My first tentative PP attempts

[Alpha_7]

Doug (Potatis) has been encouraging me to actually learn how to use PP, and tonight I had some time spare waiting for the Boston IT guys to get into the office.. so while we waited, Doug gave me some pointers on things to play with in PP. We both first tried it on a tree stump, I introduce a lot of noise into mine and seemed to go overboard with the yellows and reds, but I did turn a boring tree into a more interesting subject.. the first challenge over, I attempted a second shot, this time flying solo, noting too crazy here just playing with colour, hue, saturation, shadow hightlights, then a resize, sharpen and save as jpeg.
Click for bigger and please let me know what you think, I'm prepared for the worst.





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[cc@t]

Alpha - good effort - I maybe would've upped the saturation a touch to make the trees jump a little. But nice pic.

[Alpha_7]

Just as a short aside, the Sailboat short was taken onboard a Boston Duck Tour, well worth the experience, and I have to give myself some credit for getting a pretty straigh horizon in this shot... considering a) I was floating in the water, and b) I was shoting out a small gap in the window..

This shot as well as a few others is since yesterday hangin on my wall, .. I know it's kind of doing things in reverse.. but seeing it in print made me think to try PP it.. see how it turns out.

[Potatis]

Hehe, well you know what I think. Bit too strong with the reds and yellows for my tastes. But as I said, keep experimenting and with experience you'll get a feel for what settings work best.

We had a little fun. Craig sent me a small artifact ridden jpg to work with. It's ok, here is the before and after I came up with. The "before" is on the left.

[moggy]

Nice pics, I like both the tree shots as they set different moods. Having said that I do like your treatment Doug, possibly because it fits it's surrounds better.

Bob.

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[johnd]

Craig, I was going to reply that I don't like the introduced grain in the tree stump shot. But when I saw what Doug posted that you had to work with (all those jpeg artifacts), I've changed my mind. You've done a great job of getting rid of the artifacts. Can you get rid of the artifacts and still not get as grainy?

As for photoshop tuition, I have learned a heap from "Better Photoshop Techniques". It's a tutorial style publication that comes out once a quarter. I know there are zillions of books about photoshop, but I found these personally very useful in helping me learn.

[Alpha_7]

John...

In short I cheated.. I was sending Dough a heap of files sizes down to 10-15k each... about 300-200 pixels, and about 70% on Jpeg image quality.

Me, I was Photoshoping from the orginal raw... as you can see in the orginal jpeg doug had, it was quiet dark, so I upped the exposure a little too much introducing a fair bit of noise, then when I tweaked the colours the stump came up nicely.. but so did all the noise too...

[Potatis]

Yeah, I got the little files. 11kb... not fair! LOL

The photos I posted were 100% size of what Craig sent me.

[johnd]

Hardly a level playing field.

[nito]

hey alpha, I gotta dummies book on PS CS2. You can borrow if you want. The book is okay, since like you I'm a beginner.

[marc]

Craig

What Raw converter are you using?

Cheers
marc

[nodabs]

hope you don't mind but i had a crack at it too

original



my version



obviously with the unaltered pic you can do more or better yet raw but thats my take on it

[Alpha_7]

Hardly a level playing field.

No it wasn't a level playing field, but we sort of feel into mucking around in PS, it wasn't planned.

hey alpha, I gotta dummies book on PS CS2. You can borrow if you want. The book is okay, since like you I'm a beginner.

Thanks for the offer Nito, I actually have a tutorial on CD, that I am slowly working through (only started on the weekend).

Marc, for these two shots above, I was using Nikon view, and just clicked open in CS2, when I do a lot of RAW -> Jpeg I have previously used Rawshooter, but I'd like to move away from using it as I wasn't happy with some of the results.


Nodabs, I don't mind you having a shot at it.... I actually played with the trees that green, but remembered it was fall when I was over there and pealed it back to keep it more realistic to how it was..