Alright, /p/. I got my first nice camera JUST IN TIME for a 2-week vacation where I shot over 14,000 photos in various levels of motion, light, and subject type. Throughout my trip I experimented a lot and really started to internalize the exposure triangle to the point where I'm perfectly comfortable shooting manual without any confusion or issues.At this point, I feel like I've learned enough that I just need to practice practice practice, but I have almost zero experience with post-processing photos. I have over a decade of casual experience with Adobe programs, so I'm at least familiar with image stuff, but it was mostly UX design and motion graphics. I'm a bit colorblind, so I fear I'll never be able to do any decent color grading, but I'd really like to start dipping my toes into post-processing photos so I can start shooting in super low light, and generally just touching up my favorite shots.What tips do you have for a beginner here? What software, workflow, techniques, etc. do you use, and what things should you always do, or avoid doing in post?
>>4475496Dont overdo it.
>>4475496>I'm a bit colorblindHonestly I am the kind of faggot that would recommend that you try darktable or rawtherapee. But in this specific case, stick to LR. Or even better if you can, Capture One. In your case its even more important that you don't go full retard with the saturation slider, lots of beginners love to crank that shit and end with rockwellian nightmares.
build yourself a little "look" database of various photos you like, compare your results often.
>>4475513Genuinely some of the best general advice someone could give to anyone learning image processing -- Thankfully I've had plenty of time to get filters out of my system from my initial excitement just applying stuff from the filter gallery to everything with reckless abandon>>4475515Yeah, I figure I'll probably just keep tone adjustments to a bare minimum until I get pretty deep into learning color grading. Being that most of my experience has been with web stuff, I've had the luxury of just going with exaggerated color palettes since I didn't need to worry about things looking 'natural'. But in the case of photography, I think I'll rely on my camera for color. I hear that Canon glass is known for richer tones, so I'm hoping that will help bridge the gap a little.So why stick to LR? From my years of working with Adobe software, I feel the most comfortable using it, but I'm definitely open to other stuff, especially if they provide a better/easier workflow for gentle processing.>>4475517That's actually a really interesting idea. Thanks!
>>4475496Use smaller sessions / catalogs for individual events or months rather than 1 giant catalog. Like I would have a session/catalog for just that trip alone.Think of things as color and/or tone. How is the contrast, and how do the blacks look? Do you want your greens to look more or less saturated, more towards yellow or more towards blue, etc? Do the same for viewing other pictures you like, try analyze them like this. Make inspo folders for processing you like.Start more broadly, and work towards smaller adjustments as you go. Get your baseline exposure and wb, then contrast/shadows/highlights/ and global color adjustments, then more specific color adjustments and more fine-tuning of tone.Realistically, you can do 90% of all image processing with just the curves tool alone. Lots of tools overlap or do similar functions, so figure out which tools you like and the workflow you like for them.When you think it looks good, scale it back like 80%. Everyone goes too far when starting out. Also try going a few different directions with any given image.When you find something you like for a photo, save those adjustments as a preset you can use for later images. You should still tweak things based on the image, but starting from the same base preset will give you more consistency across your images.
