If this doesn't settle the "Why Process?" question, then nothing will. Scroll down to the contact print.
Moonrise Over Hernandez
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Why edit photos?
- Thread starter jwolf6589
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why do they refer to the part of a horse you sit on the back?
shouldn't that be called horse-top?
"Kevin Coster had to re-learn how to ride hosrsetop for his upcoming movie role"
i hear horseback, i think of the posterior of the beast.
and why are horses beasts?
absurb!
shouldn't that be called horse-top?
"Kevin Coster had to re-learn how to ride hosrsetop for his upcoming movie role"
i hear horseback, i think of the posterior of the beast.
and why are horses beasts?
absurb!
I edit my photos because I want want my photos to be look the way I think is best. Sometimes it's because the unedited version doesn't properly portray the scene, sometimes it's because it does but I want it to portray something else. Sometimes a person walks into my nice, clean shot and I just need to make them go away.
Most of the time I'll just straighten the image and fiddle with exposure, contrast, and highlights/shadows, but every now and then I want to fully replace the sky or turn a photo 45º or completely throw off the tint so whole picture looks unnatural. Why? Because I can and I want to.
Most of the time I'll just straighten the image and fiddle with exposure, contrast, and highlights/shadows, but every now and then I want to fully replace the sky or turn a photo 45º or completely throw off the tint so whole picture looks unnatural. Why? Because I can and I want to.
Oh yeah, there's the fact that I can't seem to take a straight photo to save my life!
Same. Even if I use a tripod and check that everything is perfectly level, it still comes out ever so slightly crooked. its like a terrible magic trick.
I'm going to tell you this once. If you want to build up any rapport in this forum and not constantly frustrate other members, you had better stop reporting our posts and having them removed. I have tried to be patient when you, but when I come to five alerts about my posts being removed I become very unhappy.
Editing photos also helps center focus on the subject you are trying to shoot. Some times for instance you want to crop a photo, edit brightness, clarity, color and add a watermark to signature your work. Example below on all of the techniques discussed.
I've edited this photo to show you I have 8 of my posts removed
I've edited this photo to show you I have 8 of my posts removed
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Frankly, I don't like editing images, I am not very good at it, but this is a necessary evil when one shoots RAW, so I live with it. I prefer the level of control I have over my images when shooting in RAW as opposed to shooting in .jpg so I (reluctantly) learned the basics of editing and do not attempt to do anything more complex.
What exactly is original about a jpg straight out of a camera? There are so many variables. Lens, sensor, in-camera processing, etc. A photographer, even hobbyist, will often shoot RAW and choose corrections and / or enhancements that bring the photo more in-line with how they viewed or felt about the scene.
I do very little of what one might call "hard" editing where I substantially change the photo, but there are a lot of things that do fall under the heading of editing that I do on every(digital) photo I touch.
Exposure, white balance, contrast(by curves generally) and others elements virtually always get touched. I set my cameras to "vivid" since I generally prefer more saturation, and even though in RAW it's far from permanent, Lighroom and most other RAW editors I've used do read your in-camera settings and give those as the initial rendering. Sometimes a scene calls for me to pull saturation, and sometimes I think a photo will benefit from cranking it up.
Film scans have a never-ending battle of manually fixing dust and scratches, and either the clone stamp or spot healing brush are the ticket depending on the size and location of the photo. It can take a lot of effort to blend out a really bad one, but the spot healing brush is really darn good now at least in Photoshop(Lightroom was still so-so the last time I tried it).
Low distortion was often a priority in film era lenses, but it's so easy to fix in post that many digital era lenses prioritize absolute sharpness and hard-to-fix-in-post issues like lateral chromatic abberation over the easy to fix geometric distortion. I know Fuji was one of the first companies to do this, but I'd not be surprised if it's true of all modern mirrorless native lenses since there's basically no chance of them being used on film(and by and large the wide to normal ones are "clean sheet" designs since they can do things like reduce or eliminate the amount of retrofocus used given the flange distance). Adobe has thousands of profiles for modern lenses and since the exact lens you are using is readable in EXIF, most of the time in Lightroom it's just a matter of checking the correct lens distortion box and usually it just happens. Even if you have to do it manually, it's easy to fix, and you can save the profile for any time you use the lens.
