to photoshop or not?

[harleyrider]

hi i just came back home from my first ride up to daytona bike week and deland.will be rideing back up later in the week. thanks for all the replys

 

[Alleh Lindquist]

You can take photos without using photosop?

 

[zemlin]

In my mind, digital editing (I don't use Photoshop®) = darkroom with film.
When processing film & paper, all kinds of decisions are made regarding processing, paper, exposure, filters, color - all impacting the final image.

Digital editing is not cheating - it's just the next step in the process.

Then there's Polaroid - no darkroom necessary. You can go that route with digital photography too. It's your call.

 

[Mr. Murmeli]

In digital world you can't be purist so no point for avoiding PP. But PP and photoshop won't necessarily mean the same thing. As people have said in this thread you can do wonders to a regular photo with Elements / Lightroom / Gimp. But i wouldn't trade the proper old school 'you must know about layers and stuff' -photoshop to anything .

But really, if you just want to do regular fixes and don't know how to use the proper - and expensive - photoshop, don't bother! Go for elements / LR.

 

[mrodgers]

Settle this once and for all. Someone take an extremely well exposed photo shot in RAW and post both only a JPEG conversion and a JPEG with "digital development" done to it for comparison.

I actually would love for someone to give me a RAW file so I can look at it on my computer and do some processing to it. I can't shoot RAW, so every photo I take has in-camera processing done to it. I would like to see what a completely unprocessed RAW file looks like.

 

[zemlin]

Settle this once and for all.

I'm not sure what you're hoping the settle here. First off, not all RAW converters are created equal, so if you do your raw conversion using 5 different programs you'll get 5 different results. Some of the difference may be very slight, but others could be significant as Nikon's Capture NX reads in more of the in-camera settings than other programs do so a straight-to-jpg conversion would match the in-camera conversion more closely.

The strength of RAW files isn't in a straight conversion to JPG, it's when you want to bring up some detail from the depth of the shadows, or reveal a little more texture and detail on that white dress. When you want to increase the contrast in a cloudy sky, you may find the detail just isn't there in a JPG.

Rather than posting a perfectly exposed shot for comparison, it would actually be a lot more revealing to compare a poorly exposed in-camera JPG, attempts to fix it in post, and the same image brought to life from a RAW file.

 

[JerryPH]

60% of photoshop users would like to have a word with you :badangel:

That was not my point.. my point was who would be dim enough to basically admit they were doing so in the first place. Nice to know that *I* am one of the 40% that is helping them make enough money for there to even *be* a photoshop.

My 1st version of CS2 was bought for $5 at a garage sale, I upgraded to CS3 for $199, and I will upgrade to CS4 when I feel I want to. Christ, I have 5-digits worth of camera equipment, a couple hundred dollars for the best software is NOTHING. It doesn't have to be expensive!

 

[NateOntario]

That was not my point.. my point was who would be dim enough to basically admit they were doing so in the first place.

Alert the Adobe police