Post-processing - photography or not?

Get the

Capture One 8

forget this LR. (was kind of acceptable to 5.0, but 6.0 is really only for press people.) You will be very, very happy with capture One. Safer batch processing etc, etc... I can't go into all details but it would never cross my mind to use LR for commercial ad-worxs and especially for technical documentations...

Reg your question: Yes it is. Why should it be not? Remember the tricks in the darkroom...It's all digital today, so its also digital in this craft. Dam digital was the reason I shifted from press productions to commercial only because the media people wanted suddenly all for free "you don't need to buy any films anymore" etc...

I go even further: We're already in a post-photoshop time. At least if you're using PhaseOne and the series of D800 / D810 or the new Sony's R7....

Welcome to the Darkroom Peter. I absolutely need LR and find PS useful for more arty stuff. I nearly always have to correct White balance in LR. I find Nikons have difficulty with blues!!!

In reply to your question: Yes! Absolutely; It is part of the photographic process in the same way that the dark room was.

Am I the only one that would lose all sense of time in a Darkroom, & emerge hours after I'd gone in?

CaptureOne has some layer functionality for what it calls local changes. Having defined one or many layer masks you can change a large number of parameters on that layer. Nice, but as I say it's only a bargain if you happen to have a Sony camera.

Layers are (is?) the main functionality missing from lightroom AND Elements. Thats why I go into Photoshop (and a better control over reducing haze using levels). Its so seldom though it certainly doesn't justicy the cost, LR is best value for me

RAW with Lightroom and occasional Photoshop is definitely the best though with the prohibitive cost of Photoshop and the coverage of the latest Lightroom version I suspect one could almost use Photoshop Elements when one wants Photoshop functionality.

If you want to look at more extreme post-processing then HDR is the next step. Call it art....

I've used Photoshop for so long now I find that when composing a photograph I am taking into account what I can and cannot do with the RAW file when it gets onto a computer. I honestly do not care what it looks like either on the camera or on the PC before I fire up Photoshop.

The levels are the only thing that matter to me because if they are OK then the picture I want is in there somewhere, I just need to go and find it.

I did consider learning gimp once but while Adobe insist on making their software so easy to pirate I feel obliged to help myself. :)

Yes, we tried GIMP too but you need far too many add-ons to work efficiently with it. Good otherwise.

I was partly in the "can't be bothered" camp. But I find that importing images, a minor clean-up, and an export is pretty quick and well worthwhile.

My Nex5R wasn't what I consider an expensive camera at about €500, but it's capabilities are astounding. Panoramas are a case in point - filmed and stiched flawlessly in real time, quite incredible.

Yep, have used GIMP for a long time, but never consistently. I always end up having to re-learn how to do things each time. But it's not for post-processing really, more (as it says on the tin) image manipulation.

Look up GIMP on the internet, its completely free and is similar to Photoshop

I run Photoshop CS6 Extended, could have saved a whole lot of cash if I knew about GIMP Beforehand.

I have used Lightroom for years, I consider it more or less equivalent to what could have been achieved by an expert developer in a darkroom back in the days of film. Some functions like panoramas required photoshop (though LR5+ does this now). Even HDR is possible in LR6 - but much of what "purists" might think of as "trick photography" can even be done in-camera. imo its down to composition and post processing is to get it just right, as you saw it (perhaps, though some hdr, requires some hallucinagenic perhaps :-) ).

Raw is definitely the way imo. The main "complaint" I hear about post processing is 'I can't be bothered with all that messing around' in which case I expect that same opinion existed when it was only film.4 years on and I am still learning Lightroom and the more I learn the more I love it.

Yes, I know what you mean. It can be easy to get carried away with effects, or even just with relatively simple modifications, and that's where I started a long time ago with the "Yes, but is it Photography?" questions.

I think I'd almost certainly have gone for LightRoom had I not discovered the Sony discount for CaptureOne. I guess they are both very very capable, maybe it doesn't make that much difference.

It's nice when you take a decent picture into one of these tools and find that there's very little you can do to improve it - amazing that the camera itself can do so well. But interestingly when I had my camera shooting both JPG and RAW, often importing the RAW file and exporting a JPEG without touching anything makes a better quality JPEG than the camera. I guess it's down to the level of compression used, but the file sizes are pretty comparable.

I use Lightroom and only shoot in RAW, the detail that is available within those files is astounding especially on the D800 and A6000 that I use mainly. You can see some of my work here if you like.

Gotcha.

Yes, it's darkroom work on steroids.

One can have both skills, or farm out the post-processing, just like in the old days.

I use Lightroom for ninety percent of the work, with filters from Topaz sometimes; and Photoshop perhaps ten percent of the time, when I need layers or text.

I am by no means fluent in post, and don't believe I ever will be. It's like learning a whole other language.

I do notice that people in general seem to "like" pictures that have heavier post-production. HDR, for example, is all the rage. Only to my taste ten percent of the time (I bought and use Aurora HDR Pro), but when I do post photos on the internet, the HDR versions get much more attention.

Yes, it's photography, in just the same way as the old darkroom techniques were. And for some reason, when messing about with those at the time it never occurred to me to even ask the question. Maybe it was the more manual nature of it, I don't know. I guess it required a little more skill because the Undo button hadn't been implemented in the darkrooms I used. :-)

Actually, Picassa isn't bad but PhotoScape is really pretty good. I loved darkroom work, perhaps that is one of the reasons I do so little photography (plus not travelling as much as I used to I suppose) nowadays. I think there are quite a few packages but sure, it is photography still and whilst composition (plus luck) are important, processing has long been part of it. So, sure I agree with you on that.

"...whether post-processing is still photography, or whether it's something else entirely. I eventually arrived at a view that yes, it is..."

Yes, it is which?