Even discounting lens distortion, in the film days if you wanted your straight lines parallel when you can't necessarily shoot straight on, you at least need a tilt-shift/PC lens, and preferably you use a view camera to get it all correct. Of course you still need a tilt shift lens or view camera(or at least some degree of swing-I've actually had some fun a Hasselblad V-mount Planar off the front of my PB-4 bellows, which do offer a small amount of rise/fall and tilt/swing-one of the reasons I opted for those over earlier or later models, but even using a medium format lens it's difficult to get infinity) to use the Scheimpflug principle for changing the plane of focus. Perspective correction is quite easy in Photoshop or Lightroom-in fact I actually find Lightroom easier even if Photoshop is more powerful at the end of the day-as long as you have the foresight to shoot wide enough to account for the amount of cropping a heavily PC-corrected image will require.
A lot of times I leave my cameras parked with a minimum EC of -1/3 EV, and will go lower. A lot of the Sony CMOS sensors including the ones in my D800 and D810 display nearly ISO-less behavior under most conditions, so there's virtually no downside to underexposure while a blown highlight is always going to be a blown highlight(even if you do have 1-2 stops of highlight recovery in modern sensors). I don't go to the extreme of parking at base ISO and using an external meter like some photographers do with these sensors, but knowing the sensors behave this way is a handy trick up my sleeve.
EDIT:
And meant too to address the "Not very good at it" part!
I definitely fall into that camp! About the deepest where I really feel comfortable with heavier editing is masking an area and adjusting exposure on it. I've done it a handful of times where I couldn't get shadow detail in a specific spot I needed it without making the whole photo look "plasticy." Some of the best examples of this I won't necessarily show here, but we got a dog last year who is jet black, and of course my wife wants lots of pictures of him. I remember taking one of the three of us by the Christmas tree, and of course to show the lights on the tree and see us in detail(me with my pasty white skin, her with her slightly darker but still white Italian-heritage skin) there was no way the dog was anything but a black hole in the middle. I was quite proud of the end result of an hour of messing around to get him masked off, brought up, and still have a fairly "natural" looking photo.
Adding elements in-no, I can't make it look good. Taking elements out? Maybe-it depends on what else is around them...
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I actually really like editing. Most images I don't do a ton of work to, but they all end up looking quite a bit different than the SOOC. And I have a custom import preset that is my "sooc" anyway, but I do a lot of masking (the new masking options in the latest version of LR are awesome and fast) for targeted adjustments, and/or radial/linear gradients so that my edits are definitely noticeable when viewed as before/after. I just really enjoy making my photos look like me, and having a recognizable style that is my own.
Portrait editing gets to be a slog though, as you can't often sync people photos like you can with nature photos. And skin takes a lot of individual work. Any single image isn't bad, but I took photos of my daughter and her friends for Homecoming, and hand editing 20 or so images of them got boring quickly. At least to me...this is why I don't specialize in portraits.
Portrait editing gets to be a slog though, as you can't often sync people photos like you can with nature photos. And skin takes a lot of individual work. Any single image isn't bad, but I took photos of my daughter and her friends for Homecoming, and hand editing 20 or so images of them got boring quickly. At least to me...this is why I don't specialize in portraits.
Not if you import as "Camera Vivid."
My Nikon Z cameras actually read the true camera profile, even with in camera tweaks to them. But as I mentioned above, I use my own preset anyway, so that info is discarded.
JPG is fine for smart phone cameras because the computational photography, especially on an iPhone is really good and for the most part you don’t need to do much after that.
But for any other camera, if there is a RAW option, use it. Most people will crop, edit, adjust exposure, saturation etc anyway so best have all the data to work with as much as possible. Stand-alone cameras aren’t really that smart and they do weird crap to photos sometimes.
For people who don’t really plan to do much editing, or are content with sending photos as they are, JPG is fine.
But for any other camera, if there is a RAW option, use it. Most people will crop, edit, adjust exposure, saturation etc anyway so best have all the data to work with as much as possible. Stand-alone cameras aren’t really that smart and they do weird crap to photos sometimes.
For people who don’t really plan to do much editing, or are content with sending photos as they are, JPG is fine.
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No way I would ever muck around with swapping out skies and putting in different ones, or adding a person, animal or object to a scene who or which was never there in the first place. To me that kind of manipulation goes beyond mere photography and more into the realm of "digital art." I am not an artist and don't pretend to be.
I will, however, remove odds-and-ends of things which are in the scene which I either couldn't do anything about or overlooked at the time of shooting. Stray bits of paper or other rubbish on the ground -- that kind of thing. Occasionally I've removed half a bird from a water scene when one swam into the scene just as I was shooting another bird. That sort of drastic removal is usually most easily accomplished by a bit of cropping.
