To photoshop or not to photoshop ??

[Padfield]

PS - of the three versions of Paul's epiphron I prefer the original because it preserves the characteristic softness of the butterfly. This is sometimes critical. For example, when the cell spot (or lack of) is not visible, the softness of a Chapman's blue underside distinguishes it from common blue, which is distinctly grainier. Sharpening a Chapman's blue photo can have the effect of turning it into a common blue. It would be a shame if going after the 'perfect' photo resulted in a distortion of the true jizz of a butterfly.

Guy

[Bryan H]

Your images are brilliant and I'd love to be able to do something of that quality.

Guy

And April 1st is just around the corner, Guy...

Bryan

[Padfield]

And April 1st is just around the corner, Guy...

Yes, I've probably shot up any chances I had of fooling you lot this year.

As it happens, I've already prepared the 2008 picture and I must admit it would benefit from sharper cutting...

Guy

[FISHiEE]

I definitely would be one for photoshopping. I am sure a much better job can be done in photoshop than in camera. I just set everything to neutral in the camera (sharpening, saturation, contrast adjustments etc.) and then sort it out in photoshop. Sometimes it just means a simple crop and a bit of saturation adjustment and sharpening. Other times, when there is poor light etc. and I need more shutter speed I will purposely under expose by quite a bit to get the sharpness and then bring the exposure and possibly also the colours back up in photoshop afterwards.

I see no problem in a little gardening in photoshop if it's not possible to move a blade of grass out of the way for example before taking the shot and balancing out of harsh shadows and highlights.

Not that keen on the idea of doctoring the subject itself to for example repair a damaged wing etc. I think if you go that far it is no longer a natural history shot...

In a photo comp recently a guy photograph a dragonfly perched on some grass then cloned out the grass to give the impression the dragonfly was photographed in flight. The judge was totally fooled, but anyone who knows dragonflies knows they don't fly with their legs all sprawled out and it was quite clearly faked. The fact the judge didn't spot the really quite bad cloning wasn't too good on his part though!

One thing to mention with regards to photoshopping is that images from modern compact digital cameras cannot be manipulated very well. Now that too many pixels are crammed into too small a sensor these days the images tend to be quite noisy even at low ISO's and then when you come to edit them in photoshop for example things don't work out so well as can be seen in the original posters example where the sharpening really exagerated the noise quite badly. I have found that with these cameras noise reduction in photoshop does virtually nothing, and when you start to fiddle around too much with a noisy image it looks a bit messy. Therefore best to get the result as good as you can in camera.

[Martin]

I am sure a much better job can be done in photoshop than in camera. I just set everything to neutral in the camera (sharpening, saturation, contrast adjustments etc.) and then sort it out in photoshop.

Ditto.

Martin and Guinevere, what programmes do you use to make these pictures? Is this Photoshop? I ask because I only have a very basic programme and I can't possibly cut out a butterfly like this - I have to go round the outline with a mouse. Your images are brilliant and I'd love to be able to do something of that quality.

Guy

I use Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Martin.

[Gwenhwyfar]

That's beautiful, Lisa, and clever!

Thank you Chris, it's very simple to do.
If you can get rid of unwanted areas of your pic and you can do it well with out anyone noticing, I'm fine with that. I understand what you mean though, it's not quite the same.

Lisa, you'll be interested to see this photo I recently found online - it's a natural version of what you tried with PS.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ian-s/359800449/

Hi Alexander - that was a great image you found, and quite unusual.

Martin and Guinevere, what programmes do you use to make these pictures? Is this Photoshop? I ask because I only have a very basic programme and I can't possibly cut out a butterfly like this - I have to go round the outline with a mouse. Your images are brilliant and I'd love to be able to do something of that quality.

Guy

Guy - I use Jasc paint shop pro 9, but Correl have taken the company over.

[George]

I spend hours in front of my PC tweaking my photos - it is true to say though that if the shot is no good in the first place then you probably have no chance of doing anything with it. So I now try to think about each shot I take (RAW) so that post processing is minimal. However I have Corel PSP X1 which I find ok - there are hundreds of bits of software for image manipulation. The two best ones (IMHO) are

SILKYPIX Developer Studio 3.0E (http://www2.isl.co.jp/SILKYPIX/english/ ... reewin.cgi) at $149
and Lightzone (http://www.lightcraft.com) - ful version at £105 and basic at £68

I cannot justify the expense of the Adobe products and these two are very good - I think that Lightzone is the best I have used. Both available as download for a trial period.

As several other people have said though getting the image right in the first place is the point of taking photographs in the first place surely?

[FISHiEE]

I never said I paid for photoshop

I think elements has a lot of the important features though and is quite reasonably priced.

I use Capture one LE to convert my RAW files to TIFF and then take over with photoshop from there. I have downloaded a trial copy of lightroom but not yet installed it.

[Dave McCormick]

For me, especially on insect/animal shots, I don't correct any things like wing damage or any other naturla thing that was captured on the image when it was taken. I may lower the contrast slightly in some pics and increase the saturation slightly or sharpen the image slightly, but on butterfly pics, I don't really do much.

However on landscape/sunset/sunrise pics, I would do much more. Like on a sunset pic, I may increase the saturation and strongness of the colours slightly and so on.

[eccles]

It should be noted that many wildlife competitions, for instance the BBC Countryfile competition, do not allow digital manipulation or retouching of submitted photos. Most will allow simple contrast and brightness adjustments.

[FISHiEE]

Yes very true. In those situations I do little more than dust removal, contrast, saturation etc. and cropping. No cloning other than that.

I have a pic in this years calendar

[Dave Mac]

Photographers have always manipulated their final images. From how they develop the original film to dodging and burning with masks when making the final prints. Nobody criticises Ansel Adams for enhancements he made in the darkroom, although it is said that Henri Cartier Bresson did not even crop his pics.

[Bill S]

I'm very interested in this thread as I usually have a go a trying to improve the out of the camera images but usually end up leaving them as is (apart from cropping), my attempts to improve look too harsh. So I have a couple of questions which spring to mind, I hope someone can find the time to help.

I use a compact camera which saves in JPEG, so my first question is whether you really need to shoot in RAW to perform effective post processing?

Secondly, I use PSP v 7.02 for which there isn't much in the way of web tutor articles, I've seen many more for Photoshop or Lightroom. So would it be worth upgrading to a more commonly used or recent package such as Adobe Lightroom or Elements so I can spend some time learning the craft so to speak? Or would a night school be a good

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Cheers

Bill

[it344x]

Hi everybody,

I take two types of imaging ,

1. astronomical imaging for astrometric and photometric data , and this is not edited at all - the raw data must not be manipulated, and

2. images for fun i.e. astrophotography , family, butterflies etcetc and because they aren't of scientific interest I have no issues with using photoshop/PSP at all to provide a more pleasing effect.

my t'pennywuth

regards
Martin

( http://www.mgnastro.org/wildlife )