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bob_summersOut of interest, if you require the colour to be an accurate record of what was seen during the composition, how do black and white images sit with you?
Don't go asking awkward questions of the post processing puritans.
Well, my response wasn't meant as vitriol, more as constructive criticism. But, if you want to post two versions of a mediocre image and ask for a critique then don't be too surprised when you get one
No worries - I can take constructive critcism - in fact I'd rather receive it with the goal of becoming better at photography.
I posted the picture for responses about the level of processing, but it veered off a bit towards composition, which is fine. Without going back there, I'm not sure where I could have taken the photo to frame it better. The drain was actually pretty central in the original shot, I think I conciously took it off centre slightly, but that may not have worked.
I suppose, I went up with the intention of recreating/putting my own take on some dramatic shots I've seen taken up there in the back of my mind - if it doesn't work for some people then that's fine. I enjoyed taking and editing it, so that's a partial result as far as I'm concerned.
Out of interest - and I'm prepared for it to be ripped apart, what is the take on this one? It's had an ND grad added PP, a skylight filter and some shadow detail brought out iirc. The first problem I see with it when I look back at it now, is the water being bluer than the sky, the sunrise in the background being slightly blown out and bringing out the shadows has given the trees in the background a bit of an artificial look - I did want to bring the detail of the dam wall up though, rather than it being in shadow - maybe that hasn't worked at all, or maybe I need to become a bit more adept at editing specific areas of a picture?
[url= https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/718/31886326174_629c5b9600_k.jp g" target="_blank">https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/718/31886326174_629c5b9600_k.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/QzFKSo ]DSC00434-Edit[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/85252658@N05/ ]davetheblade[/url], on Flickr
of those 4 images up there^
#1 is ok.
#2 doesn't do it for me.
#3 is alright. tells a story as one of a series of photos (although since landscapers are aiming for one true keeper, that probably wouldn't be it).
#4 not my cup of tea, but I don't do photos of people.
Processing Raw to Photo is essential, so no, it's not cheating. If it is then sending your old 110 or 126 instamatix to Boots or Truprint is cheating too, and Polaroid is the only true way.
Global adjustments are fine in my book. Excessive adjustments like what Serge Ramelli does are impressive, but are art, not photography imho.
I loathe most HDR. Mainly because it's overdone and awful.
B&W is very interesting. It's obviously a filter
Heh, not on my Huawei P9!
I always carry a sketchbook and draw what see if I got time. Makes you observe more and ingrains the detail into memory.
When I look back at an old sketch...everything comes flooding back....light, colour, temp, wind, how I felt....:)
I cant hardly remember anything from the thousands of photographs I've taken on a given subject.
The camera is for snaps and a capture of a moment in time.
That post just made me like you even more, RT.
Here is one of mine. A pic of the wee fella ...
Left: Original RAW file dumped straight out of LR ... no edits/adjustments at all.
Right: Edited through LR. Slight crop, B/W, contrasts etc. To me, just seems to make the pic pop a little more. Esp in the eyes.
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art, not photography
What is photography if not art?
Re the hole in the reservoir image - for me, I must admit that the subject is the problem. A big ugly hole in the ground sort of photo-bombing a landscape. Either really focus on the big scary hole, use those geometric lines and make it look like something other than a bit of infrastructure; or don't have it in the shot at all. The fact the horizon's not flat ruins the landscape part of it if you were trying to juxtapose.
All my humble impression of the pic, hope you don't take it personally.
TheArtistFormerlyKnownAsSTR - For me that Howden Dam photo is just on the right side of believable. The only thing pulling my out is the fringing above the treeline.
"Out of interest - and I'm prepared for it to be ripped apart, what is the take on this one?”
one thing people always seem to get wrong with these kind of images is the brightest part of the sky is always going to be the sky itself not the reflection of it. the foreground reflection should have the same treatment as what it is reflecting.
as for colour/mood changes then i’m all for it. i go ape with my images all the time.
For me photography is not a hobby as such, I don't study it or spend a vast amount on equipment, but I have always enjoyed it both for family type stuff, but also artistically for landscapes. I also occasionally paint landscapes, but these are to capture the feeling of a place rather than a facsimile of the scene.
Processing Images is one of the great benefits of digital photography for me. The number one thing for me is the ease of cropping. either to capture a great scene or face in an otherwise average shot.
