Vic Vinegar
TPF Noob!
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2015
- Messages
- 68
- Reaction score
- 33
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos OK to edit
I started doing photography in February and really started HDR in April. I'm completely self taught other than a few online tutorials on Youtube that taught me what buttons do what in Photoshop and Lightroom. I follow photographer Trey Ratcliff because we're both big on post processing and my opinion is that being good at post processing is just as artistic as taking the photo in the first place. It requires just as much skill to make a really great photo in Photomatix and Lightroom as it does having the photographic eye out in the field. And it's just as challenging as well. What I do is I take 3 bracketed shots, load them into Photomatix Pro, and then export them into Lightroom. Because every photo is edited differently based on nothing more than just how I felt like editing it in that moment, what I thought looked cool at the time, I won't get into exactly what the Lightroom sliders are or anything like that because this is an individual thing and if you do it like I do then you won't have the same results and you'll get disappointed. I wanted to upload the original unedited photo just to see how much it transformed from the original to the final but there's a file size limit on here and I don't know how to get around that. But here's the final one. This is the birdhouse in my backyard. Honestly the original doesn't look very good at all. The aspect ratio and angle are off. The original isn't even straight. But I like to think that I'm good enough with post processing to turn a mediocre image into something that people like. And I think that should be a person's goal with editing. To take an image that would otherwise not be that great and to turn it into something great (not saying my photos are great or anything
). And as you can see I don't always go for absolute realism here. Sometimes I like to make mine a bit abstract which is really fun to do. I actually did a project for family and friends with all my HDR photos and they love them. That's such a good feeling to have as a self taught amateur photographer.
EDIT: I just uploaded a much better photo I got done editing just now. The first one was a phone background. This one is more suitable for actually sharing. Birdhouse 1-edit is the better version. I wanted to make the light hit the side of the tree so I made the right side brighter and the left side darker. And then I included a landscape I did right as fall hit. #1 is the closeup of the birdhouse. #2 is the new edit, and #3 is the landscape. I like the landscape because like I said I don't always go for realism or accuracy. I think it reminds me of an enchanted forest in fall.

EDIT: I just uploaded a much better photo I got done editing just now. The first one was a phone background. This one is more suitable for actually sharing. Birdhouse 1-edit is the better version. I wanted to make the light hit the side of the tree so I made the right side brighter and the left side darker. And then I included a landscape I did right as fall hit. #1 is the closeup of the birdhouse. #2 is the new edit, and #3 is the landscape. I like the landscape because like I said I don't always go for realism or accuracy. I think it reminds me of an enchanted forest in fall.
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