Photo Editing

Photo editing is definitely a crazy thing.

This evening I was taking some photos for eBay downstairs. I turned the lens around and fired off a photo of my face to try something in editing.

It is absolutely amazing what you can do to an image.

In the images below, you'll see three steps.
1. the original image.
2. the corrected image.
3. the touched image.

THE ORIGINAL

In this case the exposure and overall photo are in pretty good shape from the beginning, so from here to the next step isn't too dramatic.

THE CORRECTED

From the original a few corrections are made to bring the image to life a bit. Skin tones pop a bit and the sharpness of the image draws in a small amount. From here typically the image is done.

I like to shoot images that out of the camera are in fairly good shape. A lot of guys today are very, very good at editing, and don't have to work as hard in the field because they can fix just about anything in Photoshop. Not my case. :) I need the images to be solid, because I'm very limited in my editing skills. You can find any image of mine, anywhere on the web, and I can promise you it has never seen Photoshop. Which is dumb really, in an age where everyone is using it. But, I choose to work extra hard in the planning and shooting stages, so that I don't have to be in front of my computer screen for hours.

THE TOUCHED

Just for fun this time I decided to touch up the image. Everything you see here is still without Photoshop, and again my skills are limited, but the image cleaned up quite a bit.

I'm not much of a touch-up photographer. It's fine I suppose with it being my face that I'm erasing stuff, but I feel like it can be insulting to say, "you want me to erase that, right?". ouch. or, "oh you didn't want that erased, sorry I thought it needed to be" wow.

Anyway there's a look at the photo editing side of things. :)

I love shooting, but it's 2010, and editing is very much a reality of the industry.

thanks for reading!