I remember a thread a couple of years back ( Rocketdog's if I remember rightly ) Autumn riding pictures. There were a few disparaging comments regarding over processing of the pics which I was guilty of ( as were others ) however the snaps I had taken on the iphone simply did not convey the way I saw the light on the day the processing of the images captured the feeling a lot better than the as took images.
Below is my favourite image I taken/made recently, it has very little to do with the as took image and all about the processing.
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All my humble impression of the pic, hope you don't take it personally.
Not at all.
I hadn't gone up there specifically to shoot the drain - it usually looks better with water flowing down it anyway. The shot wasn't taken for the landscape aspect - there's plenty of that around, without sticking a drain in the forefront of the shot.
The pic wasn't meant to document anything really - everyone know's it's there and has seen it plenty of times - the intention was for a striking image (whether that has worked or not is debateable - obviously. Lot's of people in FB land love it for example). Straightening the horizon skews the drain, so unsure on that one.
I think the main problem with overblown HDR is everyone's doing it, and mostly badly. My take is that they're a bit like black websites - everyone's allowed to create just one.
TheArtistFormerlyKnownAsSTR ...
Its quite dark overall and you can see the pseudo fade between the tower and the trees behind trying to brighten the tower, but keep the trees dark. Common in software effects. I like the subject overall though.
I changed it slightly, and made the dam frame the sunset ... would be better with the original photo but hey ...
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Straightening the horizon skews the drain, so unsure on that one.
Yeah - so you were standing in the wrong place. Hard to correct that in PS 🙂
TheArtistFormerlyKnownAsSTR(whether that has worked or not is debateable - obviously. Lot's of people in FB land love it for example). S
My camera has a tone mapping feature (aka HDR) where it composites five different exposures together. I recently took some photos at my BJJ club, one of which I shot using this "HDR" feature, the rest without. I uploaded 30+ images which were either colour or black and white with some adjustments for brightness, contrast and hue....and the "HDR" image.
Well everyone in Facebook land immediately lost their shit for the "HDR" image which was my least favourite by some margin. People react to something novel whether it's good or not. I can still remember getting my hands on Photoshop 3.0 around 1996 and going nuts with the filters along with everyone else in my class. I think the bubble burst when a lecturer went around the room pointing at peoples work saying lens flare/swirl/spheriphy/trace contour/invert .....stop using bloody filters!
I'm more intrigued as to what your BJJ club is 😯
To the chap above who mentioned calibration. He's bang on . A lot of the time we're wasting our time certainly in iffy colour environments like browsers.
It would be the third thing I buy (an eye1 or something) after camera and monitor. I would then learn about colour spaces.
Also you can't adjust a photo by committee as it will end in tears. 🙂
Well everyone in Facebook land immediately lost their shit for the "HDR" image which was my least favourite by some margin.
I think that often just what people want. A mate takes a lot of cycling photos which he HDRs and uploads to Instagram with an inspirational caption and gets hundreds of likes. Not my cup of tea but people like it - he's even had a bit of work off the back of it.
TheArtistFormerlyKnownAsSTR - MemberI'm more intrigued as to what your BJJ club is
C'mon now, [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_jiu-jitsu ]google[/url] is your friend here. I'll post the images in a minute.
Edit- files are too big.
To the chap above who mentioned calibration. He's bang on . A lot of the time we're wasting our time certainly in iffy colour environments like browsers.
i’m viewing this thread in a profile aware browser on an Eizo CG class graphics monitor (D65, 120 C/M2, G2.2 98% A1998 colorspace) the images don’t seem to gain much by doing this. 😕
I like both photoshoped and natural images. I think people forget that there were different films that give various depths of dynamic range, sharpness, grain and colour saturation. You are unlikely to use Fuji velvia for a portrait. RAW images are as unprocessed as you can get and they are normally flat, unsaturated and lack sharpness. any jpeg has been processed in camera or through a computer.
some pictures are clearly made in photoshop as the light is totally un-natural with others are quite subtle. as far as B&W goes, it has to be film.
Kodak plus-x 125 - bronica ETRS
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Fuji neopan 400 EOS5
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Lol at MrSmith!
Interestingly, now that lots of images are viewed on mobile, in particular Instagram, I can be fairly certain that an image I upload will look the same on my iphone as it will on everyone else's iphone. Desktops/laptops are a completely different matter, but 9 times out of 10 it won't actually make all that much difference to the overall image.
Not read the whole thread yet but Ansel Adams was a big influence in my days at college - he had a very technical approach to photography with his use of a[url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_System ] zone system[/url] which I tried to adopt for my own photography - it is a method that starts in the camera and right through to the processing and printing stage.
