Comments on: Anatomy of a photo edit: Ready in 3 minutes

By: Photodoto » Blog Archive » Anatomy of a photo edit: Our love is all of God’s money

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 08:10:44 +0000

[...] I think that post-processing is an integral part of photography whether you are processing your own black and white prints in a smelly darkroom or using Photoshop. As my abilities as a photographer have improved over the years, I’ve found it more and more likely that I will shoot a photo with a particular final look in mind. That was the case when I shot this photo recently so I thought I’d share my editing process with you. If you like this article, you may also like my previous Anatomy of a photo edit: Ready in 3 minutes. [...]

By: John Watson

John Watson — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 05:29:27 +0000

For this I think I used Raw Shooter and Paint Shop Pro. But these days I’m using LightZone and GIMP.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 02:15:45 +0000

John – I love your photos! What editing program do you use?

By: Nancy

Nancy — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 19:09:33 +0000

If you want to save time, you can use the data that the histogram in your lcd screen provides you, then you can make these correction prior picture taking! I found this instructive video that shows well how to use it, take a look :)

By: Timothy Gray

Timothy Gray — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:00:14 +0000

Great Shot! I find it very interesting you started with Levels and THEN used Curves, especially for a color photo. The overall effect looks like it proved successful.

By: John Watson

John Watson — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:09:03 +0000

The lights and sunset are very bright so I wanted a relatively fast shutter speed, even though it was getting dark, so that they weren’t blown out. At that time of day especially, a faster shutter speed gives the sky a really nice saturated color instead of tending towards being washed out. Point your camera towards the bright part of the sky (don’t look directly at the sun even through your viewfinder) and check out how fast of a shutter speed your camera wants to use even at sunset.

Switching to aperture priority in this situation would have allowed the camera to choose a longer shutter speed (probably in the 1/50s range) that would have exposed the booth better at the expense of blowing out the lights and possibly parts of the marquee. At 1/200s in shutter-priority, the camera can only set the aperture which was already maxed out wide open.

By: luminouslens

luminouslens — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 21:37:07 +0000

I really like this photo! It’s kind of funny and touching at the same time, and I really like how your adjustments make the final image look a little punchier, kind of like the Polaraid-esque photo that probably is produced from that booth!

But I have a question… I’m not sure I understand how setting the camera to 1/200 helped you to “to capture the lights of the fair and the colors of the sunset”. Can you explain? I was thinking you meant that you wanted a relatively fast shutter speed and that maybe the ferris wheel in the background had been moving, but then you said that you thought you should have “switched to aperture priority to let the camera slow down the shutter speed”, so I’m confused!

Also, I don’t know if you’ve played around with Selective Color (or at least, I don’t remember if you’ve written about it here), but you might enjoy that as a way of separately saturating (or otherwise adjusting) colors, so that you wouldn’t have to be so careful about the reds.

By: Kristi aka Fiber Fool

Kristi aka Fiber Fool — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 19:32:44 +0000

Thanks so much for that! I know I have my own techniques, but it is wonderful to get a peak behind someone else’s. It increases the editing arsenal :-)

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 13:31:03 +0000

That’s a great editing job, really makes you notice more then you would in the original. Great work!