipulation" than selecting the appropriate grade of paper would have been, in a darkroom. My advice would be not to overdo the adjustments as an unaturally bright or sharp image can look worse than one which is a little soft. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing more from you :-)

Well you seam to have plenty of assistance here, and it’s all-good :-)
I’ve seen the latest version “Lucky Butterfly” and I it’s a huge improvement on the original. You must be making good use of all that advice.

I will refrain from adding any more advice for fear that too much often becomes confusing to the recipient. But invite you to ask questions any time, as you can see most of us are keen to help someone who wants to learn.

I agree at large with the last comment by Robert (trisbert) above. My only addition would be to lay off the "auto" part of the contrast and color adjustments. I'm all for hands on adjustments and trying out individually for each image if a slightly different amount of correction will do that little extra.

If you are in doubt, make multiple versions with small differences, and compare them after a small recess in the postprocessing. I never use any form of sharpening on my images btw, but then again my digital camera adds a bit by default. (It's not a good idea generally to set your digitals sharpening settings on "high", that would give the same problems that too much sharpening in an editing program.)

I too use a small shareware program for most of my standard editing. It's for the Macintosh platform and called GraphicConverter. It gives me full control of color brightness, contrast and hues and is the best software I've seen for compression of images to the JPG-format.