I'm a bit of a newbie and i was just wondering if you guys photoshop your images before uploading them. I have only done that once. Any thoughts welcomed.
It’s always best to do as little as is humanly possible to avoid knackering your image data integrity but a little spit and polish doesn’t hurt occasionally. Personally, I try to limit my PS photo work to smart sharpening, auto contrasting and applying digital ND or infrared filters where necessary. Any other alts that are needed I try and do in the RAW conversion.
I generally do fractals, but I see nothing wrong with a little color enhancing, possibly contrast adjustments or adding shadows. I usually use Photofiltre, though. It's very comparable to Photoshop, and it's free.
Like Phil, I do as much as I can in raw conversion then if I need to do any major changes in photoshop I convert the image to a 16 bit tiff file. Many of the classic fine art photographers were masters at manipulating images in the darkroom to achieve the results that they wanted. My view is that the digital darkroom is no different. I just posted an image Vineyard Skies that has a lot of photoshop work done to it. There's a comment that I made on it that has a link to a copy of the raw image that the camera captured. Check it out and I hope this will be helpful info for you.
I also use any free program I can get my hands on - I use mainly PhotoFiltre or the default Microsoft Photo Editor (sorta like IrfanView) to enhance the colors of my photos or fractals or sometimes apply an effect or filter to it.
I also usually do most of my post work with my raw files. I use nikon capture for that. Somethings need photoshop though and there is definitly no shame in doing that. Like surfcat said, the film dudes were masters at it as well. Photography is an art, not a science. You make your image look the best it can, not represent exactly what was there. Even things that happen in the camera, like shutter speed change the way it really looked, so purists that say you should never edit are crazy.
I always use PS or PhotoFiltre on my photos to check levels and for resizing. I agree with Phil in that the less you do the better, however I don't follow that advice even though I know it's correct. I play around on a lot of my pics with filters and stuff trying to set off the image more or blur a background...yadda, yadda, yadda. A good photo should stand on it's own, I know. I just like playin' around + generally my photos can't stand on their own. 8~O
I almost always use auto levels, and increase the colour saturation, and will sometimes sharpen if needed. IMO the camera doesn't always capture exactly how we saw the scene through our own eyes...
Since my works pretty much are "fabricated" within the Photoshop realm, I always use it...But even if I still had something that I felt didn't need editing..I'd still use Photoshop to resize, and add my watermark...
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I use Nikon Capture and only adjust brightness, sharpness and lighting just a little bit, the difference is amazing, I did not do this at first, but someone on this site suggested I try it and I am very happy with the results. I then send them to Fast Stone Image Viewer to re-size, and/or crop. It is a free software program.
Very rare i use photoshop and that is only when i want to make some differnt look on my photos but the program which use for the lite corrections is mainy Picasa
I use photoshop on all my photos. :) The camera I have never captures the scene the way my eyes see it. I use Photoshop to make the image more in line with my memory of the scene.
I use Photoshop most of the time. Sometimes I even use Fireworks, but that has limited functions unlike Photoshop. Even as a newbie, like myself, you can create some really cool artwork by using photoshop.
Almost all of my uploaded images were retouched with Photoshop. My camera takes a very good original image, but doing small modifications to the levels and curves can add a lot of punch to what was a very ordinary image. There's a lot of photos that I see on Caedes that could be greatly enhanced by bumping up the contast a little.
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I'll do some unsharp masking, cropping (when absolutely required) and conversion to black and white by decomposing to RGB layers, but that's about it. Very occasionally I'll clone out imperfections or even the odd person, but not very often at all.
I'm generally not a fan of an average photo with a big starburst in the middle and a fancy border, I'd rather have an interesting image that stands alone without such frippery.
Since I like taking photos of architecture, I tend to take things out of the photos a lot since there always seems to be a person or some object around it because, well, that's architecture for ya. Also, since I'm fairly new at this myself, I rotate a lot of my photos since I'm still learning to take them straight. I use Paint Shop Pro simply because I bought it before I was really into photography and now days I don't have the money to buy Photoshop. It works well enough though. :)
I often dream about things that don't exist. And in those dreams, I'm often taking photographs that I plan to put on Caedes... and when I wake up... I'm disappointed because it wasn't real.
I'm a bit of a newbie and i was just wondering if you guys photoshop your images before uploading them. I have only done that once. Any thoughts welcomed.
Jude