Preparing photos for a gallery

magnadoodle

Hello everyone. Here's a question that's been bothering me for ages: how to retouch/adjust photos. I think i always feel there's a 'right' way to do it, but having looked at many many photos, it's clear so much of it is down to personal opinion. in fact, i've seen images in galleries that i thought had had too much contrast added etc, but that's how the photographer wanted them.

i'm now preparing some images to be sold in a gallery and i've been told i ought to adjust the contrast etc on some of them. the question i have is - how? (i use photoshop 7 and have CS2) are there some limits that i can apply to the photos generally and then they will be ok? some generic process? i went looking for a book yesterday, but all the books are incredibly detailed. i just want to broadly adjust contrast, levels, etc so the images look right.

i'm struggling with this - please help!

Sam

I read this, and went away, only to return. The question is so open ended it's almost impossible to answer.

First I must ask, what type of photos are we dealing with?Landscape, people, still life, journalistic?

Second what types of gallery? Is this a classic high end fine art gallery, or a cooperative craft store?

How are these being framed?

There isn't any one way to process an image. It's all subjective. One image may take minutes, another hours.

I think what your asking for is a short list of some fairly basic editing tools you can apply on a global basis.

Maybe an easier way would be to post an image or two, and tell us what you think needs to be done. The more experienced can look, evaluate, make changes, repost the processed image, and tell what tools they used.

Sam

Pupator

If these images are just for you, for a personal website for friends and family, I'd suggest either:

1) Get Paint Shop Pro Photo X2. You can usually get it for between $50-100, it can do almost everything photoshop can do, and certainly everything you'll need to be able to do. It has a "one step photo fix" button that is quite good. You can use it on most of your pictures while you learn to make adjustments manually and get a feel for what does and doesn't work.

2) Get I2E Image Editor. You'll find a really great deal on it in the "Flea Market" section of this site. It can do a batch of photos in minutes and, with some help tweaking settings, will produce generally wonderful pictures. It's the same kind of fix you get when you order prints from Smugmug and choose "auto" color.

There's a lot to learn about editing pictures - layers, histograms, cloning. I've learned how to do much of it in PSP, but it's nice to have the "auto" features from either program when you just want things to look better quickly.

magnadoodle

Hi Sam, thanks for coming back. i know it is broad, mainly because there are a wide range of photos involved. to be honest, the main problem i have is with colour photos - i often find some areas are dark, some are light. the colour is a problem.

>I think what your asking for is a short list of some fairly basic editing tools you can apply on a global basis.

that is what i was asking, yes. i mean something like, the colour range should fall between x and y. over at smugmug they did something similar in terms of colour tones and it worked pretty well for me - just give me a good range.

just had another thought...will post separately...

thanks again

Sam wrote:

I read this, and went away, only to return. The question is so open ended it's almost impossible to answer.

First I must ask, what type of photos are we dealing with?Landscape, people, still life, journalistic?

Second what types of gallery? Is this a classic high end fine art gallery, or a cooperative craft store?

How are these being framed?

There isn't any one way to process an image. It's all subjective. One image may take minutes, another hours.

I think what your asking for is a short list of some fairly basic editing tools you can apply on a global basis.

Maybe an easier way would be to post an image or two, and tell us what you think needs to be done. The more experienced can look, evaluate, make changes, repost the processed image, and tell what tools they used.

Sam