Beginner How important is software?

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ScottT

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146
Name
Scott
Edit My Images
Yes
Having recently bought my first DSLR and after spending far to long looking through this forum, i have to ask does everyone use software to tweak their pictures?
I see so many picture where it's quite obvious that its been retouched and some where i'm not sure.
Is it possible (with time and plenty of practice) to get really good quality pictures without any software fiddling (with perhaps the exception of cropping the picture)?

A small part of the reason in buying myself a DSLR was to get me out the house and away from the computer, not to spend more time sat on it tweaking pictures.
So how important is it?
 
Your questions a bit open as the answer depends on the type of picture your taking... I shoot sports so dont have the same time as say a landscape photogrpaher to take the picture ..... thus your answers will vary depending on the type of photogrpahy

My answer
Very important.. Its possible to get pics spot on in the camera but rare.. as you say it may need cropping? That means sitting at a computer.... I take a few seconds with each picture... Usualy auto contrast.. straighten crop and maybe sharpen... I load 100 pics at a time into photoshop and do each one individually spending as i say a few seconds on each (years of practice and shortcuts :) )
 
It is perfectly possible to get great pictures straight out of the camera in my experience. To do so needs good exposure, good composition with the pictures saved as Jpegs, not RAW.

Cameras give you a choice of Jpeg style of picture so you can choose or program the look you want. RAW pictures are for processing on the computer which many people enjoy doing.
 
the pro's above are absolutely right.
the answer is ...yes or no depending on who the picture is intended for.
i am a pretty mediocre amateur photographer by the standards of what you see on this site, obviously trying to improve. However my wife (who has a pretty unbiased view of these things) thinks some of my images are great, even when I can see things wrong with them. I have a few photos printed (on a run of the mill photo printer) on the wall, and she loves them, whilst I can see flaws that make them not great but not bad either, and in all cases they have had minimal tinkering on the computer because I spend all day every working day at the screen and don't want to spend lots of free time doing the same.
So, find your own happy medium, for whomever you have as the audience. You/family or paying public as necessary
 
Almost every picture will benefit from some minor tweak even if it's just cloning out a bit of litter you hadn't noticed, or a distracting spot in a portrait.
Half the enjoyment of digital is using RAW so you can do some work afterwards - in fact from RAW you are practically obliged to do some contrast, saturation and maybe sharpen - that's the whole point - your original fie is just RAW data, a flat image that the camera hasn't already adjusted for you..
 
ScottT said:
A small part of the reason in buying myself a DSLR was to get me out the house and away from the computer, not to spend more time sat on it tweaking pictures.
Click to expand...

I despise PP for this very reason, and whilst it is vital (as said above) you can dramatically reduce the time you spend in it by getting as much right in camera as you can. One reason I spent a lot of time in PP was because I was trying to make a boring picture "look good" by playing with sliders. And because I didn't really know what I wanted from the image, I spent a *long* time doing it!

If you see the picture before you press the shutter, your PP will be much easier because you have an end result in mind. This is all IMO of course. Some people love spending time in Photoshop messing about and fair play to them! It's not for me though.

As a bare minimum, you should have the software and ability to at least crop and rotate (straighten) images. You won't always have the focal length you need with you (so you can go wider and crop later), and sometimes the camera may decide that when you turned the camera on its axis to take a portrait, you didn't. Software also (sometimes) has the ability to stitch panoramas together, or focus stack for macro, or blend exposures for high dynamic range work. Many of these are not possible in-camera (although they are becoming features on newer models) so if you enjoy this sort of photography, PP is pretty much a given.

As you get more experienced, the ability to control your own sharpening, white balance, shadow/highlight detail and contrast for those "great shots" is a real boon.

Of course if you like doing composite surreal work, PP is pretty much the whole shooting match!

My PP work is minimal now and is often just a little crop, maybe a straighten, sharpening, noise reduction and contrast adjustments. Maybe 2 minutes on photos I keep (which isn't many!). I shoot exclusively on film, so all the fancy stuff (b&w high/low contrast, warm tones, cross process, colour wash, high grain) is done with film choice. Saves me a ton of time.

