Love of post processing
rutt
Registered Users Posts: 6,511 Major grins
I love post processing. I loved the darkroom when I was in high school and college. Now I love photoshop. But I also totally agree with this statement of Gus about the images. Garbage in, garbage out. Nothing is more fun for me than working on a great picture. I've invested a lot in learning this stuff. I'm a nerd and I like understanding technical things down to a very deep level. It's not for everyone and I have a lot of sympathy for people who don't want to know. I used to help Ginger a lot and it made me feel really good when I could help her get what she was after.
I am a professional programmer and went to grad school in computer science 30 years ago. I've always worked on cpu design, compilers, and performance. Now I wish I'd worked on graphics and computational photography. What I'd really love to do is figure out some way for people who are just interested in taking nice pictures to be able to get the kind of results Dan Margulis can get just by pushing a button. A sort of super I2E. It's proven to be an elusive goal. The more I learned about what the guys like Dan can do, the more I realized how hard it would be to automate.
There is room in the world for both darkroom rats and pure photographers. They might even have the same goals and standards for the end product.
I am a professional programmer and went to grad school in computer science 30 years ago. I've always worked on cpu design, compilers, and performance. Now I wish I'd worked on graphics and computational photography. What I'd really love to do is figure out some way for people who are just interested in taking nice pictures to be able to get the kind of results Dan Margulis can get just by pushing a button. A sort of super I2E. It's proven to be an elusive goal. The more I learned about what the guys like Dan can do, the more I realized how hard it would be to automate.
There is room in the world for both darkroom rats and pure photographers. They might even have the same goals and standards for the end product.
If not now, when?
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As my avatar says, I am very new to dgrin, and I just went in search of the Ginger of whom you spoke.
What I found was a wonderful photographic legacy of a person who meant a lot to many, many people in the "family" which I am now finding Smugmug/Dgrin to be.
My condolences to all her friends and family.
Cathie
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If at first you don't succeed - you're doing about average!
I spent about the same amount of time in computer operating systems and performance. We never figured out how to make interacting with a comuter as simple as pushing a button, either, although it has certainly improved over time. The world (and the people in it who take pictures, use computers, etc.) continually confound. In both cases (getting nice pictures and interacting with computers), the problem is seriously hard.
I'm not a photographer.
I'm not an artist.
It's the journey, not the destination.
Regards,
Michael
Graphics23 - Design, Illustration, Restoration & Retouching
What's a Pirate's favorite color mode? Arrrr, G, B!
Cool post!
It's amazing to take a look at how similar, and yet how different, we are.
Professionally, I have more or less the same background as you: professional coder, been through grad school... only I got my masters degree this year, instead of 30 years ago or more. But more or less the same work background (amount of experience aside): computer architecture and low level software stuff. Nerd at heart, pretty much the same as you.
Now the differences... I started learning Photoshop in 2003, with PS 7, and I think it's so cool... However, I certainly don't do as much post as you do. I like learning new tricks, like lots of neat stuff from the LAB book by Dan Margulis, but I actually spend little time in post: I usually convert the RAW and get, say, 50-80% of my final image just doing that. Then it's curves (mostly LAB but sometimes RGB too, but nothing too fancy), sharpening, HIRALOAM and that's pretty much it. Around 99% of the enchantments I use most of the time.
So I keep it simple. I guess I don't experiment too much because I find my results acceptable most of the time. And most of all, I'm more trying to figure out what to do with the camera in hand. I'm guessing the more I know where I want to take my photography, the more I'll want to go deeper into new post processing stuff to strenghten the results. Which, I assume, is pretty much where you're at.
And oh, every once in a while I too have a desire to work in digital image processing... but my goal wouldn't be so much this holy grail of automated processing... I'd rather work on the basic tools, providing better tools for people to do better post processing manually. It's also a lot more reachable.
If I had more time, I'd work on some of these: noise reduction, demosaicing, sharpening and detail enhancement, high-quality upsizing and interpolation, segmentation/background extraction... just to quote the lower level stuff, which would require research on algorithms and so forth.
There's also a lot of work to be done in simple areas, similar to what the Adobe guys did with the ACR 4.1 improvements (clarity/sharpening mask sliders). I think ACR, PS and Lightroom still have loads of room for improvements, no matter how good they already are.
Anyways... cool post for the nerds like us!
Take care!
-- thiago
I had a B&W and Cibachrome darkroom for several years when I was shooting underwater shots 25 years ago. So I have may have a bit of darkroom rat in me also, John. For me it was always with a goal in mind - much better image quality than I could get from local labs, and at a cheaper price too.
The same is still true for Photoshop - better quality, if not a cheaper price anymore. For me, understanding Photoshop is one of the keys to much better images. There are no commercial images to be seen any longer that have not been edited somewhere, somehow in Photoshop or a similar program. Not that Photoshop is a replacement for good photography - it most certainly is not. But it is necessary to make very good images even better.
But there are a lot of shooters who are satisfied with out of the camera jpgs - that seems to be all they want or need. They seem not interested in what can be done to improve an image - maybe they just do not see the difference??
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
That's why they make chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.
And hopefully you will continue to educate the rest of us, who need prodded to improve our skills and our images.
This is the Finshing School - Post-Processing is what this thread is all about
A second rambling thought occurred to me.........
