Being creative with photoshop

[rtwo]

I am commiting myself to mostly post images where I have kept the integrity of the photo. However, "messing around" in photoshop can be fun, and I'd love to engage in a convesations with people who make significant alterations to their images.

My inital posting is at http://www.pbase.com/rtwo/photoshop

I'd love to hear from you about your ideas.

[ukexpat]

I am commiting myself to mostly post images where I have kept the integrity of the photo. However, "messing around" in photoshop can be fun, and I'd love to engage in a convesations with people who make significant alterations to their images.

My inital posting is at http://www.pbase.com/rtwo/photoshop

I'd love to hear from you about your ideas.

There is more to Photoshop than just "messing around" with images. For some people like me PS is an essential tool in our digital image workflow. I use a Canon 10D and shoot exclusively in RAW format, which records the data directly from the CMOS sensor without any in-camera processing. I use PS to open those images, and to apply necessary color levels corrections and unsharp mask. Occasionally I use the highlight/shadows adjustments and other tweaks. If I just converted the RAW images to TIFF or JPEG without the additional processing, my pics would look terrible.

[rtwo]

Nigel... I've used RAW to some degree ... how is it 'better' than making similar adjustments in PS after loading image into the program?

[castledude]

1) Its compression is non-lossy so you (the artist) get to decide on the compression for the picture.

2) The RAW output has 12 bits (per color/per pixel) of info (or more depending on camera) where the JPEG only has 8. Using Photoshop you can dodge and burn areas back into the 8 bit range of the view to give you more details.

3) Because of the extra bits when you apply levels to compensate a picture the extra bits are pulled up to give you a more natural color pallate.

4) Interpolations (to grow the picture for large blowups) have more info to interpolate with.


If you want to see some extreme examples of this look at a comparison of a 16 bit vs 12 bit picture (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/revie ... ited.shtml) take a look at the shadow and dynamic range stuff.

[ukexpat]

Nigel... I've used RAW to some degree ... how is it 'better' than making similar adjustments in PS after loading image into the program?

What castledude said. To expand, if you use anything other than RAW, the camera is making judgments for you about white balance (if in auto mode), contrast, saturation, sharpening etc, and while the JPEG results can be very good, I prefer having the extra control over the image that the RAW format gives you. Think of it as a digital negative, one that you can manipulate much more than an analogue negative in a darkroom.

RAW does have a couple of drawbacks: it takes time to work on the images, and you cannot print (nor would you want to) a RAW file directly from camera to a printer, but neither of them is a problem for me. I save images as uncompressed TIFF files and print from them, and also save smaller sized JPEGs for e-mail and for posting on PBase.