Table With A Window

[Todd Suttles]

Thanks for the candor Brandt. I will confess that none of those questions were asked when I shot it. But I am learning thanks to all you guys and your feedback. I enjoyed looking at your site. Nice.  -t

[Todd Suttles]

Thanks for your input Amolitor. That simple move would have changed everything that could and should have been changed in this photo. I enjoyed your blog and have added it to my read list. Your posting on January 1 sums up completely in better terms than I have been able to articulate my biggest hurdle right now:
"Most pictures are made today with a focus almost entirely on rendering. We worry about the lighting, the model's pose, the way the background looks. We worry about how to photoshop bad things out, and good things in. We worry about how to accomplish some visual effect or another." http://photothunk.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-process.html . Somewhere along the way I shifted some of the priority from taking a good photograph up front, to "making" good processing on a photo.

[Todd Suttles]

Never let someone else worry about what you create.

While I agree with Russ that the moment of tripping the shutter is important, a shitty print can make an image look like...well, like shit. Shitty processing is fine for street shooters, they really don't care how the tones look. From what I have seen that you've posted here, you seem to like landscape. I'm sure Russ will groan but if you haven't read Adams' books the Camera, the Negative and the Print, do so. It will give you insight into the importance of processing, be it wet or "dry."

Thanks Ed B- I will re-visit the book to see if it helps me clarify my thinking.

[Todd Suttles]

In post-processing, unless you were shooting at high ISO you almost always need a bit of sharpening. Sometimes you need to extend the tone curve a bit, and sometimes, if you had a difficult lighting situation you need to do a bit of color correction. But if you need to do more than that: crop, mess with the exposure, etc., you screwed up, and what you end up with is always going to be less than optimal.

Thanks Russ. Hard standards but true. That is the part of all this that I enjoy, not to imply I hit that mark often; more so in the past with film than now.

[Todd Suttles]

Don't do it Todd!  See above.  You are making very rapid progress at getting good at processing... just go back and look at some of your early efforts you posted here versus what you are doing now.

Ed- Thanks for the encouragement. I appreciate! -t

[cjogo]

Thanks Russ. Hard standards but true. That is the part of all this that I enjoy, not to imply I hit that mark often; more so in the past with film than now.

I rarely shoot with my digital. ( Just portraiture ) 

 Have years of negs to scan. Also I am coming from a world of little post processing.  Film and the Zone System ( and Ansels books ) just made everything easier for the final print. 

Many now shoot and think " I will fix that in Photoshop "   Totally different world ....

[Ed B]

I grew up on Adams's books, Ed. In film days I did a lot of Adams-type shooting with a 4 x 5 view camera. I was way into the zone system. Sometimes I even modified my developer chemistry in accordance with the stuff in Ansel's books.

But, bottom line: what matters is subject and technique. Capture technique; not post-processing technique. If what you're shooting is crap, if your exposure is off, or if your composition is lousy, you can do all the frantic post-processing you want to do and it won't help. I ROTFL when I read somebody supposedly "teaching" photography (an impossibility on the face of it) tell his readers that you should go out and shoot and if you examine the result you can find many pictures within the shot. If you can do that, you're screwed. You blew it. You didn't know what you were doing. I have a friend who enjoys working on his pictures on his computer a lot more than he enjoys shooting the pictures in the first place. He does things like making people smile who weren't smiling, opening eyes that were closed., etc. He sometimes can fool the ignorant, but anybody with eyes to see can detect the fakery.

In post-processing, unless you were shooting at high ISO you almost always need a bit of sharpening. Sometimes you need to extend the tone curve a bit, and sometimes, if you had a difficult lighting situation you need to do a bit of color correction. But if you need to do more than that: crop, mess with the exposure, etc., you screwed up, and what you end up with is always going to be less than optimal.

There are exceptions. Ansel's Moonrise Over Hernandez is an example. When he made that shot he knew exactly what he was after, but the lighting conditions could only give him the framework of what he later had to bring out in the darkroom. Nonetheless, his framing and exposure, even though he had to guess at the exposure, were good. If they hadn't been, if Ansel hadn't had an artist's eye, Moonrise never would have seen the light of day.

I don't disagree that capture is important and I did agree with you on that point in my previous post. And I also agree that no amount of processing is going to make a shitty photograph good. However, the right processing can make a good image better, dare I say magical. Adams' images may have been well composed and exposed but without his processing skill I don't think they would have been magical. His exposures were tied to his processing, developing the negs was just the first step in processing that got him closer to what he wanted reflected in his prints.

