Reality Check: Before and After Photoshop - Sunsets and Sunrises
Crisp winter morning on the lake.
Quite often I get asked how much my pictures are Photoshopped and how do I do it, and I've been promising a long time to show you exactly what I do. This first set of before and afters is only about sunsets and sunrises, but I'm thinking of showing some other nature/landscape pictures too and you probably want to see the self portrait works too, to see what I look like under all that Photoshopping.
I though it would be best to show you the exact changes on some of the pictures in Camera Raw, where I can easily show you the side by side comparison. This is where I do basically all the changes and when I open the picture in Photoshop, I usually just straighten the image if needed and resize it. Sometimes there is a smudge on the lens or some little thing I take out with the healing tool.
My philosophy with taking photographs and post processing them is that I want the picture to come out as good as possible straight from the camera, and then just do some little tweaks and adjustments in Camera Raw. I don't think beautiful nature in a gorgeous light needs any changes, just some enhancements that the camera couldn't catch but you could see if you were present.
Usually the main focus is bringing in detail from the lightest and darkest parts of the photo, and bumping up saturation and vibrance.
Under every picture is a link to the original post where you can see a bigger version of the picture and all the other pictures from the set.
And by the way, all these were shot with the Nikon D7200, during this early year of 2018.
Disclaimer: I'm not a pro and I'll never tell you what you should do and how to do it, just showing what I personally like to do for my pictures.
Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time.
A rare city view from me when we saw the light for the first time in over a month.
Clouds gave way to a little light and colours after the sun set.
I'm only a couple days old, go see my friends.
Perhaps my favourite sunset of the year, you need to see this bigger.
Photoshop has it's own importance in the photo editing. You can use photo shop in animations and in graphic designing.
Yes, that's true. Photoshop now a days plays very important role when it comes about showing beautiful pictures.
I didn't believe that until I saw photographers in a competition using photoshop and I was like are you serious haha
In my opinion, photographs should mimic as close to reality as possible. Don't like altering nature pictures to become more beautiful and so on.
Its an absolute necessity when shooting raw on a dslr. The shots simply aren't meant to be used straight out of camera. Some people have a real bee in their bonnect about post processing but its usually people who don't understand what it is. They just associate it with overly processed images and airbrushed fashion models. Its far more than that. Its also been around in dark room form as long as photography has.
The pictures is even clear before tweaking it. There is no much difference between before and after side of the picture. The lens of the camera is superb.
I'm a little proud of myself that I can achieve these without much extra work :) There is different lenses I used but they are all Nikkors and with a Nikon D7200 they produce pretty nice colours :)
I do better.
Busted 🙈 haha no seriously it can come in handy for adding a little bit more to the already beautifull photo.
Mostly I use it to make the lighting a little better or Black and white. But not out of proportion though,
It has to stay realistic. ✌️
I agree with you, Photoshop beautify pictures more.
I does a great picture Even better. And a camera will never catch the moment 100% as you see or feel the motive so i feel PS is the photgraphers Choice to use if he ør she feels that it is necessary to give the viewers the right image.
I will be folllwing you! :)
Great to see you're getting these so good out of camera...Lightroom could do this too....just saying :P
There is no point in opening up such a heavy program like Lightroom, when I only need to do little adjustments. I'm gonna use Lightroom for the selfie stuff, need to do much more for those😅
Really? I find PS WAY more intensive, my poor laptop can't really handle it, so adjustments take a second whereas lightroom it's instant so I can see what I'm doing better. You're right though, I guess Lightroom is really designed for batch editing, if you're perfecting a single image then PS is great, but Lightroom is fantastic for uploading a whole card/shoot as well as keeping things organised and at your fingertips. I head to lightroom on my laptop most days and scroll through the dates/folders to see what I'm going to use that day. If I'm being super organised I'll go through a shoot and tag the images I think are keepers then either edit them all in the Develop section or leave them to edit as and when I want to use them. Tbf if you have a good routine there's no point changing! Everyone I know uses an online studio management program but we still prefer the old school approach - Outlook Express and printed booking forms!
What, that is so weird. This Camera Raw is so simple and it has no extra fluff that would make the program slow. Of course if I need to do more than just adjust the things you see here, then Lightroom will probably be my go to. I do find it a little too extra for simple things, and there is so much stuff on the screen! I have to keep pushing back all those things from left, right, up and down the screen to really get a good look at just the image and not all that stuff.
Actually that is a really good point, my laptops 14 inches and not ideal, we tend to use at least 29inch monitors for our real work and we both have two screens so it’s quite a bit of tool panel real estate!
Nice Post