I really enjoy viewing everyone's photos on here.....kit lense or not. I am not a professional photographer or am trying to become one...kit lense owner here.
My question is...are most of the pictures postedonthis forumor photos in general enhanced in any way by a computer program?Or isenhancing just something that is done out of need...which might be always? Do most photographers enhance all their photos in some little way?
Just curious.....keep up the good work!!!
keller
I've slowly made the transition over to shooting RAW so I have to at
least process my image into a .jpeg. Rarely do I do more than just
mess with the raw settings (i.e. settings that could have been set in
camera) such as sharpness, contrast, b/w, sat. other than that I
usually only touch brightness otherwise. It may sound like it's alot
of processing but again it's all potential in camera settings (with the
exception of brightness since having to do that means I didn't shoot
exactly what I wanted).
~Jordan
7d w/ BG-E7, 24-70 f2.8L, 70-200 f2.8L IS II
keller, not all the pictures you see are post processed - excluding conversion from RAW to JPEG. But *I* think that a simple rule is: if you see a steller picture, then it probably *is* post processed.
Originally Posted by keller
Yes. Some rely on the computer inside the camera to do the enhancement, others control the enhancement themselves with a full fledged computer. Some do very minor enhancements (saturation, tone curve, sharpening), others do more changes.
Yes. Back in the film days, they were enhanced chemically by selecting high saturation films (e.g. Velvia), certain developers, or emulsions with other enhancing qualities. Photojournalists tend to do the least amount of enhancement, and most photographers do more than that.
I shoot as a hobby, but in "professional" situations now and then as "event" photographer. In a way, I treat it as journalism: documenting the event. In another way, I treat it as marketing: showing the event in a positive light, to help the event sell itself and grow into the future. Therefore, my style seems to be evolving to do less and less enhancement as I get better and better at capturing great shots up front.
That said, I was "married" to the free Picasa by Google for 2+ years. My workflow was simple: bring the pictures into Picasa, whiz through them and select my keepers with a *, select the starred images, do a batch (i.e. apply to all photos) "I'm feeling lucky" (fixes some exposure, color, and contrast misses), crop/straighten, batch "sharpen" (helps make the photo crisper), and export. I went through 7,000 pictures (I was playing that weekend) in under 4 hours that way.
Just the other day, I shot some portraits of a restaurant manager (and friend) for his employer's website (he didn't like the corporate shots with a sombrero on). I'm not the strongest shooter when it comes to remote flashes and ambient balance, especially since my flash(es) often seem to need some sort of boost to get things great. In this case, I used Canon's Digital Photo Professional to brighten the shot by about half a stop, created a JPEG from the RAW original, and I was done:
Processed the whole shoot, including three HDR images (after a few mistakes) and another six or eight single shots, in DPP while lunch was cooking (and while eating...bad choice...butter on keyboard is a mess). Keep in mind that when the manager goes in the back and submits the order, those fajitas come out to the table real quick.
Last weekend, my girlfriend and I shot another event. I shot ~900 images in ~4 hours. I now use Downloader Pro to automate and streamline the process of reading in my storage cards. I also use BreezeBrowser Pro to mark my images (in this case, 2 for the highlights, 1 for the rest of the keepers), then told DPP to boost the contrast globally +2 (I think I'll have my camera do this up front from now on), fixed exposure on a few of the highlights, and had the whole job processed in ~3 hours (from RAW, at high resolution, counting all of the time that the junky old laptop was working on the task).
So...long story not-so-short: the answer is probably dependent on the job and on the individual style. I happen to be a fairly technical shooter, and the artistic side is taking a lot of development to build. That may influence how much (little?) time I spend processing.
We're a Canon/Profoto family: five cameras, sixteen lenses, fifteen Profoto lights, too many modifiers.
Typically, I won't do anything but adjusting brightness/sharpness/white balance in Digital Photo Professional. Sometimes, however, I like 95% of a picture but there's something that I just bugs me about it, so I have to fix it in Photoshop. Here's my most recent example:
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I shot this using the 50mm f/1.4 lens I bought refurbished from Adorama. I love the lens, but the out-of-focus highlights have hard edges on them (as opposed to the very circular highlights that my 17-55 f/2.8 IS and 70-200 f/2.8 L IS capture). So I threw the picture into Photoshop and did some very slight blurring to the highlights in the background on the left and right side of the image. It's almost imperceptible, but it made all the difference to me.
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