Editing

[Michaelintraining]

Can someone edit these for me / Give me tips how to improve the pictures.

 

[chrisburke]

yikes thats a lot of pictures to ask someone else to edit for you..

 

[Rachelsne]

what do you want from your pictures?

I will say number 2 is over exposed and the others dont really have a an interesting point to them, I like the rocks, maybe having it black and white may enhance it?

the pics with the trailing flowers might have been enhanced at the time of taking the pictures by having more of the door/wall in it.

What editing software do you use? I can offer some suggestions to help you edit if you want to learn?

 

[Michaelintraining]

Sorry about being a bit hasty Chrisburke.
I have Photoshop and i'd love the help thanks.

 

[RyanMillerPhoto]

Hi Michaelintraining,

At this point, I recommend just shooting, shooting and more shooting.
Visit sites like Photosig, study some compositions for reference.

As you shoot more and develop your eye, your pics will magically get better. So, don't bother editing, just shoot more to get what you want.

 

[chizuck]

I am new at this but here is what I came up with.

 

[LaFoto]

Michaelintraining, I'm afraid, the second is lost.
It is overexposed to the extent that data has got lost that can no longer be recovered by any post processing software. You had to reshoot and apparently did (Photo 3 <- same flower), and your second attempt is better exposed.

I can see why you are still training yourself on still objects and on anything that is close to you, makes training easier, flowers always "pose", never "pull a face", don't "run away", don't move so much that you need to refocus all the time, so they are very nice objects for beginners! Nothing wrong with the flowers (though many here say flower photos are "boring").

I also understand why the overhanging plants made you want to take a photo of them, they are nicely changing colours just now and look good with the colour of the fence.

Well, I'd like to play with the feather caught in the bush some ... while compositionally it may not be over-exciting, the feather being so centred (which, however, seems to work here, I think), I like the fact that you photographed against the light and have the feather lit up from behind. Let's see what could be done about that photo...

 

[LaFoto]

Right. So here we are then:

First I looked at the histogramme of the feather-in-bush photo and found it isn't too bad to begin with:

So only very minor changes being done there (anything more done to the highlights and the detail of the feather began to disappear and the feather looked only like a brightly white thing):

You see, I only pushed the "shadow"-slider (left) from 0 to 10, and the "highlight"-slider (right) from 255 to 245.

Then I applied a bit of Unsharp Mask in the settings as shown:

After having done that I felt that maybe it might be fun to try to recompose the photo by cropping it some, after all, making the most of the shape of that little twig in front of the feather and including that into the overall (new) composition ...

... and in the end (as you will see) I cropped the picture even closer than is shown here in order to maintain the standard print sizes (800x533 is my usual size chosen for web-presentation).

Then I suddenly felt it was too saturated, so I reduced the reds (only the reds, no other colour):

With those few steps taken, I arrived at my edited version of your photo, Michael:

What do you say? OK?