Let's take this one for example.
Which is a perfectly fine shot of Boo. It's shot inside in crappy light and I had to use the flash. I dislike using flash, but kind of necessary in this case.
Then I used Photoshop Elements to touch it up and came up with this.
I like the second one better. I want to figure out how to do that without having to use Photoshop to work out the right elements. I know most professionals use Photoshop to fix photos, but I like to think they are just tweaking them. This is a fairly big change.
Although not as big as this one. This is Cathy and Boo. I've taken a lot of pictures of Boo because he doesn't really care. Cathy smiles politely for a few and then suggests if I try to take many more of her she might try out the new zoom feature of my lens to get a good shot of my colon.
Anyway, Cathy and Boo before.
And Cathy and Boo after the wonders of Photoshop.
Again, quite the bit of difference. And yeah it was a gray day outside. And yeah, snow can do weird things if you not completely sure how to shoot it. Still, I'm not completely happy with the results so far. It's not the camera, I'm pretty sure. I'm just not used to shooting with something this advanced.
I'll get better, I'm sure. It's just going to take practice. On the upside, the battery held up really well. It was cold, but not frigid on Saturday when I took the outside shots. Probably around -20. We've had colder, but that's still pretty harsh for most electronics. I had it outside for about 30 minutes and there was no problem with the electronics and the battery life was even pretty good. No noticeable dip. I've been outside with my other camera and saw the battery life die by about 40 per cent in 20 minutes.
Now I just have to start shooting to the level the camera is capable of. I almost wish there was a course here I could take part in. Maybe I'll look some people up when I'm in town the summer. I'm not a bad photographer. Just wish I was better.
3 comments:
Craig, what you are doing is no different than if you actually were to develop your own negatives. If you had a proper lab and film camera you could theoretically do most of what photoshop can do. Having said that imagine tweaking a RAW file the same as if you could potentially adjust the exposure after the fact etc etc. Knowing the digital negative and how far you can stretch it is as important as knowing the film negative.
Don't feel too guilty about it. There many reasons why you would need to tweak a photo and bring out the hidden details. Sometimes though you do get lucky. The more control over the tweaking the better! Photoshop sometimes imagines things which are just not right!
BTW, this is why you need to work with white balance ;) You're really going to need up there by the looks of it :D
Can't wait to see more pics!
Cheers
Dups
I've got a film camera and I'm really not sure what sort of equivalent a digital has, but my very nice camera has partial light metreing and (multiple) spot metreing. The spot is great as it allows me to measure the extremes of light and dark and a mid-tone so that the exposure takes each of them into account. Perhaps that's what the "white balance" digital feature does.
M.
i use a photoshop filter called digital sho professional V2.0.0 to get the same effect with photos. it's great for bringing out the details hidden by shadow.
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