On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Steve from Mendocino
There has been some interest in before and after comparisons of photo editing so I thought I’d post a simple series taken from my post regarding collaboration with Janie. The first of the two images will be the photo as it comes directly from the camera, altered only to fit the file parameters required by Balloon Juice. The second will be the edited version of the same shot.
These appeared in the 8/24 post titled My Collaboration with JanieM
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
sab
Those are gorgeous.
raven
I used Lightroom for a long time but the management just got too complicated so I just use iPhoto now.
debbie
Being able to pull out all of the detail in that last photograph must have been a happy surprise!
Betty
It is surprising to me as a non-photographer that it makes such a distinct difference. Nicely done.
Wag
Very good! I really appreciate the increase detail in the snow photo, as well as the last photo.
and like Raven, I use Photo for my editing. Seems to work well except you don’t have the ability to isolate edits to specific zones of a photo.
arrieve
Very nicely done. So many photos are overprocessed these days (I plead guilty to falling into that trap myself) and these are done really well. I especially love the sunrise (sunset?) with the trees.
I used to use Photoshop when my company paid for it. Now I use Photoshop Elements, which gives you much of the processing ability (no masking, sadly) at a much more reasonable price.
dnfree
Those are beautiful, and here’s a question. I used to use (free) desktop Picasa after Google bought it. Then after a few years of me running all my photos through its editing and facial identity processing, so I could pull up all the photos that contained my dad, for instance—Google scuttled it. Didn’t sell it to someone else, just killed it.
What I relied on most was their “I feel lucky” editing option. As a rank amateur, I could mess around with the various editing options, but I’d never know whether I had the optimum combination. One click on “I feel lucky” and the picture sharpened up considerably. Color, brightness, contrast, whatever would all be improved.
Do you know of any editing tool that does the equivalent? Thanks. And thanks for sharing what a difference good editing can make.
Steve from Mendocino
@dnfree: I know these capabilities exist, but I’ve never been on the lookout for them because I take a very hands on approach to my edits. Modern IPhones do something like this. When my daughter sends me pictures, they’ve been processed by some option she selects on her phone. If I want a better version of the picture, I ask her to send me the original, unenhanced photo so that I can do a manual edit. I suspect point and shoot camera software offers something similar. Does anyone else know of a quick and easy app that will do auto edits?
dnfree
@Steve from Mendocino: all my newer photos are on my iPhone. But I’ve never tried editing them there. I send the ones I want to keep to my (Windows 10) computer via email.
RaflW
I’ll often play with the pics I take – usually just very mild tweaks to things like black level, saturation, bringing up a few low-light areas. Soft and easy with the silders is, to me, the key. The OP set has that touch.
stinger
Such a difference! But I don’t understand: Does this type of editing make it more like what the photographer saw, because the camera just can’t capture it precisely, or does it enhance the “reality”?
Steve from Mendocino
Cameras “see” images very differently than people. The human brain constantly recalibrates an image by having the eye dart around the subject adjusting for the different levels of lighting hitting different areas of the scene. These days there are apps that can be selected that use AI to automatically adjust the image to compensate for color and lighting problems. With a great deal of practice, more complex platforms such as Lightroom and Photoshop can be used to manually make decisions involving brightness, contrast, color balance, etc. on a localized level so that for example I can increase the color saturation, lighten or darken highlights, mid-tones, and/or shadows in a chosen area of the image. It’s quite complicated, aesthetic judgements are made throughout the process, and “reality” becomes laughable as a concept. The guideline I use is to make the edit look credibly realistic while making it as pleasing and exciting (to my mind) as I possibly can. I’ll let Janie jump in here to give her take. She’s been learning the process herself and we do this together.
JanieM
This is an ongoing learning experience for me. Steve and I had quite a few discussions early on when his editing changed what I thought of as the reality of a picture I had taken, but as time passes and my experience grows, my view of reality has gotten much more complex and nuanced.
With the last picture in this set, the edited version is much closer than the camera’s original to what I saw when I took the picture. As Steve said in his intro to our collaboration, the camera just can’t handle the extremes of light and darkness all at the same time (there are tricky ways of attempting it, but I prefer to keep it simple). The editing process let him bring the extremes closer to what I had been seeing.
But that isn’t always the case — sometimes the edited versions are quite different from either the original or what I think I saw, and yet they are much more beautiful, so I have had to ask myself: am I merely a recording secretary (with tools — in the form of my eyes and a camera — that are imperfect in any case), or am I trying to make something lovely and memorable? Often these days I am thinking, even as I look into the camera, of what Steve’s editing skill can bring to the shot later on.
Also, it’s also one thing to ask whether either the camera’s product or the edited version is closer to what the photographer saw, and another to ask about reality. This optical illusion is a great reminder that the human eye isn’t seeing “reality” either. (Whatever that is.
ETA: Yes, I am learning to use Lightroom and Photoshop. Long way to go….but fun!
stinger
@Steve from Mendocino: @JanieM: Thank you both! (And of course I put “reality” in quotes.)
JanieM
@stinger: Heh. I was going to put “reality” in quotes too, but it got kind of cluttered-looking. I think we were talking about the same thing, whatever it may be.