Friday, March 2, 2012

Before and After Pictures

Along with learning how to take pictures I have also been learning a lot about processing my pictures. Processing can be great and most digital pictures can use at least a little bit of sharpening. But my real goal is to take awesome pictures SOOC (Straight Out Of Camera), so that they need little processing. I have Photoshop Elements8. Elements ia a lot cheaper then the full photoshop program but you can still do a ton with it. When I first starting using photoshop I used free action that I got from Pioneer Woman, Paint the Moon and Coffeshop.

As I have been trying to get more serious about photography I decided to really learn how to edit my pics without actions. Some photogs look at actions as cheating... Anyhow, this is a whole other discussion. I don't think I want to throw out actions completely. But I want to learn what they are doing, and use them selectively and creatively. For now I am attempting to edit on my own. Here are a few of my recent edits. You can also see these on my flickr page with the shooting information.

2 comments:

  1. This is almost convincing me to buy photoshop. So I am ready for the next post:)

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  2. PS If you aren't going to use "actions" so much I think I can mimic what you are doing in photoshop in a Linux based program- I'll bet ya! Let's try it.

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