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

Ok, here's where we can discuss what we do to our photos after we've taken them. Cataloguing, treatments, Aperture vs Lightroom, free/bundled stuff like Gimp and Picasa. The Photoshop experts can drop their science and the SOOC purists can stick their oar in too. Is pressing the shutter the end of the process or merely a means of generating an image you later turn into a "picture"?

I s'pose this mainly for digital photographers; a discussion of film processing/scanning/developing could perhaps go elsewhere.

I used to go hell crazy with the Curve utility on PS, it's pretty handy for helping add striking look to your contrast.

Nowadays I just don't have the time and can't be bothered to touch them up before uploading. Mostly because I just take sooo many pictures in one session, and also I would like to get good at taking a really good photo in the camera.

I'll probably be forever having to crop/straighten them though, I'm useless at that.

The picking/rejecting/flagging step in LR is essential in this - you can very quickly get down from a 150-image session to the 20 you really want people to see (or, on reflection, the 8 or 10 that are actually worth "publishing").

After that, I usually find myself doing similar things to each image - a little S-curve, a little clarity/vibrance boost (perhaps coupled with a saturation roll-off to counter the fiery Canon in-camera reds), pulling the histogram down (if there's an obvious gap at that end) to deepen the blacks. Then there are more image-specific manoeuvres - sharpening, noise reduction, chromatic aberration reduction (the 28/1.8 suffers quite a bit from there but it's only obvious where there are sharp edges/high contrast towards the edges of the frame).

And, in LR, all of the edits are non-destructive (you haven't touched the Raw or JPEG at all, you've just built a stack of instructions) - you export your desired tweaks as fresh JPEGs (or TIFF or DNG).

If all else fails (or if I'm being especially lazy), I've got a stack of special presets (Ektachrome, TMax-400, Mocha, etc) that people have developed, some of which are very good indeed. Overuse of the "300" preset (named after the film) is kind of a running joke now.

Michael, is there any chance you could briefly explain to me (or direct me to a tutorial elsewhere) this picking/rejecting/flagging step, because right now I'm overwhelming myself with pictures, and like you say, only a handful are actually worth spending any time over, and I'm reluctant to actually delete any pictures I've taken.

haha i used to have a '300' style macro in PS too, a heavy curve contrast, saturation turned down, and if i remember diffuse blur?

In Lightroom, I select the day's "shoot" (a very pretentious name for just a day's worth of random pics in my case) - LIBRARY-Grid View-Metadata-DATE, then just click through them, hitting "P" for pick, "X" for reject (you hit Ctrl-DEL at the end and get the option to remove those images from just your LR library or from the hard disk too). You can also hit numbers keys to rate them (1-5) or give them colour codes (6-9).

Filtering afterwards can be done in a couple of places and to a ridiculous degree, combining the Metadata and Attribute views you can select (if you wish), only photos taken in Aug 2008 with the 50/1.8 lens that are Picks and have a rating of 3+. And so on. I don't usually go that far - just Picks and then maybe an extra level of colour coding (e.g. RED = print this one).

Ant Attack: here's an example of 300:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3457/3296381356_6a501b76f0.jpg

That's brilliant. Thanks Michael. I've got a lot of organizing to do this weekend, I think.

I've got three flavours of 300-preset - they all basically:

Give a huge Vibrance boost.
Give a huge Saturation cut.
Vignette heavily.
Gentle S-curve.
Pull the histogram to the extremes.
Do some split-toning - grey in the shadows, pale yellow-green in the highlights.

ah yes the vignette, another one i used to overuse.

nice pic btw

one trick i used to use a lot for mine, the diffuse blur. i would create a copy of the picture as a new layer. Add a medium diffuse blur, curve, and then just fiddle with the transparency of that layer bringing it in slowly to see what would work.

it gives everything a glowing effect.

...until now, that is.

I do something similar to Ste's, except I use the soft light layer blending, which gives an a++ effect for wedding pictures. On one it completely transformed the dress. I'll upload a before/after directly.

I have yet to use any software in my pix .What do you guys recommend? I'm also tempted to start cropping my pics. But I kind of fear it'll be an endless road.

apropos of nothing, do you guys print out your pics? I do. I don't like storing'em on a harddisk. I'm extremely lazy about storing (digitally that is) cause we have several comps and I tend to transfer here and there. :-(

Also iphoto f-ing sucks big time. :-(

^^ I can't stress this enough to anyone who'll listen.

thinking of moving to aperture from nikon's high-quality but painfully labour intensive raw software. anyone spent much time using it? or can lightroom users persuade me it's better?

