Sunday, November 17, 2019

Learning to Tweak Photos

Been learning a few new techniques for post-editing one's photographs. Ansel Adams stated that good photographs are taken, great ones are made. He was known to spend hours and hours in the darkroom using chemicals and lights to tweak his photos until he was satisfied. 

Today we spend hours and hours staring at a computer screen striving to achieve Ansel's look...   frequently falling short in the process. 

Here are few of my latest efforts to master the craft of post-editing... enjoy and critique at will. 

First what I call street portraits, 
or photos of people busy doing other things. 
Some of which you have seen, before I spent more time with them, tweaking.


 Stoic Elder


 The Stare


 Princess


Eagle Feather Warrior



 Shy Maiden


Watching the older ones dance


Posed Photos or people posing for photographers

Title: Chatter in the dark... or GRIT.
I think I like GRIT better.



 Young beauty


Giving them the eye



The Real McCoy


To me what is most interesting are comments strangers will make.

On a hot dusty side street in Mora, New Mexico...


...this old sheepherder replied, when I asked how he was doing..." Waiting to die."


People are most interesting creatures.


CCjon




5 comments:

  1. The black and white images look great!

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    1. Thank you Kofla, am learning which images lend themselves to B&W and which are better in color. Th native american images I wanted to look more 1800's than modern, so better without color, or with e tint.

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  2. Great pictures CCjon, great stuff.

    Which post-processing software are you using? I like lightroom from Adobe to bring out the shadows so I can shoot for the bright areas in a picture.

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    1. Thanks Dom, There is a new editing software called Luminar that was written on an Apple computer so is more intuitive for Apple users like me. They just released Luminar 4, with some amazing AI editing tools.

      In less than 20 years, we'll just drop a photo in from our phones and out pops a beautiful professional looking photo with a printed matted photo arriving in the mail the next day. AI photography programs will tell US what a great photo should look like....

      Those who still want to edit their photos will go back to film.... ??

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    2. I doubt you and I will live to see such days CCjon, the technology today just can't capture what the human eye sees and "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".....still, I can see where social media is leading the younger generations along the path of "this is the way you should think"

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