I don't do masks, layers, complete changes of background, all that kind of thing. If an image requires such extensive work, I usually just discard it instead. I shoot solely for my own pleasure and enjoyment, and since I don't enjoy editing, I am not going to spend extensive time on it. To the extent that I can, I try to get things right in the camera in the first place so that I don't need to be spending a lot of time fiddling around in the editing phase later.
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Not trying to be smart, but did you read the rest of my post, and also which editing programs have you used?
My comment SPECIFICALLY was that Lightroom, when importing the NEFs(and converting to DNG) does "read" the camera presets and the initial photo you are shown after import reflects your camera presets.
Yes, you have 100% total control to change those, but if you shoot RAW+JPEG and open both photos side-by-side in Lightroom they will look identical when first opened.
I keep settings like that because 95% of the time, they get me closer to where I want the end result to be and save editing time, and for the other 5% of the time I can completely change them in post processing.
When I've used Nikon's RAW processor, it imports presets too. From what I recall, the last time I played with it, you essentially had a menu also that gave you the same options as in-camera for saturation, contrast, etc and you could easily switch to a different camera preset mode or of course do anything else you wanted(which generally is the reason we all shoot RAW anyway).
Not everyone uses Lightroom.... I for one, don't. I use DXO PhotoLab 5, which indeed provides "modules" (presets?) for one's specific camera body and various lenses. Presumably the DXO folks do a thorough assessment of each camera body's unique characteristics and color rendering, potential output, etc., as well as each lens' sharpness and other characteristics which make it, too, unique.
It's kind of fun with a given image open to then look at the list of choices offered for camera body rendering and to see the differences in the different camera bodies, even within the same brand, not to mention differences between brands.
It's kind of fun with a given image open to then look at the list of choices offered for camera body rendering and to see the differences in the different camera bodies, even within the same brand, not to mention differences between brands.
Masking and targeted adjustment have been done long before Photoshop was ever a thing.
petapixel.com
I imagine a talented printer could also clone and sky swap if they wanted to. Let's not go down the rabbit hole AGAIN of debating editing on a scale of acceptable to unacceptable. Photography and editing are arts. If someone doesn't want to personally work in one area or another, that's cool. But let's also not judge people who do choose to do so. There is almost nothing being done in digital photography that wasn't previously done in analogue.
There are a lot of wedding photographers who hire out their editing. They come up with a general look they want for their brand, then ship off their raws to editors. This is the modern day equivalent to sending your images off to a lab to be printed. There's nothing wrong with this approach, just as there is nothing wrong with a minimal editing approach, whether from lack of knowledge or desire. But digital photographers who are doing "full" edits aren't any different than people who had their own darkrooms in the basement way back when. We just use computers now.
These Are the Darkroom Techniques Photoshop's Tools Are Based On
As a tribute to Photoshop for its recent 25th birthday, Lynda created this "before there was Photoshop" video that shows the darkroom tools and techniques
I imagine a talented printer could also clone and sky swap if they wanted to. Let's not go down the rabbit hole AGAIN of debating editing on a scale of acceptable to unacceptable. Photography and editing are arts. If someone doesn't want to personally work in one area or another, that's cool. But let's also not judge people who do choose to do so. There is almost nothing being done in digital photography that wasn't previously done in analogue.
There are a lot of wedding photographers who hire out their editing. They come up with a general look they want for their brand, then ship off their raws to editors. This is the modern day equivalent to sending your images off to a lab to be printed. There's nothing wrong with this approach, just as there is nothing wrong with a minimal editing approach, whether from lack of knowledge or desire. But digital photographers who are doing "full" edits aren't any different than people who had their own darkrooms in the basement way back when. We just use computers now.
This is what I haven’t given my input yet. If we shoot digital, then we all process the image in some way. But I suspect OP is referring to image manipulation.
at this point i think it’s a free range discussion so feel free to weigh in. multiple other opinions have already been offered.
we’ve also covered this thoroughly in another thread. but might as well go with this one too. ??♀️
I don’t generally process my images whole lot. But since I primarily shoot with a ranger finger, I often have to straighten the horizon. And I also shoot Av, so I sometimes have to correct global exposure. Finally, the rare white balance correction may be needed as well. Other than that, I like to present in a white, square border.
So that’s my boring post processing.