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Sketch from the last ride. Severn Estury with extra mud.
Ink and mud, hair spray for post processing 🙂
@gofasterstripes
Thanks for the comment 🙂
Okay so here they are for reference. Not looking for any specific crique or criticism, rather illustrating what people reacted to.
This is the image people reacted to the most - overwhelming I would say.
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Here's another image of Gav which really got no response. There were many similar images of him because he was instructing that night but only the "HDR" one garnered any kind of FB like and comment frenzy about how cool it was.
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And here's my favourite shot from that evening
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...which incidentally got a lot of likes and postive response on instagram.
Edit: Great sketch redthunder, I like the style.
See, I'm not a fan of the HDR of the guys above, but I think the content is better than the 2nd pic. The 3rd one works for me
What I was mostly getting at is that if you process the image, you should be doing it on an accurate monitor. If I process on this screen, you'll vom over your Eizo.
I think people forget that there were different films that give various depths of dynamic range, sharpness, grain and colour saturation.
HDR is to today as Kodachrome was to the 70's and grainy HP5 previously.
It'll define an era of images.
Redthunder > that's amazing, fair play.
"It'll define an era of images."
I really bloody hope not.
And fwiw, +1 on the monitor calibration. Both my iMac and MacBook Pro Retina weren't far off. My older MacBook Air was atrocious.
"I want to do everything in the camera and Photoshop is cheating"
If that's what your mate is trying to achieve through his/her photography then that's just as valid as someone who makes their photo in the post-processing. They're different branches of photography, but both still photography.
[i]"I want to earn my DH and uplift is cheating"
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[tenuous analogy]Still cycling though[/tenuous analogy]
"If that's what your mate is trying to achieve through his/her photography then that's just as valid as someone who makes their photo in the post-processing. They're different branches of photography, but both still photography."
Well, they're not really, they're just deferring their processing decisions to a firmware programmer' predefined algorithms in the camera.
I thought this thread was about the post-processing that you *couldn't* do in-camera. I've misunderstood.
All cameras do some processing in the conversation of raw sensor data to a viewable jpeg. It's why phone cameras images appear to 'pop', but why two similar phones give quite different results for the same shot. And also why a dSLR's captures of the same image can look flat.
But to follow your line a bit further, I can do an amazing amount of processing on my camera phone before I even download the image if I want. Processing is processing...
Just seeing as we've now mentioned phones, RAW and B&W - people who like taking photos/snaps/whatever would do well to consider the P9 if they fancy a phone with interesting imagery capabilities.
It's no DSLR, but does have: a dedicated B&W sensor and lens, RAW output and all sorts of Leica-powered processing [optional]. Oh, and full manual control! Also Leica-designed lenses, so they're as good as you could reasonably expect.
Well after starting this ball rolling I'm finally back.
For me LR and PS are part of the day job. When I go out to take photos I usually know what I'm going for and take a image that will get me there with processing. Sometimes this is not the shot that I would take if I was going to simply print it out.
I like B&W at the moment so I'll often be exposing to the right to make it possible to lift shadow details. And I am guilty of waaay tooo much post processing. But people often like the results. And that's it, the end result. All that matters really.
Seeing as everyone else has been brave here's a couple of mine.
[url= https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/500/32120258865_7458cae943_c.jp g" target="_blank">https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/500/32120258865_7458cae943_c.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/QWmHUD ]Brian-2[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/146501625@N06/ ]John Stanley[/url], on Flickr
[url= https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/729/32093074711_ecf0d58b43_c.jp g" target="_blank">https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/729/32093074711_ecf0d58b43_c.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/QTXp1k ]Train time[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/146501625@N06/ ]John Stanley[/url], on Flickr
[url= https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/730/32059802012_0b46e1e28c_c.jp g" target="_blank">https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/730/32059802012_0b46e1e28c_c.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/QR1Sc7 ]IMG_01232[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/146501625@N06/ ]John Stanley[/url], on Flickr
AlexSimon - Member
Hard to explain, but for me it still has to believable that I could have witnessed it with my own eyes.
And there's why this is such an interesting/divisive debate.
If you believe/feel that photography should 'just' record reality as accurately as possible then you're probably not going to like heavily post-processed images as they're not 'truthful'.
If you think that photography is just another tool to make images with, then everything is fair game and the end justifies the means.
