Photo Edit Show n' Tell
I thought it would be neat to share some of our photo edits. Straight out of camera (SOOC) vs how we edited our shot. Even if you edited it in camera and have a before/after to share. If your camera has recipes built-in and you have a before/after of that, that's cool too. Whatever you want to share. Heck, even if it's a print and you cut it with scissors to crop, doesn't necessarily have to be software stuff.
I edited this photo in Lightroom, and the story I wanted to tell was how cold it is here (it's so, so cold...). Black and white snow scenes usually "feel" more cold to me than color photos. So that was step one. The other thing I wanted to do was make the icicles "pop" since they are the real subject of the photo, not the Jeep. So I boosted the contrast a lot, and that did the trick.
I imagined sharing two photos, before/after, but I'm including three here to show the difference adding contrast made. There really are no rules, y'know... 😛
What do you all think? Was B&W enough? Did the contrast help? Would you have gone another route?
1st: SOOC
2nd: B&W
3rd: B&W + increased contrast
This is a cool idea for a thread!
I do think the B+W boosted is the coldest feeling. The B+W I do think can have a cooler feel, but maybe mostly in this case because the sun is in the background of the color image and adds that warm tone. I actually really like the color picture too because there's a lot of nice complementary colors going on there. The contrast + B+W to remove the sky colors does help the eyes go to the icicles first.
I took one art class in college (haha) and I remember learning the eye normally goes to the top right first, then over left and down. I think it had to do with where you lived though, as it corresponds to how we read. Might be making that part up.
Anyways, the top left then also having that bright orange + blue complementary color contrast definitely steals the attention from the icicles. But I don't mind that in the color image. Your eye eventually finds it and then it has it's own sort of story that way too. Cool how two different edits of the same image can tell different stories.
I'll try to think of more of my own. I don't do a whole lot of editing, and when I do it's very minor. Saying that might make you think I'm some sort of purist, but it's mostly laziness and not knowing how to post process very well.
That said, the one major exception is wildlife photos, which I edit heavily and every single one. I have some big before and afters I can show and talk about. Next time I edit one I'll take. a screenshot side-by-side and it'll be fresh and I'll remember what I did, haha.
This is a great topic! I'd be so interested to see where people start and end up. Here are two photos from last weekend, where I felt like I wanted to, among other things, boost some of the colors I felt were there (even if my X100F didn't bring them out right off the bat). I'm curious how other people handle this: wanting to be faithful to what the scene/subject was, while also trying to bring out a little of the magic that drew us to that scene or subject.
Anyway, here before and after shots from a couple of my favorite spots near me in Western MA: a vista at the Graves Farm Audubon Sanctuary, and a shed at Chesterfield Gorge.
Uploaded files:
Quote from Snappy on January 30, 2022, 1:38 amThis is a cool idea for a thread!
I do think the B+W boosted is the coldest feeling. The B+W I do think can have a cooler feel, but maybe mostly in this case because the sun is in the background of the color image and adds that warm tone. I actually really like the color picture too because there's a lot of nice complementary colors going on there. The contrast + B+W to remove the sky colors does help the eyes go to the icicles first.
I took one art class in college (haha) and I remember learning the eye normally goes to the top right first, then over left and down. I think it had to do with where you lived though, as it corresponds to how we read. Might be making that part up.
Anyways, the top left then also having that bright orange + blue complementary color contrast definitely steals the attention from the icicles. But I don't mind that in the color image. Your eye eventually finds it and then it has it's own sort of story that way too. Cool how two different edits of the same image can tell different stories.
I'll try to think of more of my own. I don't do a whole lot of editing, and when I do it's very minor. Saying that might make you think I'm some sort of purist, but it's mostly laziness and not knowing how to post process very well.
That said, the one major exception is wildlife photos, which I edit heavily and every single one. I have some big before and afters I can show and talk about. Next time I edit one I'll take. a screenshot side-by-side and it'll be fresh and I'll remember what I did, haha.
Thanks for the feedback! I didn't think of that, but you're right about the color image and the eye movement. I looked at it again today and that's absolutely what happens. I took just one art class also and that sounds very familiar. 🙂 I do the same with wildlife photos, typically at least a heavy crop. I actually have a recent one with a deer that needed DXO love, so that may be a good one for me to share.
Quote from denniscrommett on January 30, 2022, 4:16 amThis is a great topic! I'd be so interested to see where people start and end up. Here are two photos from last weekend, where I felt like I wanted to, among other things, boost some of the colors I felt were there (even if my X100F didn't bring them out right off the bat). I'm curious how other people handle this: wanting to be faithful to what the scene/subject was, while also trying to bring out a little of the magic that drew us to that scene or subject.
Anyway, here before and after shots from a couple of my favorite spots near me in Western MA: a vista at the Graves Farm Audubon Sanctuary, and a shed at Chesterfield Gorge.