Lightroom is both high-quality and not labour-intensive in the slightest. Aperture always felt a little bit too much like work when processing pictures, but Lightroom lets you zap through a whole shoot pretty quickly, especially with presets. I didn't like the raw converter in 1.0, but I haven't found fault with it at all since 1.1.

thanks. i'm messing about with the trial versions at the moment - i tried them both ages ago and found lightroom to be much faster, but this is the first time i've used version 2 of aperture and it zips along now so it's hard to pick a winner for speed. something about the lightroom interface bugs me: i think it's the need to shift from library to develop modes which seems totally unecessary. also very much like aperture's loupe for taking a quick look at fine details without losing sight of the whole picture. but i can see how presets could make life a lot easier.

I've been managing fine with iPhoto for years, but now I'm at a bit of a crossroads. iPhoto doesn't fully implement DNG, nor does it give a shit about "sidecar XMP" files. Thus, non-destructively editing any CR2 file stored in iPhoto in an Adobe product is impossible, as far as I can tell, at least insofar as iPhoto's ability to read the edits is concerned. I used to shoot JPEG, but I have switched to CR2 after reading the many reasons to do so. So do I just keep iPhoto around for JPEG, or do I attempt to migrate the iPhoto metadata & photos to another solution?

Also, why the hell doesn't Lightroom come with Master Collection? I haven't tried it, but I figure that Bridge is no Lightroom replacement, and Bridge+Camera Raw seems to be the closest thing in MC.

Lightroom's too reliable and bug-free to come with MC.

I use iphoto to keep a collection of all my keepers, and send from there to Flickr/iPhone etc. It's v. handy if you're not trying to edit in it, and if it doesn't contain any dross, which the working app inevitably fills up with pretty quickly.

I nearly cried when I tried to backup to a external hard drive. Then I just dragged the whole shebang (iphoto lib) to the disk and that was that. Yes, I actually did that. :-(

I still haven't found the right combination of Feather, Flow and Density to get the Local Corrections (K) tool in LR to do what I want, or what I used to be able to do (with much more effort) in PSE. I still end up with very artefacty border zones between areas I've "painted" with different exposure values. At least I've learned not to use Auto Mask any more, which is pretty disastrous when painting areas that are non-uniform in colour or texture.

Methods for organising photos? In order to subdivide things to a reasonable degree so I can drag chunks off to an external HDD when necessary, I have folders on the laptop based on camera model, year, then quarter (Canon EOS 40D/2009/[Q1]). I suppose I could just have one great dump of a folder and let LR sort it all out but I've not got to that stage yet. I'm also poor at tagging in LR. I don't much relish the idea of retrospectively adding "Ava" or "Tallulah" or both to 5,000 photos...

I've been moving a lot of pictures around tonight from drive to drive and to try and get them into order. Aperture has been a complete nightmare; Lightroom was a total breeze. I now have them all in it, with top-level folders for each year, and a sub-folder for each "job" inside.

This works well in LR, as it lets me drill down into a specific thing without having to go to the bother of tagging them all, but you can also completely ignore where they are on disk and do big searches across all of them.

Hey, that's what I was doing last night! It's what Fridays are for, right?

Taking advantage of the newly-ordered environment of the office/craft room/3rd bedroom (a bomb site for three years), I was inspired to do some virtual sorting on laptop/HDD and now everything is a bit more streamlined (and the LR catalog has been backed up for the first time in four months).

Problem is, in the bad old days, I'd use ZoomBrowser to take everything off the Ixus i/300D and I'd give a two-letter prefix for each import (so you'd get KX0001, KX0002... for 17/3/05 and then KX0001, KX0002... for 18/3/05, etc - which was pretty stupid). Fine if you're retaining that day-by-day folder structure, not so good if you want to merge (especially as external mass-renaming tools will only destroy LR's links). But I've discovered you can just jam a new prefix in the Filename field in Library mode (with a whole bunch selected) and all the pics just inherit that prefix, sequentially-numbered.

Our teacher says it's better to erase your cards once the card is full. So now I'll have about 1200 pics on my Canon w hich need to be sorted through. ARGHHHHHH! :-)

um, what else are you going to do with it once its full ?

Yeh deleting in drive and drabs is bad for flash memory, supposedly

Yeah, but I wonder how much longer you can use it. That said, tbh I always wait till it's full.

I'm nervous about wiping a CF card until the pix I've taken off it are also backed up elsewhere. I had three cards on the go last week, which meant, slightly annoyingly, overlapping filename sequences (the camera just picks up from the last thing on the card, even if it's used that filename on another card). Fortunately, LR prefixes the shooting date on the filename as it imports, so no duplicates yet...

does the 'erasing everything' rule come from the fact that files are never deleted only de-indexed? (because when a new file is created, it has to delete space first thus making the whole process slower)
if so, then not only do you need to erase but you need to full format.

or am i talking bollocks?

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.