As with most stuff like this, most people float somewhere in the middle but it's clear that the thread contains 'extremists' on both sides of the fence...
[img] https://goo.gl/ZBO0Ea [/img]
If someone likes the image then it's valid, which makes processed or non-processed a moot point. A trend I've noticed is strong HDR type processing. I don't like it but others seem too, so it's OK in that sense.
There is a slight issue with using JPEG and saying that's it. The camera will post-process the image it has captured to make the JPEG and I'm sure you can adjust what processing does on some cameras. Pretty sure my D90 can be adjusted. The point being where do you draw the processing/non-processing line
I've got 2 extremes of processing here - neither are a 100% representation of what my eye saw, but they both work for me in their own context, whether anyone else likes them or not
[url= https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/526/32468568841_5dd838add0_k.jp g" target="_blank">https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/526/32468568841_5dd838add0_k.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/Rt8Uk4 ]Halloween Mel.sandstorm[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/85252658@N05/ ]davetheblade[/url], on Flickr
[url= https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/304/31494402543_4ab4bf2564_k.jp g" target="_blank">https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/304/31494402543_4ab4bf2564_k.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/PZ43Cp ]DSC02030-Edit[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/85252658@N05/ ]davetheblade[/url], on Flickr
dmortsIf someone likes the image then it's valid, which makes processed or non-processed a moot point. A trend I've noticed is strong HDR type processing. I don't like it but others seem too, so it's OK in that sense.
I don't agree. It's a blunt analogy, but it's like fashion vs style. Fashion comes and goes but style is timeless and inimitable. In retrospect fashion looks ridiculous. What we're seeing with "HDR" images on social media is that people are reacting to the gimmick or novelty of something new.
I'm sure the first colour feature film must have been mind blowing, regardless of quality. With instagram and phone image editing apps people are discovering an ability to change pictures quickly and easily with little to no skill/consideration. When we look back on this period of time it'll be clear that this technology was just filtering down to most people - the results will seem laughably bad and I guarantee you the people who like it and therefore validate it today will be sick of it tomorrow.
See, I love the tree pic colournose posted. Very nice, processed with care as to not obliterate.
But I like obliterating my images, I go so far that sometimes they are barely recognisable. That's the fun of post pic production, you can do what the hell you like.
More please.
bikebouy - Member
See, I love the tree pic colournose posted. Very nice, processed with care as to not obliterate.
colourNOSE? Heehee.
Anyway I agree with you, but it's clear that in the eyes of a reasonable amount of viewers we're 'wrong' (and that the tree image does obliterate the original photograph). Won't stop me though - I too am not averse to the odd bit of real image obliteration.
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If you believe/feel that photography should 'just' record reality as [b]accurately as possible[/b] then you're probably not going to like heavily post-processed images as they're not 'truthful'.
This is where it gets interesting. I remember travelling in the late 90s with a compact camera (film, natch). I took lots of sunset photos in Africa which, when printed, looked great. However, they didn't accurately depict what my own eyes saw; the photos recorded reality within the limitations of a film camera. Arguably they looked even better than reality.
It's a bit like the old hi-fi argument, where "true" hi-fi should reflect the real experience of being there as much as possible. Well, to be frank, I've been to lots of live concerts where the sound quality was pretty dire and I'd be gutted if that's what I had to listen to on my hi-fi at home.
jimjam
dmorts
If someone likes the image then it's valid, which makes processed or non-processed a moot point. A trend I've noticed is strong HDR type processing. I don't like it but others seem too, so it's OK in that sense.
I don't agree. It's a blunt analogy, but it's like fashion vs style. Fashion comes and goes but style is timeless and inimitable. In retrospect fashion looks ridiculous. What we're seeing with "HDR" images on social media is that people are reacting to the gimmick or novelty of something new.I'm sure the first colour feature film must have been mind blowing, regardless of quality. With instagram and phone image editing apps people are discovering an ability to change pictures quickly and easily with little to no skill/consideration. When we look back on this period of time it'll be clear that this technology was just filtering down to most people - the results will seem laughably bad and I guarantee you the people who like it and therefore validate it today will be sick of it tomorrow.
To expand on your analogy, style comes from fashion does it not? Things are not immediately timeless. You have to have variations and trials of new things before something sticks and becomes timeless. Who cares that things look bad in retrospect if, at the time, someone enjoys them?
The very process you have outlined results in 'better' stuff persisting and the dross falling by the wayside. Therefore you have nothing to worry about 🙂