>>4475496Keep things basic for now. Shoot in RAW and you can always come back a year later once you're better at post and redo your edits. I do that now and then and realise my changed workflow means a better / different looking JPEG. For a noob in post-processing, I'd say stick to NR, cropping, saturation, gamma, contrast, WB, and sharpness. Don't go too heavy on anything.Basically:>Start with Noise Reduction -- Before applying other shit so you don't apply changes to the noise profile and confuse the algo doing the work>Dial in WB -- Your WB is a baseline for every other colour in the photo>Gamma/Contrast/Saturation in any order-- make tweaks until things look nice to you. A small amount of additional sat is normally needed to reproduce what our eyes saw in the scene>Crop and Resize-- Don't crop too heavily (if at all) otherwise you're just fucking the total image quality. Clean up edges or play with aspect ratios but major changes WILL fuck you. Resize appropriately, which for digital bayer is between 50-75% of RAW resolution (i.e. resize a 6000x4000 to 4500x3000 at most). Resize smaller for web use, generally.>Sharpness-- Unsharp mask and Deconvolution are the two better and more used sharpness methods. Pick one depending on your software and be conservative. All photos need some degree of sharpening, but overdoing it creates artefacts and halos that make things look like horse shit. IF you are going to PRINT these photos you need to be a bit heavier with the sharpness, because the dye will smear just a little bit on the paper. I normally do a second pass and save seperate files if I'm doing a print version which has the extra sharpening.>Finallly, save as JPEG and ONLY JPEG. You don't need TIFFs, you don't want HEIF or some other bullshit. JPEG.Save it with between 90 compression and choose 4:4:4 chroma subsampling if quality is paramount. Otherwise 80-90 compression and 4:2:2 is usually sufficent and cuts down on file size further.
I need some advice on this, i edited this like in august. I have a lot of photos from this trip around 3500, but most of them are hdr so somewhere around a 1000 unique photos. Due to reasons, i probably wont be processing them for around a year from now. I did this, and another one, as proof of concept, just to wet my feet.I dont really know where to go with my raws. I worked on this first, because i found the composition stunning. This is a hdr composite, made in luminance hdr and then the final post work was done in rawtherapee. I have two diff tone mapped versions, i posted the one i find the most pleasing.If it is important, this was taken with a smartphone camera, i used a app called ProShot to take a dng, three of them to make the composite.Ig my issue is that, i cant quantify the exact feel i have achieved in this image. I find it great, i worked for like 12 hours on this one image.
>>4476020Can you upload your raws and send a link?It's a hdr but still has blown highlights, halos, a few distracting elements (top right) and it might be a bit too dark idk. I would also probably apply negative clarity/contrast in the upper part of the sky, for me there's a duality betwenn the messy/busy part inside of the "window" and simplicity of what's outside of it. Not the greatest scene though tbqh
>>4476030original dng, this is 0EV. I used a automatic +-1 EV mode.https://files.catbox.moe/5087ly.dnghdr tiffhttps://files.catbox.moe/le3yij.tifhdr pp3https://files.catbox.moe/qxv3wt.pp3I get the blown highlights, it has to do with the bad dynamic range on the sensor. I was trying out / new to hdr so i missed stopping down more to get detail. I applied a graduated filter on the sky. I think a bit of positive EV would help this image.
>>4475528Thanks anon.
>>4476042Ah I didn't understand that it was an automatic hdr mode, +- 1 is often not enough to capture the whole dynamic range. But you have to understand that HDR is precisely used to compensate for bad sensors with low dynamic ranges. Nowadays the sensors are better so that hdr is rarely needed, but you should be using +- 2 stops at the very least, and check for saturation on either ends of the spectrum.
>>4476042Actually I checked your images and none of them is an HDRI. The tiff is 8-bit, an HDRI should be in 32 bits, not sure about the dng but it doesn't look to be 32 bits. Never heard of the program you've used either. In any case the data is here and the highlights can be recovered, but it's quite noisy (see picrel). When it comes to processing I can't do much other than recovering highlights and removing distracting stuff since I don't know what you were going for.
>>4476020>>4476064the dng is fine, no need for HDR type shit. its a bit too grainy for my liking though, and i was too lazy to put it through the denoiser, so.
>>4476020>blue cast>>4476064>green cast>>4476097>red castDo we finally get a neutral picture if we mix those three
>>4475528>you don't want HEIFWhy not exactly? I tend to save as JPEG for posting everywhere but then convert to HEIF just for my phone, I can't see any real difference.
>SQUARE CROP FROM THE TOP ROPE>>4476171Don't save your first pass as HEIF because there's no compatibility for it outside of huehue le macintoss. The world runs on JPG.No harm in converting it to that for your own uses if there's compatilibity but beware the conversion process is making its own assumptions about your image when it does its magic.