I'm not as rigid as you when it comes to cropping but it is something I strive to avoid. I'm not opposed to small crops if it is unavoidable during capture but when it comes to large crops, I agree that the image was missed during capture. Relying on cropping to improve an image is poor technique.

As someone who loves B&W (especially landscape) I believe that capture and processing are forever tied together. One without the other makes it incomplete, imho. I see many images on the web that have great compositions but a lot of them are poorly processed, be it flat, too much contrast, overzealous vignetting, and a myriad of other problems. I'm not sure about you but I wouldn't hang something like that on my wall.

[cjogo]

"In post-processing, unless you were shooting at high ISO you almost always need a bit of sharpening"

Why is this ??  Many of us have fought with Canon -- for years.  Sending lenses back and forth -- calibrating bodies to lens... etc.  Did technology move too fast in the digital world ??

 I still hand focus every shot > just never have trusted the auto system of today's DSLR .  With a SLR on a tripod -- manual focused -- there was no post sharping ??

[RSL]

Forgotten your name, cjogo, but hi, cjogo,

If you're going to switch from film to digital you need to do your homework. The need for minimal sharpening has nothing to do with the steadiness of the camera or accuracy of focus. For starters, check Jeff Schewe's PDF piece you can find at: http://www.pixelgenius.com/tips/schewe-sharpening.pdf. There's plenty more out there on the subject, and there are some good books. I'd even recommend Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom. It's from 2009 and incorporated a bunch of wisdom from Bruce Fraser as well as from Jeff. The book's a bit long-in-the-tooth now, but still an important read.

The reason I excluded high-iso images is that at high iso there may be enough noise that you don't want to emphasize it by sharpening. You still may need a bit of capture sharpening, though.

Oh, and there never was post sharpening with film unless you were going to do the unsharp mask thing.

[cjogo]

Forgotten your name, cjogo, but hi, cjogo,

If you're going to switch from film to digital you need to do your homework. The need for minimal sharpening has nothing to do with the steadiness of the camera or accuracy of focus. For starters, check Jeff Schewe's PDF piece you can find at: http://www.pixelgenius.com/tips/schewe-sharpening.pdf. There's plenty more out there on the subject, and there are some good books. I'd even recommend Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom. It's from 2009 and incorporated a bunch of wisdom from Bruce Fraser as well as from Jeff. The book's a bit long-in-the-tooth now, but still an important read.

The reason I excluded high-iso images is that at high iso there may be enough noise that you don't want to emphasize it by sharpening. You still may need a bit of capture sharpening, though.

Oh, and there never was post sharpening with film unless you were going to do the unsharp mask thing.

 Switched over a long time back -- been using digital since the Canon 20d days.   Still did not understand the digital capture chip -- and why we were not getting sharp images.  Kept sending our lens to Canon Pro -- and they would send us new ones.....must have been an alignment coupling of the lens to body. Even after manual focusing -- just was not tack sharp ?? And we do this commercially -- just unacceptable.  

 You just have to handpick your lens and do a lot of research > ( stay away from the 17-40mm ;-[ ) Went through 4 of those...

Still rarely move above ISO 500 -- just not a noise guy...

Use a combination of Smart Sharpen ...for images these days.

[amolitor]

Something to keep in mind that with virtually all sensor chips in use today, there is a Bayer Array to produce color information. This method quite explicitly trades resolution for color information.

The result is that when you pixel-peep, you ALWAYS have more pixels lying around than there is resolution in the final picture. It will ALWAYS "look blurry" if you dig in far enough. The Bayer Array trades roughly half of your sensor's resolution for color information, so your 24 megapixel sensor produces, roughly, 12 megapixels of color picture. This is invariably delivered to you in the form of a 24 megapixel file.

This is a good thing, for the camera makers, because it keeps the gear-heads strapped to the wheel. They'll continually pixel-peep, buy better glass, buy a new body, buy, buy, buy, chasing a chimera that is mathematically impossible. And thank goodness, those guys fund the R&D that builds the gear I want!

The exceptions are b&w sensors and the Foveon design from Sigma, as far as I know, and those are pretty thin on the ground.

[cjogo]

I don't know -- like a analog camera with a simple lens -- no brainer -- just pick it up --focus and its sharp.  You'd think the tech guys could reproduce that simpleness :-) 

Well sent back enough lenses and complained to Canon enough .. found the smaller sensors to work better ..especially edge to edge sharpness.   60d with 17-50mm 2.8 for 90 % of my work --shoot between  f6.7 and 13.5 delivers a decent image ...

[RSL]

Gelatin-silver has its own built-in softness, just like digital has. At least in digital you can do something about it.