Post Processing - to do it or not?

[BartonFlyer]

The camera never lies. Of course that never was true but in this digital age the ability to manipulate photographs is easily open to us all.
For anyone that saves their images in the camera as .jpg rather than .raw, there is already an amount of photoprocessing going on (the image will be sharpened, the colour saturation and contrast will be adjusted etc etc) so what you saw is not necessarily what you get!
I certainly apply adjustments to the photographs I take, usually to boost the contrast, sharpen the image, crop out unwanted bits and get what I believe (possibly mistakenly ) to be a more pleasing result - what do others think? Is this somehow wronng on a site that aims to be essentially factual?

[pxl8]

I think the answer is each to his or her own. I shoot raw and post process all my shots to some degree. I very rarely do selective work, usually just exposure, colour balance, saturation, etc. and always some sharpening for web images.

The really isn't any such thing as an unprocessed image. When I used to shoot film slr I had to decide between B+W, colour neg, or colour slide. Add to that different brands giving different results and (as I worked in an E6 lab) being able to control the processing to the nth degree there was still tweaking after the shutter was released. Digital just gives more (and different) choices.

My usual workflow (for the web) is something like this:

Open raw in Canon DPP, fix exp, contrast, etc. Export as max. quality jpg.
Open in Paint Shop Pro
Re-size to 800px on longest side.
Duplicate layer, change blend mode to soft light, set layer alpha to 50%. Gaussin blur layer with a radius of 6px. Curves tool using a preset to lighten shadow areas.
On bottom layer run either focus magic at 1px, high pass sharpen (1px, 50%, hard light), or USM (1px, 50%, 5 clipping) depending on the type of image and detail.
Flatten layers, paste sig into corner.
Save as jpeg using optmizer tool to control quality/size ratio.

[BartonFlyer]

Originally Posted by pxl8

My usual workflow (for the web) is something like this:

Open raw in Canon DPP, fix exp, contrast, etc. Export as max. quality jpg.
Open in Paint Shop Pro
Re-size to 800px on longest side.
Duplicate layer, change blend mode to soft light, set layer alpha to 50%. Gaussin blur layer with a radius of 6px. Curves tool using a preset to lighten shadow areas.
On bottom layer run either focus magic at 1px, high pass sharpen (1px, 50%, hard light), or USM (1px, 50%, 5 clipping) depending on the type of image and detail.
Flatten layers, paste sig into corner.
Save as jpeg using optmizer tool to control quality/size ratio.

Good to meet another PSP X user! can you just explain the bit on "set layer alpha to 50%" - do you mean set the layer transparency ?

I think in essence I do a similar process, but I don't resize until the next to last step, before a final sharpening.

Thanks for sharing this procedure - Ian

[pxl8]

Originally Posted by BartonFlyer

can you just explain the bit on "set layer alpha to 50%" - do you mean set the layer transparency ?

I think in essence I do a similar process, but I don't resize until the next to last step, before a final sharpening.

Yes, layer transparency - the value can vary a bit but usually I would tweak it after the curve adjustment if need be.

I re-size sooner for web images just to speed things up a bit. Any minor differences in quality scaling later would give are thrown out with jpeg anyway. It's a different story if I'm preparing images for printing...

[pxl8]

Thought it might be useful to show a couple of before and after examples.

The before versions are what came from the camera, just converted raw>jpg and scaled to web size. The after versions were processed roughly as I described earlier.

[Boddie]

Hi Guys

Please forgive my ignorance but I never really understood this processing. I have a 350D and can shoot either JPEG or RAW. It seems that with RAW the image size is much larger but how do I then process it? Is there software available as the before and afters show a marked improvement and it would be handy to now how to try to master (may take some time) this skill as so many of my photos seem lacking in some way.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers

Boddie

[pxl8]

Boddie,

Your 350D should have come with Canon's Digital Photo Professional for converting raw files (and v2.0.3 is available on the canon website). Another route would be Pixmantec's RawShooter Essentials which is freeware.

There are plenty of tutorials on the web for raw processing, I'm sure google will point the way.

[Boddie]

Ah I have them. The CD's that were disgarded in my excitement to play with my new piece of kit. I will load them now and see how I get on. Thanks for the advice - will let you know how I fare.

Cheers

Boddie

[Fourwings]

The RAW converter software supplied with most cameras is very basic and extremely limited in what it can do, I don't know about Canon but I have both Fuji raw-converter LE & Nikon capture 6 & both of these are slow & far too basic to hold your interest for long!

I can really reccomend RAW Shooter essentials, it's brilliant, by far the best bit of freeware you will ever download - go get it Boddie - you won't regret it!

[Fourwings]

By the way, I had my first play with an EOS 350D the other day, & was really impressed, once you've got over it's compact size, both it's image quality & handling are superb.

I'm now giving serious thought to buying one in preference to the Nikon D70s.