Do you edit?

[cumi]

Hi! As a totally newbe, let me ask you sumething guys, who are posting those nice photos in the posting section of the forum:

Do you edit (a lot) (with Photoshop & Co) your photos before posting here or you post, as they were taken? Do you play with curves, contrasts, levels, etc?

I see so many beautiful colors, wonderfull contrasts, etc. I have the feeling, it is impossible to take the photos like that. Especially with my Powershot A520...

 

[ksmattfish]

The right light, and nailing the exposure go a long way towards a good looking photograph, but most images (digital or film) can be polished up with some post-processing.

My standard post-processing with photos from my DSLR starts with editing the RAW file with Pixmantic's RAW Shooters Essentials. My main adjustments there will be white balance and exposure compensation(<---hopefully not too often ), and minor adjustments to contrast and saturation. Then I convert to TIFF and finish with Adobe PS adjusting curves for contrast and color and using unsharpmask to sharpen.

As I get more familiar with the RAW editor I'm finding that I don't need to tweak curves in Adobe PS as much.

If I'm converting to BW I usually at least look at it desaturated in the RAW editor. Sometimes I really like how that looks. Other times I'll take it into Adobe PS as a color image, and split into RGB channels or desaturate, depending on the subject, and follow up with curves for contrast and USM.

 

[Marctwo]

If you're taking jpegs from your camera then the camera has already processed the image with it's ideas of colour balance, dynamics, etc. Sometimes you'll have images that you can just resize and upload - other times you'll end up with unworkable images because of the way the camera has processed them.

If you're shooting raw then you've decided to take control of this basic processing yourself so you need to do it to get anything near presentable.

 

[terri]

Everyone edits to some degree, but ksmattfish is right that the better you do in camera the less it's really needed - or should be. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear no matter what kind of editing software you have.

 

[©AnderGraph]

I shoot raw and have a lot of control over what my images look like. whilst i normally shoot with a result in mind (and then process that image to suit) sometimes i shot poorly and 'rescue' images. a bit like this.


this shot was rescued from

this shot

here is an example of shooting with intent to process

i had this image in my mind for a long time so i shot it with a blue grad to put the color in the sky and went from there in photo shop

this is how it turned out

 

[Johnboy2978]

The more I shoot, the closer I am getting to a finished result from the camera. My post processing includes typically a bump in saturation and contrast. I will sometimes play around with curves, but am not very good with curves. Most often my post processing consists of using channel mixer and contrast to convert to b/w. I will also clone out things at times, if there was no other way to compose the shot naturally and dont want an offending component in it. Also I still tend to crop after the fact, b/c sometimes I just can't tell if I want it tight or not when shooting.
I have learned that exposure bracketing can really save a lot of shots, and use it more and more. But yes, I think that most people who shoot digitally will be inclined to use imaging software to improve a shot. Is that cheating? In my mind no. If you were developing the film yourself, you can do all the same things practically that you could with PS.

Andergraph, that is a absolutely stunning shot of your child. Really nice! The hay bales are quite nice too.