Welcome to TP!
 
Everyone has a slightly different view.

Mine goes back to the days before digital, where not a single 'great' image would have come straight from camera (i.e. processed as-is by Boots or Truprint) and every picture would have highly skilled darkroom work performed.

These days in-camera processing is probably a bit better than Boots could manage, and for images needed quickly like Kipax sports pictures or news photos then yes, it can be SOOC. Outside of that, the raw image is the digital negative, and needs processing accordingly. More or less processing depending on what you want.
 
Depending on the camera you bought, the free software that came with it could be all you need.

in order to help minimise the amount of time you’ll spend at the computer, here’s a few tips.
be careful when you’re shooting, the more care you take, the less you’ll leave to fix.
select carefully. That means learning your cameras controls and learning to ‘see’ images. don’t fall into the ‘you’re not a photographer if you don’t shoot Manual’ trap or any other internet trends.
if you take 50 images and only want to print one, you’ll be wasting tons of time messing with a dozen in software, bringing us to...
learn to cull. The most important part of the process is ‘editing’, that’s not ‘changing’ as a lot of people believe, it’s choosing what to work on. Selecting your chosen images can even sometimes be done in camera. This is one of the hardest skills to learn. I chuck stuff away that most people can’t see anything wrong with, the point isn’t what I’m casting aside, only what I’m keeping ;)
 
Phil V said:
This is one of the hardest skills to learn. I chuck stuff away that most people can’t see anything wrong with, the point isn’t what I’m casting aside, only what I’m keeping ;)
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Very true, I've got terrabytes of stuff that I will possibly never view again! :tumbleweed:
 
I shoot raw and enjoy processing some photos on the computer so you don't want to do what I do :)
I agree with all of the above but a couple of points I would add are:
1. On the camera you can adjust things like contrast or saturation but the controls are a bit crude, +1, +2, +3 for example. On the computer you get a range from perhaps 0-100 so you can achieve a finer adjustment.
2. On the camera adjustments are global, they affect all of the picture. On the computer you can do local adjustments such as raising the shadows in one area, increasing saturation in just part of the picture etc.
Whether such adjustments make the picture better or not is subjective however, and are not normally essential to get an acceptable photo.

Just to repeat what Phil V said, many years ago in the days of film I read an article in AP where a professional photographer, could have been David Bailey, was interviewed. He said that one difference beteen the amateur and the professional was that the amateur showed you all their photos while the professional only showed those that he wanted you to see.
 
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Thank you all for your replies, it give me plenty to think about.
Regarding software, i've been using PaintShop Pro for the last 20yrs, i'm very happy with it and understand how to use it, part of me just cant be bothered trying to learn a new program (must be getting old).
Perhaps i'm a bit old fashioned in that i see heavily altered pictures more as computer art and not as photograps, thats just me.
You guys who do use software to heavily change your pictures, you do amazing jobs, some of the pictures i see on here are amazing, but some do leave me a bit cold, no the sky really wassn't that orange and the grass isn't that shade of green, but that doesnt mean it wasnt a good picture.
The picture above with the trees looks great, please can you post the original picture so I can see how much it's been tweaked?

My main focus at the moment is learning how to get the best from my camera, i know it can take far better pictures than i'm getting, its a big learning curve, for now i'll stick to a bit of cropping and perhaps some B/W on the computer, who knows i may in time get more into the computer side.
For info I use a EOS 77D, all canon lenses 100m macro, 35mm marcro, 18-55 kit lens, 10-18 wide and a 70-200.

In the last 4-5 weeks since i've owned it, this is my favourite picture i've taken, not perfect I know but I'm happy with it and with a lot of practise I can only hope to get better.
Only cropped no other changes.
1410.jpg
200mm f9.0, 1/640 iso200 white balance auto, no flash, is the info from the picture.
 
ScottT said:
In the last 4-5 weeks since i've owned it, this is my favourite picture i've taken, not perfect I know but I'm happy with it and with a lot of practise I can only hope to get better.
Only cropped no other changes.
View attachment 290596
200mm f9.0, 1/640 iso200 white balance auto, no flash, is the info from the picture.
Click to expand...

