On the weekend I went searching through my archives for some more dog photos to post on the blog over the coming month. I came across some old JPEGs of Duke, who is the dog of friends of ours who we were staying with for a weekend. At the time I was just starting in photography and was snapping at any and everything. Duke was a somewhat willing participant in my photographic lessons, so I have a handful of images of him. None of them were screaming at me to post to the blog, but I thought I should do some processing on at least one of them to include.
So here it is….the first time I’m exposing my before and afters to the world. I find that I really do undertake different processing methods depending on my mood at the time. On the weekend I just wanted to do some quick tweaks to make the image presentable, so I was in a very minimalist mood. Here’s what work Duke has had done:
- Dodge and burn on the eyes. I find this makes them look a little more glassey. Over the years I’ve tried different methods, but dodge and burn is my current choice.
- Increase saturation and contrast to my liking. Luckily on this photo the blacks hadn’t come out too blue. When I was solely shooting JPEGs, correcting the white balance would be the bane of my existence, especially on black dogs. In fact, now that I look at him again, perhaps he is a little blue. What do you think?
- Sharpen. I usually stick to sharpening the face or specific features I want to be crisp. Sharpening that background would have started to look weird.
I have to post-process all of my images because I have turned off all in-camera contrast and sharpening. I like to have final say on how the images look and don’t want my camera deciding that for me. While I used to shoot solely in JPEG, I now shoot mostly in RAW. The images you see on this site are a real mix of each. For example, all photos from India was shot in JPEG because I was backpacking and did not want to lug too much data storage around with me for weeks.
I hope this helps at least a few people. I know that when I was starting out I would be distressed that my photos didn’t look as good as most that I saw. I soon came to realise that the in-camera work is only part of the process. Post-processing adds a whole other dimension to making your images say what you want them to.
Ahhh, photoshop geekery. What could be better. Excellent tips, everyone. It never ceases to amaze me what you can do with that application. Oh, and great shot by the way, Mia.
Wow…thanks Jamie. I’ll be sure to give that a go. Anything to make processing quicker would be good. Especially since my Mac is starting to run a bit slow.
hey Mia, I have a super simple PS trick that will get you the same results as above in a fraction of the time. duplicate your background layer, and set the new layer style to ‘hard light’ in the layer style drop-down menu at the top of the layers palette, and then set the opacity of the dupe layer to somewhere between 15%-65% to taste- the higher the percentage the greater the effect, the lower the more subtle the effect. then you may need to fuss with saturation and color balance but then you are done! let me know if it works on your jpeg files. :-)
thanks for sharing, mia! whenever i go back through old work it’s always crazy to see how my taste for post-processing effects change; sometimes it drives me crazy when i want to use an old picture, though, because then i go digging for the original and want to re-do everything all over again. :p …nice work!
i love seeing ‘before’ and ‘afters’!! Thanks for sharing your perspective on things!! :)
Thanks for sharing! I don’t think he is blue, at least not on my screen. Looks good!