Landscape/cityscape PP question

lizzard_nyc

I want to try and enter the cityscape mini challenge.
Unfortunately my P.C. is kaput and I'm working off my laptop which is so old I almost have to manually crank it to get it started. It runs slow as molasses and would probably just melt if I installed any kind of photoshop programs.

I have very limited PP available on my Masters 2 program, which came with my Olympus E620.

I'm getting to the question--

How important is PP work to landscape photography?

I've seen many of the shots taken in the landscape forum, and YAOZA!!!, they are unbelievable--but I think the majority of them have quite a bit of PP work no?

CWSkopec

lizzard_nyc wrote:

How important is PP work to landscape photography?

It depends... on everything.

If you're shooting jpgs and you like the way they came out of the camera, done.

If you're shooting raw, you're going to have to do at least a little and then it gets harder to answer after that. Some examples to help illustrate why:

1| This one had very minimal pp done to it. Some sharpening, contrast & minor color tweaks and it was done because I really liked the way it looked almost straight out of the camera


2| This one, I wasn't too impressed with SOOC, and there's really been some extensive PP work to it. A number of factors contributed to it, but I just didn't capture the image the way I wanted to when I was on location, but luckily there was enough latitude in the raw file to craft it into the image I wanted.


As for the mini-challenges, I say go for it!
They're really just for fun, bragging rights and a little bit o' learning!

Disclaimer - I'm no expert, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt, but hopefully I was somewhat helpful!

lizzard_nyc

CWSkopec wrote:

It depends... on everything.
GET OUT!!! I can't believe that first shot has minimal PP, that's crazy.

Hmmm ok so I will see if I can't get a shot to enter into cityscape, I've seen some of the possible entries and I pretty much have a snowball's chance in hell (those guys in the Landscapes forum blow me away), but I need to get my feet wet--if I manage to get a shot, it will be my first challenge entry.

I will shoot it in JPEG then, since I will only be able to do minimal tweaking. Hope Mahesh doesn't take off points for JPEG , I know he has a fondness for RAW.

Thanks so much for the reply--I really dig your first shot.

CWSkopec

lizzard_nyc wrote:

CWSkopec wrote:

It depends... on everything.
GET OUT!!! I can't believe that first shot has minimal PP, that's crazy.

Hmmm ok so I will see if I can't get a shot to enter into cityscape, I've seen some of the possible entries and I pretty much have a snowball's chance in hell (those guys in the Landscapes forum blow me away), but I need to get my feet wet--if I manage to get a shot, it will be my first challenge entry.

I will shoot it in JPEG then, since I will only be able to do minimal tweaking. Hope Mahesh doesn't take off points for JPEG , I know he has a fondness for RAW.

Thanks so much for the reply--I really dig your first shot.

Thanks Liz!
That first one was actually a "happy accident" while experimenting. I had just learned that my camera had Long Exposure Noise Reduction so I set out for some long exposures. I tried this image numerous times at various exposure lengths and this image almost nailed what I wanted (about 7 minute exposure, 2 hours or so after sunset) so since I had nearly nailed it, it didn't require too much PP.

So if you nail the exposure, you're not going to need to do too much in post, but like I said about the second one, I didn't capture what I wanted, so I had to craft it in post which is where the raws really come in handy. I would have probably had to scrap that image if I had shot it as a jpg.