A little processing can really improve this image, which is rather dull and flat I am afraid. (No offence intended). :)
 
Slightly off topic, but don't worry about it too much.
On a recent thread I asked if members got more pleasure from taking photos or viewing them.
Overwhelmingly the taking photos process was the driver and main enjoyment.
Enjoy that part. If you're like the rest of us the results will rarely be good enough anyway. Software or no software. :)
 
ScottT said:
Perhaps i'm a bit old fashioned in that i see heavily altered pictures more as computer art and not as photograps, thats just me.
Click to expand...

Please don't misunderstand, but few of us do lurid social media photos - it's much more about making the image from the camera what we saw with our eyes/minds, perhaps with a little help to make it look as we'd have liked it to. That's not always strictly true in that if I'd doing mono for example, then the image is always going to be substantially different to reality, so it's necessary to think in terms of tones and shapes a little more than for colour.

Example? SOOC
fishing example-01507-2.jpg

Processed
fishing example-01507.jpg
 
As you are asking about software if you were to turn on image editing then people could have a little tweak and demonstrate what a small amount of editing can do .
 
ancient_mariner said:
Please don't misunderstand, but few of us do lurid social media photos - it's much more about making the image from the camera what we saw with our eyes/minds, perhaps with a little help to make it look as we'd have liked it to. That's not always strictly true in that if I'd doing mono for example, then the image is always going to be substantially different to reality, so it's necessary to think in terms of tones and shapes a little more than for colour.

Example? SOOC
View attachment 290597

Processed
View attachment 290598
Click to expand...

If her and her sister haven't caught anything you'd have thought they would have gone home by now. :ROFLMAO:
 
i prefer just taking photos and have really no interest whatsoever in 'processing' them - i just go with the default darktable settings and simply use it to convert the dng file from the camera into a jpeg
 
troutfisher said:
As you are asking about software if you were to turn on image editing then people could have a little tweak and demonstrate what a small amount of editing can do .
Click to expand...

Sorry I have no idea what you meanabout turning on image editing. If anyone wants to download the picture and tweak it to show me that would be great



gramps said:
A little processing can really improve this image, which is rather dull and flat I am afraid. (No offence intended). :)
Click to expand...
No offence taken, thank you for suggesting that but the feedback i would really like is how i could improve the image using the camera if you or anyone else could help with that? I do feel if i had used a flash i may have got a better result, i'm thinking it perhaps would have lit the body up better, but other than that i've no idea what i have done wrong, guees thats why i'm here to learn.
The wood it was sat on was the top rail of a fence that was just under chest height and i couldnt get that close to it as it kept moving, hence why i used a 200mm, the path wasnt wide enough to get a side on shot as it put me too close and it just moved. Any thoughts?
 
@ScottT as you are using Canon and wish to avoid or minimize post-processing, this may be of interest https://global.canon/en/imaging/picturestyle/file/download.html. It is Canon's picture style editor. The link gives you information about it and some styles you can download. Go to the canon software page to download the editor and create your own styles to produce jpegs straight out of your camera.

From time to time I work with Getty photographers who only shoot in jpeg so it can be done as it is what I do for events and sports as the workflow is faster. As others have said, some photo genres lend themselves more to post-processing but if that's not your thing it doesn't have to be.
 
1410 pp.jpg
An adjusted version of your pic. You may not like it but it shows what can be tweaked. There is no need to go for over the top adjustments.
Sometimes after taking a shot you can wish that you had pushed up the contrast or sharpness etc and post processing allows you to do that.
 
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Suvv said:
An adjusted version of your pic. You may not like it but it shows what can be tweaked. There is no need to go for over the top adjustments.
Sometimes after taking a shot you can wish that you had pushed up the contrast or sharpness etc and post processing allows you to do that.
Click to expand...

Thank you for that, yes it does look better than my original. Thank you for taking the time to change it and show me what is possible.
Now what could/should I have done with my camera to get a result like that? The sun was high and from the right, my guess is a flash would have lit the shaded side better possibly giving me similar results, would it have helped or is there something else i've missed?
 
