Should I Photoshop or not?

Grumpy Old Bag

Senior Member
This was shot in early morning light with the aim to capture the mood in that moment in time.
Nikon D200
ISO200
Program Auto
1/320 sec
F9
Spot metering
18-135 Nikkor lens at 135mm
WB - Tweaked Auto.

It was only sharpened, framed and resized in ACDSee.

Should I consider manipulation in Photoshop? Is it possible to get it right in camera? :confused:

NIK_6423.jpg
 

wud

Senior Member
What would you do in photoshop? I think it's a beautiful image, maybe it could be a little more bright.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

pictaker64

Senior Member
Looks quite nice to me...there is very little you need to do to it,if anything.I,and this is me,would maybe sharpen it a little bit more cause I like real crisp pics and maybe deepen the red for some dramatic effect,however,thats me.Its an outstanding pic,thanks for posting it
 

alfaholic

Banned
I think you should use PS. You can get it right in the camera, as you did here, but the camera has it's limits, and PS is some step further.
Whether you decide to do only essential PS editing, or something more advanced it is up to you, but I think you should use PS.
 

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
Do I think it needs Photoshop? No. Do I think it could use a little more post processing? Sure. It's an extremely nice photo, but I find the unevenness of the light on the flower to be distracting, particularly the shadow on the lower petal. I used Elements 9 to do very minor brightness, contrast, level and saturation adjustments, and then boosted the sharpness a bit using Unsharp Mask to avoid adding noise to the nice bokeh in the background. I also used the Dodge tool to lighten up the lower petal a bit.

The differences are very subtle, but I think it grabs the eye a little better.

rose.jpg


While it's nice to believe that we can get perfect captures straight out of the camera, it's always been darkroom practice to dodge and burn and adjust the print exposure time to achieve the best effect. My take is that the digital photographer should expect to do the same to maximize the impact of the photos they take. You absolutely do not need the power of something like Photoshop to do this. For the digital photographer I personally believe that Lightroom is more than enough tool to do just about everything you'd want to do in terms of simple "printing". And Elements can do most of that as well and save you some $$ if that's your main driver.
 
Last edited:

weebee

Senior Member
The picture looks great now. Though perhaps a little more light. As far as PS goes.It's really is up to the person. If you have time to adjust your camera to suit the subject then I would go that way. Sometimes you don't have time to take the perfect shot and then PS becomes your best friend.
 

rocketman122

Senior Member
a little more contrast. maybe a light vignette. but me personally, I would of plucked some of the outer leaves. specifically the bottom 2. it would give it a more cleaner look, but other than that, looks fine.
 

Grumpy Old Bag

Senior Member
Hi,

Thanks for all the comments.

Thank you Jack for the edit. It seems your edit is better than my shot.

I must say I am a little disappointed in you people, nobody told me it is a crappy shot and I have to go back and do it again. So I told myself and I did it again.
If this one is crappy I don’t know what more can I do. Same Rose – 24 hours later.

Same camera, different settings.
1/160sec
F6.3
Program Auto
ISO 200
Centre Weight Metering
Saturation: High
Sharpness: Hard
Focal Length: 62mm

This time I cheated: Sprayed water and cloned out the “bite” in the leaf.
For this shot I used a tripod to get it sharper, changed my point of view to get a better background. In the Menu I set Colour to More Vivid.

I do not have a calibrated screen. I “calibrated” one of my screens to my camera. Sometimes I look at images on three different screens, two at work and one at home. What worries me is that it seems to me whatever some of you see on your screen is different to what I see on my screen. Most of you recon my images are too dark. Looking at Jack’s edit it seems a lot of noise has been introduced to the image. The edit is not much lighter than the original post, though the dark areas from the original image are brighter.

Is this one still too dark? Hope it is better than the first one.

Thank you again for spending time to look and comment, it is always much appreciated.

NIK_6490Edit.jpg
 

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
I must say I am a little disappointed in you people, nobody told me it is a crappy shot and I have to go back and do it again.

That's because it's really not a crappy shot. It's actually has more than decent composition and is rather nice with just some lighting issues that can be easily corrected.


I do not have a calibrated screen. I “calibrated” one of my screens to my camera. Sometimes I look at images on three different screens, two at work and one at home. What worries me is that it seems to me whatever some of you see on your screen is different to what I see on my screen. Most of you recon my images are too dark. Looking at Jack’s edit it seems a lot of noise has been introduced to the image. The edit is not much lighter than the original post, though the dark areas from the original image are brighter.

Is this one still too dark? Hope it is better than the first one.

It's Jake, btw. Honest mistake, but I have this thing about being called "Jack" - long story requiring a beer and a lot of background history. Honest mistake. ;)

Realize that I was working with a low resolution jpeg when I edited and not the original RAW file. I also did the minimum amount of editing possible to show you what I meant and without knowing what it's possible to do with your software. Brightening that image will definitely add noise, but it can easily be reduced in a RAW image, and even with the jpeg I have software that would have allowed me to do these adjustments while better preserving the background, but I wanted to keep it simple and use global adjustments. I could have done most of what needed to be done with just the dodge tool and then some contrast adjustments, but having no idea what you have available in ACDSee my intent was to show you what might have been doable with what you have and not to show what you can do in Photoshop.

The new image does not suffer from what I see as correctable in the first. Most of the problems were in the flower and not with the background, with the whites/pinks not popping as they should. The new image does not suffer from this at all.

Monitor calibration is a tricky thing, and it the bane of all photographers who strive to get things to look right. Most monitors tend to be too hot and cool by default, and even when tweaked by their owners. It's just what the eye expects to see. My brother has a Spyder calibration system and he's done mine, and will then also profile them to match my printer. But I fully expect that what I see will not be what others see, and I confirm that every time I look at something on someone else's monitor. Believe it or not, the first thing I'll check after I put something online is how the colors look when I pull it up on my iPhone. If it looks right there then I'm content to know that it should look OK to most everyone else - or at least most everyone else who cares about it.
 
Top