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Post Shoot Adjustments

driftless

driftless

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 2, 2011
1,486
183
Chicago-area
I was wondering how much time you spent in PS, Aperture, etc., with your pics? I have always been a purist and have done little, or none, PS'ing if I got the pic right to begin with. While I am not abandoning PS, I am finding since I have adopted Aperture that I use it less. Thoughts from the pro's on this forum?
 
no pro here, but I spend at most 5-10 minutes in LR with images that I want to polish or do something with, otherwise I'm a purist as well. Sure I'll batch process the lens corrections but thats about it. I only go into PS now if I'm doing panoramas or getting artsy with coloring (B&W + highlight colors, etc.) or if my friends want specific touchups (skin, color consistency on clothing, etc.)
 
Ack! Are you kidding! (Big Smile Goes Here) Digital tools finally give colour photographers the same opportunities that film-based BW photographers have always had, and now you say you don't use them - to be "pure"? Yikes... but thanks! Makes my life easier.....

I am grateful for the tools that LR and PS have given me. I grew up with film, and with printing both my BW and colour prints (I had access to a schools colour darkroom, which I recognize was a little unusual). Virtually every print I made in colour was "tweaked" at least a little bit. Colour balance, dodging and burning, even using Agfa/Fuji/Kodak paper made a difference. I would have liked to do more, but there was a limit to what you can do with a colour print.

In BW the only time I made a straight print was simply to create a working print that was bigger than the frame on the contact sheet. There were 10x as many thing I could do to a BW print to bring out the best in an image. I always wished I could do the same things with my colour prints.

With BW you got to pick both the global and local contrast in an image. You could lighten and darken locally. You could choose warm or cool toned paper. If you were into chemical toning you could do localized warm/cool toning. You could choose film developing to give fine grain or course grain. And on and on....

I get to use the same tools now. And I do. And I'm just scratching the surface of what can be done. I don't create images that "look" manipulated - I manipulate my images to make them look how I saw them. Cameras and eyes see the world differently.... each person sees the world differently... so I use the tools I have to make my images look how I saw the scene.
 
This stuff definitely got adjusted during the film days too, and digital retouching has been available since the 1980s. It just became more common in the last decade or so. The thing about digital cameras is that unadjusted digital images generally don't look as good as a chrome on a light table or a contact sheet. They could continue to improve. Demand for higher megapixel counts has been leveling off. I'd like to see them do something to get away from the whole bayer array design. It does a horrible job at reproducing detail in red and blue given the nature of RGBG sensors. Yes it has improved, and blooming has become less of an issue than it was a decade ago. They still have room for improvement beyond a simple increase in resolution.
 
I do retouching because such is the nature of shooting in RAW. It is a digital negative and i have noticed when you import a RAW in Aperture or Lightroom, those programs have some processing that they do but you need to redo a lot.

What I don't do is photoshopping the image 99% of the time. So I , personally, do not do cutting things out and adding things in to the images.
But to answer your question. Yes I adjust anything i canon the image and i DO use healing tools to kill blemishes.
If i have the tools and it makes my image better , then why not.
If you want to be a purist, set your jpg processing in camera and shoot with that...
 
flosseR said:
If you want to be a purist, set your jpg processing in camera and shoot with that...
Click to expand...

No, no, no.
If you want to be a purist, set your camera to default jpg processing and shoot with that. Increasing saturation, sharpness and all the other parameters in the camera is the same as doing it on the computer. ;)
 
Dornblaser said:
I was wondering how much time you spent in PS, Aperture, etc., with your pics? I have always been a purist and have done little, or none, PS'ing if I got the pic right to begin with.
Click to expand...

I used to think like that.

Then I realized Photoshop is the digital equivalent to the darkroom. Photo manipulation has been around since the very first days of photography, from simple dodging/burning to add/removing things from photos. So it's nothing really new.

I don't think there's many pros who won't edit their photos in some way, shape, or form. I'm sure even the majority of photojournalists will tweak the levels, saturation, run noise suppression, etc...
 
Dornblaser said:
I was wondering how much time you spent in PS, Aperture, etc., with your pics? I have always been a purist and have done little, or none, PS'ing if I got the pic right to begin with. While I am not abandoning PS, I am finding since I have adopted Aperture that I use it less. Thoughts from the pro's on this forum?
Click to expand...

It really depends what's being shot. I've spent hours on photos before. Photos like rig shots with cars where there's a lot of detail in the background and require the removal the rig from the shot can take a long time, but they're taught me some very valuable skills in photoshop.

Other photos where lights have been used to certain effect and the light needed to be placed physically in the frame have required removal. Beauty and fashion type shots require blemish removal and skin smoothing. Composites that could not have been done without several images takes time to blend the images together to make them look like one.

It totally depends on what type of photography you're doing. If you're doing street photography you'll probably spend less time in post than someone doing beauty and fashion, although I've seen some amazing street photography photos where PS has been used to produce a really amazing photo.

You're calling yourself a "purist" for your lack of using PS, but if you were shooting a type of photography that required it, you'd probably think differently about it. After all, things like putting fire and people together can't always be done in one shot as well as a room that's set up for a particularly lighting scheme but also uses additional light sources like TVs or has floating people can't really be done in one shot either.
 
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