Amen, Brother George amen.
[email protected] wrote:
Message: 2 Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2012 11:38:10 -0500 From: George Sinos<[email protected]> To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List<[email protected]> Subject: PESO - Before and After - "Get it Right in the Camera" Message-ID: <CAHd=7rdk0adqaewhbycf4gptr5x235+kkjxyynkdpnqypgt...@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Slavishly adhering to the advice of getting it right in the camera can limit your ability to create the image you really want. The before and after images are here <http://www.georgesphotos.net/Photography/altar-before-after/25399372_vjTgds> The "after" image is what I see, in my mind's eye, when I think of this statue at St. Bridget's church. When I took the photograph I found it was impossible to capture in the camera what I had visualized. You often hear the advice "get the image right in the camera" and don't depend on "fixing it later in Photoshop." But it's not always possible. In this case, "getting it right in the camera" means capture an image that will work within the capabilities of the processing tools. It isn't possible to capture the stature and the window in the relationship that I see in my mind, with the window out of focus. There are walls, a marble altar and other physical restrictions in the way. It's just not possible to stand where you would need to stand to use the focal length lens necessary to make that shot. The "before" photo is a close as I could get. I took several shots at various exposures anticipating an HDR combination. In the end, I was able to use only this single exposure. Here's what I had to do to get the "after" shot. Starting in Lightroom, I fixed the basic exposure. Moving to Photoshop CS6, I used the Adaptive Wide Angle tool to bring the window to vertical. The window was still too far away from the statue, so I used the Content-Aware Scale tool to move it closer. After using Crop tool to set the aspect ratio, a very small portion of the lower left corner was blank. That was due to the two previous adjustments. I used the Content Aware Fill tool to fix that. The match isn't 100% accurate, but it doesn't show because of the next step. The Blur tool put the window out of focus to help keep attention on the statue. At this point the photo was moved back to Lightroom 4 where the exposure was fine-tuned, a few hot spots were darkened with the adjustment brush and a small vignette was added. I feel this image needs more work. I may go back and re-shoot the image now that I know what the processing steps can do. With a slightly different starting image I may be able to get a final result closer to the image I see in my mind. The final image may not be notable to anyone but me. That's not important because I'm the only customer for this photo. The point of this rambling comment is that photography is a process. The camera and your post processing software are both part of that process. The two must be used in balance to produce the images you see in your mind. Using one without understanding the other can severely limit your creativity. gs George Sinos -------------------- [email protected] www.georgesphotos.net plus.georgesinos.com
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