Photo editing tools

[MastaMax]

Thought it might be a good idea to start a thread about how people edit their photo to render them better.

I personally always use Adobe Photoshop but just found out about Adobe Lightroom, which is a tool to organize, and quickly crop/correct your pictures.

Now it seems lightroom is not as powerful as photoshop, but it's easier and much faster to edit your pictures. It takes only 10-20 seconds per picture to get the result you want.

Here is a sample of a shot I took on Koh Lanta last November:

Raw shot, bad framing, lot of garbage in the background and not very alive:


After, just a few seconds to crop and correct and you get a far better result:


The good thing about Lightroom is that now you can retouch all your pictures, not just 5-6 pictures as it is time consuming with Photoshop.

 

[LivinLOS]

I too just picked up lightroom 3 the other day and intend to use it more for layers and color work..

But for the simplest, cropping, resizing, color / saturation / contrast etc.. The picasa desktop app is really idiot proof simple and good results. Also the app can be used to catalogue and keep folders synced with the Picasa storage.. So if you have a 'best' folder tree of the good shots / edited ones / stuff to archive it can back that up online all transparently. I am hooked on flickr for storage / backup options but with they had a folder mirroring system like that.

 

[KTMphil]

With 100 photo's to do (quickly)-

auto-correct with Microsoft office picture viewer

adjust the zoom

then crop with fastcapture (to 1024 wide)

upload the batch to flickr

 

[johnnysneds]

I use Aperture - has some powerful but easy to use editing tools. You can also edit from within the software using Photoshop.

I love tilt-shifting photos with Photoshop.

Here's the WR tilt-shifted in the garden.

There's also some amazing examples of tilt-shifting online.

And here's an incredible tilt-shifting video

 

[Pounce]

Johnny, I was wondering how that was done, it can be a cool effect.

Here's a model I made of the Nam Nga bridge

 

[johnnysneds]

Here's the link to the photoshop tilt-shift instructions.

http://www.tiltshiftphotography.net/photoshop-tutorial.php

 

[johnnysneds]

Johnny, I was wondering how that was done, it can be a cool effect.

Here's a model I made of the Nam Nga bridge

Nice one Pounce.

 

[Tom]

The good thing about Lightroom is that now you can retouch all your pictures, not just 5-6 pictures as it is time consuming with Photoshop.

I've never tried Lightroom, as I was under the impression it was specifically for RAW-stuff (which I've never played with). I'll definitely have a look at it now. Anyway, doing batch-processing of a whole bunch of pictures in Photoshop is quite easy. Jut record a macro and the run it on all open files, or all files in a directory. I did all the pictures for my recent trip-report - 133 of them - in one go. You can resize, adjust color, brightness, contrast, whatever you want, on as many files as you like.

 

[Pounce]

I used Burst Mode on my P&S Lumix to get the series of shots.
I then opened them in Photoshop & cropped them to include enough background in front & behind the bike to allow Microsoft ICE to render them into a panorama shot (stitch them together)
Worked out OK on this one, others I tried, the bikes weren't going fast enough to have "clear" scenery between the shots for the stitching program.

 

[mikehohman]

Great shot, i really like what you have done with this...

And 'Pounce' = Peter Collins? I just put it together... hahaha

Cheers, Mike