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Post-Processing Photos

Saint Basil’s

One of the digital photography techniques I have been slow to adopt is post-processing. Put simply, post-processing is a set of techniques with which a photographer can manipulate photos after they come out of the camera. Dull photos become vibrant, dark photos become bright, blurry photos become sharp, crooked photos become straight. Rarely does a photo come out of a camera look like those amazing ones that you see in magazines or in the web’s best photo galleries.

I take so many photos that I don’t have the time or energy to go through post-processing with all of them. But I have recently been trying to learn some techniques to give photos a bit of extra “pop”. Mauricio of the BBR digital imaging forum recently posted a tutorial on some techniques he used to get a really terrific looking photo. I’ve followed a few of his techniques and have put together a sample gallery showing photos before and after they have been post-processed. Most of the improvement comes from simply bumping up the saturation a bit, though I do also twiddle with color balance, curves, and sharpness. (Maybe I should bump up the saturation level on my camera? I know that I have a setting for that, and right now it’s set at “standard”…) Anyway, take a look at the samples and let me know what you think!

Also, this raises a question. What would you folks, the readers of our blog (and, hopefully, also the viewers of our gallery), rather see when we upload photos: The full selection of photos with little or no post-processing? Or a smaller selection of ‘choice’ photos, with post-processing? In a way, I guess it comes down to quantity versus quality. Or perhaps both? Maybe I could revive the showcase gallery and take some of the best of the best, post-process them, and put them up for even more jaw-dropping effect?