Post Processing

Over on Digital Photography School there’s an article today called “How Post-Processing Helped Me Become a Better Photographer“. In it Neil Creek talks about how he sees post-processing as an essential step in “developing” your digital photos and how it has helped him learn to take better photos in the first place.

There’s always a debate raging about whether or not post-processing in something like Photoshop is cheating or not. As someone that used to develop film I know that many of the things you can do in Photoshop, such as burning in, dodging, spot removal and even, if you’re technical minded enough, manipulation of the image itself are all possible when printing a negative. As such I’m firmly on the side that its not cheating.

Based on the DPS article, and the before/after examples Neil shows, I thought I’d present below a before/after of one of my shots from my recent trip to Lebanon.

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Print Techniques for the Digital Photographer

I’ve shot on both film – where I used to develop my own black and white prints – and now shoot on digital. With film, you had to at least develop your negatives, and usually enlarge and print them in order to see the final result. However with digital photography huge volumes of images lurk as ones and zeroes on your hard drive are its now rare they get printed.

I mention this as Craft & Vision have a new book out: “Making the Print – Printing Techniques for the Digital Photographer” by Martin Bailey. Although I’ve printed and display several of my shots around my home (in the UK I use the excellent Print Space to output them) I’m no expert on print. Martin’s book however covers almost everything you need to know from buying a printer through to colour profiles and paper choices.

To begin with Martin talks about the different options available for printers and what to look for with regards to number of colours used to produce your print. He then progresses to preparing your image for printing and whether or not to let the printer or the software you are using manage the colour. After all that he covers techniques on some simple edits, such as adding borders, to improve your prints.

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Photos from Lebanon

I’m happy to report my photos from Lebanon are finally now live.

You can view the gallery over on importedlight.com.

I’ve also booked my next two trips. The first to Chile, Bolivia and Peru (where I’m in the high Atacama and need to be careful of altitude sickness) and the second to Iceland to see the Northern Lights (hopefully).

Pigeon Rock

Still going through my shots from Lebanon! The photo above is of Pigeon Rock – a natural formation just of the coast of the Raouché district in Beirut. Quite a popular destination for locals and tourists to take photos and it apparently featured recently on the cover of the Microsoft search engine Bing.

A Moment to Read

105mm f/4.0 1/500sec ISO 100

I’ve never been on a trip where so many people had Kindles. eReaders have definitely entered the mainstream! This was shot on a recent trip to Lebanon. Our minibus got a flat tire as we wound our way up into the mountains to view the cedar reserve. Whilst we waited for our (excellent) driver to fix the wheel some took a few moments to catch up on their reading.

I got the flu upon returning so haven’t got as far with processing my photos as I’d hope but I’ll post the odd shot here until the gallery is ready.