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/p/, what is your philosophy on post-processing, and how do you utilize it?
I'm relatively new to serious photography and shooting in RAW. I've only just started using Lightroom and begun to understand the potential of the program. Recovering shadows and un-fucking blown highlights is incredible to me. And I have no idea how to utilize the color treatment options. I've only recently mastered white balance and now I can screw with individual channels. I'm drunk with power.
But I don't know think I've achieved a tasteful balance between maintaining the integrity of the photo and bringing out the best in it. I'm wary of my photos looking fake and yet I also know some really great photography has that quality to it. For instance I am going through my photos from New York City, where I was shooting a lot of buildings. I edit the shots such that the sky and the buildings are probably exposed but then everything looks like an HDR shot. I reduce the vibrance and saturation a bit to counter that effect. I really like what I made but think people will see it as "oh that's a cool Photoshop" and not "oh that's a nice picture."
Maybe I just need the self-confidence to go with what I think looks best.
I'm curious to see what the board thinks about this stuff.
>>2713008
>un-fucking blown highlights
You can't.
>>2713014
>You can't.
I'm new to the terminology. I guess they're not actually blown out but just brighter than looks good.
I guess blown out means truly unrecoverable and forever white?
>>2713014
You can recover detail in an area so long as there is at least one channel that is not maxed at 255. Don't be a pedantic shitface.
>>2713008
OP, just practice, and do what looks right to you. Do an edit, and if you think it's too heavy, get up and walk away. Come back 20 minutes later, and if it looks bad to you, then fix it. There's no way you would be perfect at it to start off with. Just go slowly, and make yourself happy.
That being said, a lot of photos handle heavy post processing very well. And conversely, a lot of photos don't. It will be situational. But you should always try to avoid hard clipped highlights, ugly crushed blacks, and heavy clarity. Remember that most people know what items in the world look like, so don't try to pass off weird blue trees, or green skin, etc.
>>2713057
this.
another trick is use two monitors and have the original up next to you at all times so you can keep looking at it, when starting out it's very easy to get carried away with certain colors, midtones, curves etc. you'll find that it's very easy to turn an ok edit into a piece of shit with a small bar slide. keep looking at the original and make sure you keep its delicacy.
keep it both sharp and smooth, add small amounts of sharpness and smooth with noise reduction (use topaz if possible). don't repair your shadows too much and don't repair your highlights too much, avoid that pukey HDR look in most cases. learn to nail your white balance when taking the shot rather than fixing it afterwards that way your color depth will be stronger. watch carefully for noise and grain, a loss in sharpness with some quality noise reduction is always far better than a sharp but grainy image. use luminance for specific colors, under rated tool that helps wash out and add whites to a certain color. use graduated filters and dodging & burning very very carefully and subtley or you will fuck up a photo and not even realized it's happened.
>your philosophy on pp
#yolo
I dont care about making things realistic
>>2713057
>walk away. Come back 20 minutes later
This.
Even wait a day or two if you are not in a hurry. As a fellow somewhat advanced amateur I often overdo the post when I get happy about a shot turning out good and often it looks so much better in a completely different way compared to what I did with it when it was fresh and I was "slider happy".
Always been fond of this kind of aesthetic, even if it's getting a bit abused these days.
What's the shopping method here? Looks like they cranked up the RAW clarity and brought down the saturation. What else?
>>2713990
kek
>>2713990
It's tone-mapping, and it's universally reviled by anyone with artistic experience or taste. It's fairly easy to replicate with a few clicks, though, so look up a tutorial on YouTube and have fun. Be prepared for it to be accepted about as well as farting in your viewer's eyes though.
>>2713992
>universally reviled by anyone with artistic experience or taste
So you mean it's one of those things that community insiders came up with arbitrary reasons to hate because it's simple to do and would seemingly cheapen the complexity of their art form? Cool.
I still like it, when it's appropriate. I've seen it make pictures look like garbage before, but not any more often than other things.
>>2713990
that is one shit photo
>>2713993
>So you mean it's one of those things that community insiders came up with arbitrary reasons to hate because it's simple to do and would seemingly cheapen the complexity of their art form?
>>2713993
No, because it looks fucking retarded.
>>2713008
Do what-the-fuck-ever to your photos until you like them. Processing, ideally, is driven by whichever principles led you to initially expose the photograph in the first place. There are trends in post as with anything else, so if you're preparing something for flickr or p or instagram consumption, process accordingly. Otherwise keep playing around until you become interesting enough to have your own style.
>>2713008
The best thing to do is play with it. I know it sounds dumb, but go full manual. Manual mode on the camera, shoot raw format, edit all your pictures from RAW. Once you learn what things do in the editing process, you'll learn how to fix it when you actually take the picture to make your workflow easier. Photography is learned by practice, and by speaking with others. But mostly practice. Create the art that you like, fuck everyone else's opinions.
>>2713017
you've pretty much got it. Blown out is when there is too much light hitting the lens and it gets that white washed out look to it. Think of it as the way your eyes feel when someone points a flashlight in your face when you have been in a dark room, or when you turn on your cell phone after you wake up from sleeping and you forgot you left the brightness on full blast. The way your eyes feel, is basically what's happening to the camera. Too much light. Can't process the image.
>>2713993
It just looks bad
Do you think that looks good?
>>2714107
Ok, so I'm completely new here and I've seen the term alot and have now clue what it means. What is RAW? is it a file type? A program?
>>2714392
RAW is a file type (although not always called .raw). It's essentially the raw data from the camera sensor as opposed to jpeg (what your phone camera and what your camera probably shoots at). Jpeg has been processed to look "prettier" inside the device. Raw pictures don't look as nice at first (under contrast, washed out, etc), but they have much much more flexibility in post processing (changing the light levels, contrast, etc in a program like LightRoom). So RAW is essentially sacrificing having ready-made photos for much more options in changing it. Most people recommend shooting in raw despite what trolls on this board will say.
>>2714392
raw just means lossless. like a flac music file. its all the data your sensor captured, as opposed to a jpeg witch is compressed, like an mp3. raw images are larger because they hold more data.
High-contrast? Raised blacks? desaturated? natural? film look? digitally perfect? corrupted? montage with other pictures? as many details as possible? median stacks? vsco? vivid and vibrant? moody? #nofilters? from 0 to 255? blue and orange? white frame? HDR?
so many styles. lately I'm pushing myself to do cool compositions with square crops in mind. not really successful.
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