A review – Photography and Post Processing
2005 is when I started my landscape path and I thought that the camera should be good enough, I don’t need to post process photos they should be good enough straight out of camera. As the internet began to have more websites dedicated to displaying photos I wondered how these other people were getting better shots than I was. It came as a big disappointment when I began to find out they were been processed and some quite heavy. This reached its height with the introduction of high dynamic range (HDR) processing.
I was for all intent and purposes a purist at heart. I would look at a photo and expect it to be natural. Grass was green not some weird shade or over saturated. Yet other photos did look natural to my eyes.
People who knew how to process a photo knew that the viewer should never really be able to tell. It was soft and light editing. I always though post processing should be like applying makeup. Designed to enhance the natural features and no way over done.
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Learning more and more via YouTube tutorials I began to process my photos. I went through the plugins stage and all the other effects that can be done. I only have 1 plugin now and that’s the Nik free plugin from google which I use less and less.15 years of playing around and part of my process is to simplify the editing process and develop a style. Most of my editing in done in RAW.
As of 2020 I’m leaning more towards luminosity masking as a way to control the dynamic range in a photo as a lot of time you cannot balance highlights and darks in 1 exposure.
My main tools are Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Most of my editing is done in Lightroom with other specific edits done in photoshop. New programs are now able to replace skies etc, but I’m to much of a realist to go down that path.