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Help with getting photos to 'pop'

You can download a 30 day trial of Lightroom 5 I have a Mac and I'm an Apple fan but have never used Aperture. It was a conscious decision. I'm sure Aperture is great but Apple do seem to have taken their eye off the ball and Adobe have stolen a march on them with Lightroom. Especially in the past eighteen months. But either will do the basic stuff well, including pop!

The decider for me was at the time I bought Aperture was under half the price of Lightroom as Apple had just slashed the price after moving it to an App Store only download. I think this is still the case. After a little learning curve I've been very happy with it.
 
You can download a 30 day trial of Lightroom 5 I have a Mac and I'm an Apple fan but have never used Aperture. It was a conscious decision. I'm sure Aperture is great but Apple do seem to have taken their eye off the ball and Adobe have stolen a march on them with Lightroom. Especially in the past eighteen months. But either will do the basic stuff well, including pop!

Whatever you buy take your time with it, learn, and I can guarantee that you will soon start to get very good results. Your images will start to look better and better the more experienced you get. The beauty of shooting Raw is you can go back and process old photos with your new found knowledge. I do that all the time.

Of course the other advantage that shouldn't be overlooked is the excellent cataloguing and organisational facilities. I process 50% of my photos in Lightroom and the rest in RPP and Iridient but every single photo is imported into Lightroom as I let Lightroom organise them for me.

I bought Aperture for my Mac. I tried and tried but i couldn't get on with it. Reverted to Elements and I am much happier. One day I will try Lightroom I guess.
 
Some cameras have quite a high contrast curve built into Standard modes - for instance Leica M9 and most Nikons are quite contrasty straight out of camera

With the Leica X100 and onwards, Fuji's film simulation modes are mostly relatively low contrast, reflecting the look of their colour negative films. They do have a Velvia mode which offers increased mid tone contrast and increased saturation.

If you want to get this kind of effect in post processing you can achieve it relatively easily in Lightroom by starting with a neutral jpeg or a raw image.

The following images show the transition from neutral (i've used the black paint as neutral from a colour balance viewpoint) through to Direct Positive simulation

It's up to you guys which one you prefer, of course:


neutral by cliffpatte, on Flickr


medium by cliffpatte, on Flickr


strong by cliffpatte, on Flickr


directpositive by cliffpatte, on Flickr
 
I don't follow the logic of saying RAW preserves the original
You can do the same with Jpeg - either as a copy or by renaming as a different file so the original is preserved
 
Sorry that's incorrect. The Raw contains all the data the camera managed to capture at the time the photograph was taken. A JPEG is 'cooked' from the Raw. Much of this information has been thrown away once the JPEG conversion has taken place.

To quote Jeff Schewe, author of The Digital Negative. A great read by the way.

"Raw versus JPEG

Yeah, I know, the odds are pretty good that if you bought this book, I don’t need to evangelize the benefits of shooting raw instead of JPEG. But if you have friends who like to argue this issue with you, let me give you some ammunition. The raw capture gets everything your camera’s sensor can see. A JPEG is also a raw capture (all sensors always capture all the data the sensors see), but the resulting image has been modified or processed by the camera’s analog-to-digital conversion and the camera has “baked in” some critical attributes such as bit depth, color space, tone mapping, and white balance. If the raw capture is the cookie dough, then a JPEG is a baked cookie. Personally, I really, really like cookie dough. When I say that JPEG images from cameras are “baked,” I mean it (although one could argue that they may be only half-baked). Each camera manufacturer has defined a certain “look” it wants to present to photographers who may buy its cameras. There is nothing particularly accurate or absolute in these looks—they’re just a certain preset the camera manufacturers have settled on. The analog-to-digital converter takes the raw image captured by the sensor, makes certain assumptions, and processes the raw image data to arrive at a given rendering. Most camera companies have resorted to the more contrasty and saturated look many photographers associated with film—the cameras are designed to make film-like images. The problem is that once the image is baked the manufacturer’s way, it becomes more difficult to bake it your way because large chunks of your image data have been baked away in someone else’s ovens!

JPEG (which stands for the Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a method of
(usually) lossy compression for digital photographic images. Compression isn’t a bad thing in and of itself—we couldn’t have fast-loading images on the Internet without some sort of compression. But this sort of compression as the starting point for a photograph that’s intended to undergo additional image processing is less good. JPEG compression tries to maintain the luminance data while compressing the heck out of the color data. The thought here is that color compression is less harmful (lossy) than the luminance data, which is true. However, as you can see in Figure 1.20, the loss of color gradations can be detrimental. If what you start with is an 8-bit RGB image, and you compress it as a JPEG, the resulting JPEG image no longer has all its bits!