Is the builder of a prefab home less important than a builder of the Taj Mahal? (This is a Zen question!!) Event shooters are driven by a need for speed as the value of their work drops greatly with time after the event. So for them, post processing does not add value, but may diminish it if it delays the delivery of their work. PreFAb versus Fine architecture, but everybody needs a warm place to lay their head down at night, so there is value in all hard work that is well done.
As my uncle who was a farmer used to say about his dirty hands, "It's honest dirt, I worked hard for it!"
But if you have the time and the inclination, post processing can add great value to an image. That is one advantage that the amateur has over the pro, he/she has more time to devote to a single image if he/she so desires.
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
My background is related. In high school, I had my own B&W darkroom in the laundry room at home. I even made my own film and camera once for a science project at school (mixing raw chemicals from scratch, buying silver, etc...). I've always enjoyed the fact that photography is a mix of science and technical understanding blended with artistic skill and judgement. I'm stronger on the science side of things, but happy to have a place to practice the artistic side where my technical understanding can help. In fact, my post processing skills are held back more by knowing when a result is good than by knowing how to achieve any particular result. In other words, I know more about how to manipulate the tools than I know when I've achieved a good result.
I actually have an engineering degree, worked with lasers for a number of years out of school, then drifted into software as part of my engineering work and found software was my real home - much more satisfying than the engineering work. What attracted me the most to software was that a great software engineer could literally be 10 times more productive than an average software engineer. The ratio just wasn't nearly that high in my engineering field. I spent a number of years in software, self-employed for 7 years, then a series of Silicon Valley startup companies all in software related stuff (some successful, some not). Now, I've been out of real coding for awhile (yep, I've been management overhead for quite a few years now), but I'm still passionate about making great software products. I get peeved when I see crummy software and I study with admiration when I see great software. There are fewer and fewer examples of great software every year.
I started post processing with several versions of Elements, then graduated to CS2 and now CS3. All along in my post processing experience, I've been so dumbfounded by how unoptimized for photographers the whole Photoshop line is. Even Elements is pretty crummy for beginners. It's got these multiple modes of editors, terrible file handling and just way more complication than is needed for the job at hand. You could break down what most people need to do to an image in Elements into 10-20 operations and you will not find Elements optimized around most of these things. It very much looks like somebody started with the Photoshop Engine and said how can we put a prettier face on this rather than starting with what a beginning digital photographer needs to be able to do and building around that.
Lightroom is at least taking a from-sratch look at what to do for photographers, but it is still far, far from what is really needed and the whole import/export thing is not that easy to keep from messing up if you don't really know how it works and always know what to do. I could not imagine my wife using Lightroom for her photos.
I've learned Photoshop pretty well in the past couple of years, but I'm amazed at how complex it is to do what should be relatively straightforward things. Just to tweak a skin-tone to be an appropriate in-range value requires a pretty complex understanding of CMYK tonal values and curves. You can't even really do the "by the CMYK numbers" in Lightroom or ACR. I love testing my skill on various images that other people post and then trying to share techniques so they can learn themselves. I find these are very good ways for me to continue to learn and practice.
And lately, I've done some restoration projects from old prints my wife had. I printed an 8x10 out of a scan of a 2x3 significantly damaged and old print that came out spectacularly.
Out of all this, it sure seems like post processing software is just barely entering the ice age in terms of maturity and it could do so so much more than it does with so much less effort and available to so much more of the population than today's tools. But, at the same time, with the bar being set by built-in RAW processors, lots of workflow tools and the massive tool set of Photoshop CS3, it's hard to figure out how a newcomer could ever enter that market, even if they had something truly innovative to offer to a class of post processing photographers.
I've probably been rambling here so I'll return you back to your regularly scheduled programming now...
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From what I've seen, I like LightZone for a complete rethink of the process. I watched Fabio, its father, process some of my ballet shots and he got competitive results without kinds of low level stuff I do. It's not for beginners, but real old fashioned hard core darkroom (the real kind) rats, particularly ones who have read Ansel Adams' darkroom books, will be very comfortable with it. I've been recommending it to people, particularly those with some formal darkroom training. It's still not the holy grail I imagined when I got started with digital post processing; it takes skill, just different skill.
I like knowing how thing actually work deep inside and that's been a good thing about Dan's approach to Photoshop. He doesn't like to use tools unless he can really understand them in terms of older tools. LightZone is too far away from the underlying mechanics for me now. If I were starting from scratch, I'd consider it pretty seriously.
I have to admit that I'm pretty mystified by LightRoom. As I said about the ice cream flavors...
Hooray!
I am generally caught between doing mostly event-type shooting that between the volume of images and time constraints doesn't allow me to play with them much. Fortunately I'm getting enough skill to get the images right out of the camera with minimal to no post. However, I do like to slow down and try to optimize some shots. I have a few pano sets and HDR sets waiting for me to have time to play with them.
Having read Ansel Adams' books, and I *think* getting what he's doing with the Zone System, I do like what Lightzone is doing.
http://www.chrislaudermilkphoto.com/
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
I was director of operations for an international telecommunications company (which shall remain nameless, that being one of the conditions pursuant to my "leaving") before I switched careers and became a prepress technician.
Even though I took a serious pay cut I've never looked back. I enjoy this type of work far more then my previous duties.
Coincidence? Who's to say...
Michael
Graphics23 - Design, Illustration, Restoration & Retouching
What's a Pirate's favorite color mode? Arrrr, G, B!