We'll Fix It In Post (a software thread)

Deleting files just involves more writes than recreating the filesystem, and writes shorten flash life, which is orders of magnitude shorter than (mechanical) disk. (Flash is cheap, tho, so I dunno if this point is all that compelling.) If done on the camera, it uses more battery life, as well. Compound these issues with the fact that most cameras appear to use a very fragile filesystem (FAT12, I think, on my EOS?) -- pull the card while it's mounted on yr computer and you run a very high risk of losing all the unsaved pix -- and it just makes the most sense to rebuild the FS on the device that writes to it most often.

Yo! Hello ILP. Long-time... photo-taker, first-time poster. Yes.

I'm both pretty lazy, and also vaguely averse to computers, so as a result I shoot in jpeg, and do very little post-processing. I got a hooky copy of Aperture which i do use to tweak things occasionally, but I don't do much. I don't really archive my photos at all, either, which is probably bad, but I'm not at all precious; "arty" ones can always be retaken or replaced with a totally new arty image, and I've not got kids yet. Kitten photos are important, obv., but I'm not gonna die if I lose them, so... Basically Flickr is my archive. I still have the originals mostly. I should take time out and organise them better.

In terms of post-processing that I DO do, it's generally just little adjustments to exposure, contrast, and maybe saturation.

I rarely crop, unless it was an image taken really quickly that I didn't get to frame properly; say a dog suddenly emerged from undergrowth and I had to get him centre-frame cos that's where my auto-focus point was set and I didn't have time to change before he moved on - I cropped one picture like that to put the dog in the corner and make the story of the image much more interesting.

I straighten stuff up occasionally, especially if the sea / horizon is on there; unless it's deliberately off for a good reason, the sea just looks stupid if it's not dead level.

I've taken away blemishes a couple of times, but generally only work-related photos (removed some graffiti / marks from seminar room walls, that kind of thing).

On my travels around Flickr, I generally don't like images that are obviously heavily processed, so I don't do it myself.

So guys on a scale of 1-5 how photoshopped does this picture look? Is it an obviously bad job or would it only be noticeable if the original were available to compare it to?

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2444/3607023511_c325840d3a_o.jpg

I like the photo a lot but the original is so washed out. The anemone should be bright, almost neon green, and the fish should be bright orange, and the original photo totally lets the colours down. I kind of feel like I've cheated by altering the colours and that anyone who looks at it will know it's been photoshopped!

with 1 being 'wouldn't know the difference' and 5 being 'you obviously photoshopped the shit out of that fish'

1 imo

1

Yeah, that's a 1. If you're shooting through glass under weird aquarium lighting, I think you can do whatever you like to get it back the way you saw it! It's pretty subtle.

Oh, ok, the fish isn't that subtle. But it still looks like a fish.

Sweet, thanks. Most of the colours in my other fish photos turned out just as vividly as they looked in real life, despite also taking them through weird aquarium lighting (here and here). For some reason the anemonefish just didn't want to appear orange in any of its photos.

I'm happy with the way a lot of these turned out though, given that I've never taken pictures of things in aquariums before.