Photographers that read this journal! Your input is wanted!

[drewbear]

As a continuation of the previous post (and to save your poor bandwidth), I've included the other shot I wanted to discuss in this post.

This morning (before I learned of my timing mixup), I took a shot of an airplane traveling overhead towards clear sky. I did some editting on it to improve the contrast and clarity, and I wanted to get your opinions. Also, sfopanda? What do you do to your photos to keep that high detail and color?

Here's the original (though shrunk):



Here's the editted version I made:



Thanks for your input.

EDIT: Crap. I didn't realize that the pixelation on the editted on was that bad. Lemme see what I can do to correct that...

Comments

[sfopanda.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I'll provide a short answer first...

1. Exposure

- If it isn't almost there to start with, it'll be hard to put in. A lot depends on knowing the quirks of your camera. Outdoors, my current camera tends to wash out details in bright areas, so I intentionally under-expose the images, knowing I'll fix the dark part later.

- Otherwise I just take a bunch of them with different exposure settings and pick the best one. Sometimes waiting a few seconds and taking another one makes a big difference because the light has changed. (these won't help in your example, though)

Advantages of the more expensive cameras: Camera RAW - can adjust exposure after taking the photo; you can attach a physical filter to the lens to reduce glare.


2. Common color-correction methods in Photoshop

- Curves: allow you to manipulate contrast with a lot of control. You can search for tutorials on this - here's one:
http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/curves-stealing-contrast.html

- Isolating particular areas: if different parts of your image may need different correction. Takes lots of work, and could involve complicated layers and masking.

- Sharpening using the "Unsharp" tool: use *sparingly*. Also try converting the image to LAB mode and sharpening only the luminance channel to reduce odd color halos.


From here, it's an artistic decision whether to aim for an accurate depiction of the experience, or create a whole new look for the pic.

If you (or anyone else) are interested in any of these techniques, I could post a more detailed tutorial. Or look on the web for examples. I actually tend not to do much to the photos I post - you should see the thousands of photos I don't post because they suck :o)

[drewbeartx.livejournal.com]

Thanks for responding. I understand your "taking lots of pics and dumping the crap ones" appeoach; I just haven't done it in the past because film was/is so expensive. Of course, now that I have the digital, I'm starting to head that way. And I'll have to try messing around with the exposures some, do some set experiments (multiples of the same shot using different settings). Thanks for the link, too!