Tropicals & Tender Perennials: photoshop and begonias, 1 by hcmcdole

hcmcdole wrote:
There is nothing wrong with auto but sometimes it produces images we don't like so we have to go to a mode with the controls we know will give us the image we are after. Some of the things I like about being in the "creative zones" is setting the focus point, ISO, and controlling the flash (turning it off for example).

If you don't already have some basic editing software then I would spring for it over buying another camera. It sounds like you already have a nice camera and it seems like some kind of software would've come with the camera. Photoshop Elements can be bought for less than $100 which is probably all you really need.

All the pros use some kind of photo editor (Photoshop being the most popular by most accounts) and now we can too. Salvage poorly exposed pictures to a point (blown details cannot be rescued). Blurry pictures are not worth saving unless that is the effect you want. Bring out details in the shadows, tone down bright spots, add contrast, saturate colors, turn color into black and white or sepia, add borders, and maybe sharpen your images a bit are just some of the basic stuff you might want to do.

Most cameras already have some pre-editing software in them. For example my compact camera has a "vivid" setting in it and it does look brighter than some of the other settings. My wife's Sony does an excellent job of color but sometimes seems a little artificial (almost a plastic look at times). It really comes down to what we want to see before we print, post, or email our pictures so photo editing to the rescue.


Here is an example of a picture I enhanced. The top is the original which I deliberately underexposed so I could save the details in the sky. With Photoshop Elements, I "dodged" the shadows in the bottom part of the picture so now I can actually see the details in the train (if I blew it up you would see Grand Canyon on the train) and shrubs. I also added a bit of contrast and saturated the colors a little bit too.