Picture Editing Thoughts (1 Viewer)

[PaulCountyDurham]

Hi Paul,

What software do you use / have available?

I think the processed one looks good, but maybe slightly over processed. In Photoshop I would probably go with a slight curves S-curves adjustment for increasing contrast, and a nudge of increased saturation.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/curves-adjustment.html

Available also in many other cheaper or free software, but names/ways of doing it might differ.

Hi,

I use Affinity and it has the curves adjustment. I've used it in the past but very infrequently. I've just had a looking at the Affinity guidelines for curves, which is very similar to the guidelines in your link, and it's clear I haven't used it to its potential.

I'll bear this one in mind. Cheers!

 

[PaulCountyDurham]

Hi all,

I've just found the time to play around with what has been suggested on this thread.

The easiest way would have been to apply saturation, contrast or whatever and then simply erase those changes in the green part, as well as maybe the bird's moustache because that's too dark. 'Just tried that and it worked well. I also tried selecting the bird and applying the changes to the bird only, it left a bit of a mark 'round the bird but I erased that mark with the erase brush and that worked well.

I also tried saturating selected colours in HSL and that worked well.

Although I mostly take pictures in decent light, and so minimal changes are needed, there have been times when applying contrast, saturation or whatever should have been done selectively. Both of those tips mentioned above are going to be very useful for me in the future.

Thanks for the advice!

 

[PaulCountyDurham]

I would be very wary of folk who reel off a list of things they do to every photo...

Quantise - this reduces the number of colours in an image, it is a way of making the file size smaller (or for arty effect reasons). Nobody has done this since the dial-up internet days.

Channel Filtering - only used for arty purposes, particularly creating black and white or sepia images from colour ones.

Blend background - again a way of doing arty things when you have multiple layers. Can be used to improve photos but it is very mid-2000s Photoshop.

The key to getting better with post processing is practice, just have a play around see what you like. There are a multitude of software specific tutorials on YouTube.

I'll avoid those then.

I actually have a decent repertoire of editing features adjustments after doing a lot of tutorials, certainly decent considering I started with zero knowledge a couple of years back.

I was struggling a bit with applying certain adjustments selectively so that's the next stage for me, and after playing around a bit on a few different pictures I can see now that the advice on this thread is going to be very useful.

Slow and steady improvements I suppose!