Suvv said:
An adjusted version of your pic. You may not like it but it shows what can be tweaked. There is no need to go for over the top adjustments.
Sometimes after taking a shot you can wish that you had pushed up the contrast or sharpness etc and post processing allows you to do that......
Click to expand...

personally I like the pp version

could you list what adjustments you made...............thanks
 
ScottT said:
Thank you for that, yes it does look better than my original. Thank you for taking the time to change it and show me what is possible.
Now what could/should I have done with my camera to get a result like that? The sun was high and from the right, my guess is a flash would have lit the shaded side better possibly giving me similar results, would it have helped or is there something else i've missed?
Click to expand...
Fill in flash would have helped but unless it was off camera and very subtle it would have caused more problems, a reflector would have helped to lighten the shadows but that would be awkward when photographing insects. In the days of film you had more dynamic range so that there would be more details in the shadows, even so some dodging would take place in the darkroom to preserve detail in the shadows.
I also sharpened the image a bit to suit the screen, you could increase sharpening in camera but there are subtle differences between capture sharpening and output sharpening.
All in all if you are not going to do any post processing, which is quite normal for lots of people, then you will not be able to get some of the changes that post processing can give.
 
Yardbent said:
personally I like the pp version

could you list what adjustments you made...............thanks
Click to expand...
I use Nikon Capture NX2 for my processing so what I actually did may not be relevant.
Capture NX2 has a D Lighting adjustment which gives a tonal adjustment to lighten just shadows without giving a harsh edge, I used that on the body and head at different strengths. You could try brightness / contrast adjustments or a Levels adjustment to bring out the detail.
I also sharpened the whole image, as I used Capture NX2 the setting would not be applicable to other programs, I just try to make sure that there are no halos around the edges when viewed at 100% and then back off a bit.
Sorry if that is not much help.
 
ScottT said:
Thank you for that, yes it does look better than my original. Thank you for taking the time to change it and show me what is possible.
Now what could/should I have done with my camera to get a result like that? The sun was high and from the right, my guess is a flash would have lit the shaded side better possibly giving me similar results, would it have helped or is there something else i've missed?
Click to expand...
To improve the shot in camera, you could have added a little +exp comp. your meter has been misled by the large bright plank. You could have used a reflector or off camera flash to lift the shadow detail - but these are 'techniques' that take some learning, they're harder to get right than a lift done in software.
There's also the impact of sharpening - which can be added in camera - but is more successful done in post selectively.
 
Suvv said:
I use Nikon Capture NX2 for my processing so what I actually did may not be relevant.
-----------Sorry if that is not much help...
Click to expand...

Kev
i thought I had replied - sorry. Yes it was helpful...... (y)
I use Nikon Capture NX-D ( listed as an upgrade to NX2)

ScottT said:
............So how important is it?...
Click to expand...

I use Nikon Capture NX-D
but this morning I tried Adobe Photoshop Express (free) -- looks OK for a starter .!!
 
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Capture NX2 was a paid for program - about £150? with quite a lot of useful features such as selections for adjustments, U point control etc. Nikon discontinued it about 2 years ago.
View NX2 was a free program, it was a stripped down version of Capture NX2.
NX-D replaces View NX2 and it does have colour control points which are well worth learning.
I also have Photoshop Elements which I use occasionally when I want to use the healing and cloning tools or I want to combine photos, add text, add clip art etc.
 
ScottT said:
Having recently bought my first DSLR and after spending far to long looking through this forum, i have to ask does everyone use software to tweak their pictures?
I see so many picture where it's quite obvious that its been retouched and some where i'm not sure.
Is it possible (with time and plenty of practice) to get really good quality pictures without any software fiddling (with perhaps the exception of cropping the picture)?

A small part of the reason in buying myself a DSLR was to get me out the house and away from the computer, not to spend more time sat on it tweaking pictures.
So how important is it?
Click to expand...
Really important nowadays, specially if you take pictures RAW or NEF so the then you can work full features / adjustments
 
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