Photo-Manipulation

Hmm, not often I do this, but in the comments, Wulvern wrote:

Like the photos. Are they ‘as taken’ or did you do any bodging in Photoshop or similar? Am thinking of upgrading from a basic digi camera but the reviews in magazines and at dpreview.com (top site) suggest that the output digital SLRs need ‘working on.’

So – as with previous photos I’ve put online either here at d4d™ or on my pages at Flickr – no, I don’t do a great deal of alteration to my shots if I can help it. I tend to limit myself to cropping the images if necessary, and resizing them. I’ve done some aspects of editing them in some cases, or converting from colour to black&white, but even those are a bit of a rarity.

However, I also probably don’t use the camera to its fullest power, because I tend to shoot photos as JPGs rather than in the RAW format. RAWs take up more room on the card, and need to have an amount of processing done on them on the PC before they can be usable. Quite honestly, that’s beyond my current skills a lot of the time, but also I don’t like knobbing about too much with images. Yes, sure, I could take a RAW image and do any amount of stuff with it – but I know I wouldn’t do so.

I like to keep images as close to their reality as possible. OK, maybe in the future I’ll play with images and saturation levels etc. so that I could come up with images such as this, but at the moment it’s just not my thing. I like to use my own creativity and the power of the camera to produce something like the shot of the log in the waterstream – I don’t want to be sat in Photoshop for hours blurring the bloody things to the correct consistency.

So – to go back to answering the question – no, I don’t mess about with the images. The ones from the weekend have only been altered to rotate some of them through 90°, that’s it. Yeah, some could do with some trimming or cropping, but I haven’t done so yet. As for the images needing processing from a DSLR, yeah, they can do. But it’s up to you – I stick (for now) with JPG images, and don’t need to stuff about the same way I would with a RAW. I could do, but I chose not to. As with most things on SLRs, you can make life pretty much as complicated or simple as you want and/or as your skills let you.