The landscape shot is wonderfully processed. It looks vibrant, with depth of color and detail, but it doesn't look "overprocessed" at all. Very natural and beautiful. I bet that's how it looked to your eye, and how you remembered the scene. I strive for that with my nature photography edits - I want to recreate the scene I remember faithfully but often the image I have SOOC is not how I remember it looking to my eye. In the end, whether the scene actually looked like my final image or I just remember it a bit more fondly than it was, I'm never sure. By the way... if you watch videos of professional landscape photographers showing how they edit an image you'll probably never ask yourself if you've overdone it again haha
I have gone off the deep end of editing several times... often I reign myself in, but sometimes I embrace it because I'm striving for some artistic result. It's typically with a shot that is in some way abstract to begin with. I will show some examples of what I mean - it can be quite fun to edit this way and just be super artistic with it, not trying to fool anyone, but creating something more abstract.
OK here's a good example of when I wasn't "faithful" to the scene... at all. Both are heavy crops, but the color photo is SOOC otherwise (you can see the inverted image of the shore in the icicle, cool!).
The first B&W one I went crazy with Lightroom sliders: Texture & Clarity -100, Dehaze +100. Blacks down a bit and whites up a bit. Initially I was just fooling around but all this gave it a nice dreamy look and made the ice seem to glow, which I really liked.
I felt guilty for that, so the 2nd B&W one is getting a similar (albeit not as drastic) of an effect by just dropping the exposure down half a stop, boosting the whites +30 and the blacks down -30, again with Lightroom sliders. That felt like a reasonable edit to me. Still artistic but I didn't alter it so much with sliders that only God truly understands. If I were entering these in a contest or something this is what I would go with because it just sits better with me for some reason.
I showed the first B&W one to my wife in Lightroom and she loved it. It's not often I get such a sentiment from her so that's the one I went with (and I did the same to the other ice photos from the river that day - she loved them all, I was riding high on that all day lmao). I figure it's OK because it looks like what it is: a heavily edited image for artistic effect. Do I still feel guilty about it? Yes. haha But I suppose I should not because photography is an artistic process, and I'm not trying to fool anyone with that image.
Uploaded files:
Thanks! Some photos just beg for it, for whatever reason. I took some photos of some grackles in North Carolina that had so much attitude you just had to accentuate that a bit in post. The RAWs never looked how I remembered. Those birds were looking into my soul, taking my measure, and I had to make sure the photos conveyed that! I'll have to post some of those. They are considered a pest species, I suppose, but they were so fun to photograph.
But for now I wanted to show the difference DXO's anti-noise algorithm made to a recent wildlife shot I got. I was pushing the ISO, 6400. That ISO can be beautiful on the K3 if circumstances are right, but a crop shot in dim light is not one of them. Here's the before/after (I posted the full final image in the January thread, so I won't do so again here). What a difference it made!
The images are after/before (weird I know). Aside from running it through DXO all I did was crop and offset the deer a bit, I thought that looked nice. There's more of a surprised feeling with it offset, I think, which is how the deer and I both felt when we saw each other lol. I did also adjust white balance.
Uploaded files:
I'll continue on the wildlife flow for a second with a recent before/after. The first is the shot straight from camera without a crop, the second is the crop and before after, and then the third is just a close up of that.
I always start with the crop, decided on vertical which usually works nicely on perched birds. Then I took to photoshop to cut out part of the branch that was annoyingly sitting at the bottom of the frame and distracting. I don't photoshop often, but when I do it's a distracting element. Besides, I don't know enough about photoshop to do any other cools things anyway, lol.
From there bumped exposure up, lowered contrast (I do this when it's a shot where the sun is hitting only some of the frame, and I don't want the high contrast look). After those small adjustments I took to selecting the bird itself for increased exposure, increased sharpness. Then I selected just the background and did something I like to do to make the bokeh extra creamy. I'll bump up the noise reduction and decrease the sharpness. Depending on the scene I'll then play with contrast, clarity and texture and try to find a right balance there.
Finally I like to work on colors last. I noticed some greens that were kinda brownish yellow, so I changed the hue of them to be more green. Then I added some pink to the midtones as a complementary color with the greens and to get rid of the mushy color the background was giving beside the greens.
And that's it! Not a great shot but there ya go, that's a pretty typical process for me with wildlife. Definitely my most intensive editing I do, and it's not even as crazy as some people do...
Uploaded files:
Oh, and in reference to DxO which I am finding I love (and bought and paid for with my own money), I use it whenever the image is in that really high range of ISO where you're starting to lose the image. I didn't use it for the image above because the noise wasn't bad, and the noise in the background is really easy to remove because I can blur it to oblivion and it just looks even better! Haha. It's when the noise on the subject is bad enough that I need the extra help recovering that without mushing it.