The real problem with JPEG images from digital captures is that going from the original raw file with a linear gamma, the gamma encoding is baked in the file. So, if you understand how much headroom a raw capture can contain, that headroom is lost when compressed to JPEG."




I don't follow the logic of saying RAW preserves the original
You can do the same with Jpeg - either as a copy or by renaming as a different file so the original is preserved
 
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OK, been using Lightroom demo for an hour and "I get it now"...

I haven't read any of the tutorials but it's clear how people get images to pop with this software.
 
Good to hear, and that's after only an hour or so! :) I think so many people are daunted, but really it's not that difficult. Also it's very empowering intercepting your camera's interpretation of what you saw and making it your own.

OK, been using Lightroom demo for an hour and "I get it now"...

I haven't read any of the tutorials but it's clear how people get images to pop with this software.
 
Here's a couple I did on the la[top screen but really need to redo on the large 27" Dell monitor at work.

DeclanampRonan4-1_zps394c27a7.jpg


Amy003-1_zps7810af9f.jpg


2013-12-22_0133-1_zps20dfdb50.jpg
 
One of the best pieces of post processing software I've used in terms of speed and most importantly quality of output is RPP. I know it's a favourite with film shooters. It was designed by two film shooters. I generally use it with my X100 as the files just look superior to Lightroom. It's free (you can donate to unlock batch processing), no frills with regular updates.

If anyone wants to try it don't be put off by the interface. Marvellous bit of software. Anyway I'm getting off topic :D

RAW PHOTO PROCESSOR (RPP)

RPP for beginners

Thanks, thats great. I will try it tonight!
 
Good stuff. It does require a bit of a different mindset in terms of operating the software. But stick with it. At first it may seem unintuitive but after using it for a few hours you start to appreciate it. The FAQ is worth reading, it does explain why there is no realtime preview and no sliders. I just whizz my cursor over each input box and use the mouse wheel to make changes. Then either hit apply or CMD+R on the Mac. You get very fast doing this and I actually prefer it to conventional sliders. The manual is also very good.

The film presets are very good. I use VSCO and Replichrome in Lightroom but I love the look of some of the film simulations. Especially Kodachrome (K64). Most of these shots were processed in RPP.

Here are my default settings for the X100. I then tweak each shot as necessary, if needed. He does recommend that you sharpen in more dedicated software but quite often I just sharpen in RPP. See what you think!

i-Ptcdm68-L.png


Thanks, thats great. I will try it tonight!
 
When I first went digital, I used one of Tom Ang's book for guidance on curves and sharpening and if I recall correctly it was assuming you had photoshop. I suppose I was doing something similar with the way I used to print colour negs, but yeah, its a lot easier in lightroom 5 than in some other tools I've seen.

Currently I do most of my post processing in CS6, rather than lightroom, but lightroom is cheaper :)
 
Good stuff. It does require a bit of a different mindset in terms of operating the software. But stick with it. At first it may seem unintuitive but after using it for a few hours you start to appreciate it. The FAQ is worth reading, it does explain why there is no realtime preview and no sliders. I just whizz my cursor over each input box and use the mouse wheel to make changes. Then either hit apply or CMD+R on the Mac. You get very fast doing this and I actually prefer it to conventional sliders. The manual is also very good.

The film presets are very good. I use VSCO and Replichrome in Lightroom but I love the look of some of the film simulations. Especially Kodachrome (K64). Most of these shots were processed in RPP.

Here are my default settings for the X100. I then tweak each shot as necessary, if needed. He does recommend that you sharpen in more dedicated software but quite often I just sharpen in RPP. See what you think!

i-Ptcdm68-L.png

Great thanks. Its even got Black and White simulations and opens my Leica DNGs :). I will be shooting this weekend so will try it out on my next batch

Thanks again.

J
 
Is your Leica supported? I imagine you've already checked.

Supported Leica models DMR, M8, M9, Digilux 3, S2, X1, M Monochrom

Looking forward to hearing how you get on. Just don't throw in the towel in frustration like I nearly did! So glad I didn't. It was a bit of a contrast after using Lightroom for a year.
 
Actually, I hadn't checked. I just tried my DMR files no problem. Off out with some HP5 today so will have to wait for a few days to do some PP, unless I DIY process. I have some Rodinol in the cupboard :)
 


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