Comments on: Poll Results — Do You Retouch Or Manipulate Your Photographs Digitally?

By: Paul Perano

Paul Perano — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:53:37 +0000

While improving my skills in Photoshop would be nice, my aim is to improve my photography skills. That wont happen being stuck behind a PC more than behind a camera.

Why take a few minutes to take a picture or two and then spend ten or twenty times that to fix the silly things you were too lazy to get right when you took them.

I am trying to get to the point where I can see the image I want and not have to strain my poor aging greymatter to achieve it behind the lens. I doubt any of us really get there, but its the journey that is the fun part.

By: Shivanand Sharma

Shivanand Sharma — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:40:57 +0000

Paul: That’s an interesting and effective approach to post-production. At times I’ve seen myself get carried away by Photoshop into experiments. I believe the more you pay attention to these things while shooting the less you have to mess with Photoshop other than the basics like sharpness etc.

By: Paul Perano

Paul Perano — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:47:53 +0000

I do a few tweaks to my images. Check levels, crop, touch up the sharpness, sometimes the saturation and/or contrast. I try to keep these changes to a minimum.
I may come back from a shoot with 50, 80 or even a hundred images. I will cull them down to a handful and work on them. This is often a matter of time as I don’t want to spend more time behind a keyboard than the camera. I’m behind a keyboard all week at work and thats more than enough for me! However I do archive them all. The good, the bad and the ugly.

On the odd ocasion I may play with an image to see what I can do with. I have used an IR plugin to see how it may look as an IR image and that can be fun to play with. Or I may experiment with other effects to learn a bit more about Photoshop.