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.
