Post Processing

I process/edit my photos, sometimes a little, sometimes quite a bit. For one thing you almost have to do process further if you shoot in RAW. Think of it as something akin to needing to turn an old-fashioned negative into a print. It's not that dramatic, but RAW images lack contrast and sharpening and so on. They are not equivalent to a processed jpeg image where the software in your camera or phone has made many assumptions and adjustments and handed them to you. In doing so, it also throws away much of the original data.

Normally however, I don't do much photoshopping in the way that people mean it. I don't generally add elements or move them from one part of the photo to another. I will sometimes remove distractions such wires if I feel so compelled but, certainly, not always. And most of the time I try to make an image that is in some dot of basic harmony with the what I saw when I pressed the shutter.

But I do photoshop sometimes. This, below, was a quick photo for a group on Flickr that posts trucks. I couldn't pass it by, but the light was harsh with much contrast, and the sky was blank.

So, I just cropped it a bit to eliminate much of the blank sky and then applied a few filters to tone down the contrast and even make it look a little bit vintage. So this was a little more than general tweaking of things such as lifting the shadows or nudging the exposure up or dawn, but it's not off the wall editing either. This is a matter of taste, of course, and my taste may be at odds with others.

I really photoshopped this next image, not so much the basic image itself, for I did very little to that, but I did think the flower deserved a better background, and while I was at it, I removed some of the extraneous elements.

In my opinion, the original shot was photographed well enough, so that it required very little processing, but the background and other elements that detracted from the beauty of the flower. To me, it's something like matting and framing a photo, any photo; it just looks better.

I may return to this theme at another time.