Joseph, Photography

You Asked For It: After The Camera

Today I thought I would forget about the camera and just show you what is going through my mind after I take the image (whew, this will be a quick post) 🙂

After I save the image to a specific directory on an external hard drive I load it into Lightroom. I use the “Add” image option so I do not physically transfer the file into Lightroom but instead just a small preview image loads and the bulk of the file stays on the external hard drive.

Why do I use this option ?

Because I installed 250 gb SSD’s in all my Mac’s and at that time they were pretty expensive (today you can pick ip 512 gb SSD’s for the same price I paid for the 256 gb drives). You can fill a 250 gb hard drive pretty fast with raw files so instead I leave the images on the external drives which have plenty of capacity.

This is one particular image I will use for the purposes of this post and it is straight out of the camera.  In this case I used a Nikon D300 camera at 1000 ISO and the photo was taken at the “Little Italy” section of Boston’s North End.

Example-A

As you can see this photo was taken at night and with the mixed type of street lighting and floodlights in the photo I really don’t think I should even waste time with trying to get the color balance correct. Also take notice that although this image was only taken at 1000 ISO it was also taken with a camera that is old by todays standards.  It was a fantastic high ISO performer back in the day but the grain looks pretty coarse compared to a more modern camera.

Example-B

This is basically the same image with a little bit tighter cropping applied.  For the sake of this post I will save some time and just skip to the next step because sometimes I will sit in front of the computer screen and crop 20 to 30 times and see if I like the image any better.

Example-C

Being I will not get the color balance correct I converted the image to black and white and I think its starting to look a little better.  The lights seem too hot for my liking and I will have to adjust them a little.  The lights are pretty close to the edge of the image so I have an idea on how to fix them.

Example-D

On this version I cropped the image a little bit more and applied a frame to give it a little more finished look.  There is still something not right about this image so I will work with it a little more.

Example-E

This is the final image and the difference between this and the previous image is that I applied a medium vignette (which also took care of the lights also by toning them down a little).  I also brought the black levels down ever so slightly and applied the watermark in the lower right of the image.

This will end the “You asked for it” posts and I had a blast writing them.  I hope you enjoyed them.

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17 thoughts on “You Asked For It: After The Camera”

  2. Emilio Pasquale says:

    You seem pretty confidant in your post processing. And that’s good thing. A greatly improved image. But I, on the other hand, am not as confidant and whenever I share a before and after, I get comments that make me want to revisit the image and keep working. One day, maybe, I’ll be like you. Or more like you seem to be! 🙂

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    • I’m not really confident in any of the images I post but I am also not one to sit there for hours and tweak the images. Maybe I would have fiddled a little more with the images when I was younger but now I really don’t. So I guess you will have to be like the person I seem to be Emilio 🙂

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  3. Thank you for all the “You Asked for it” posts. They are all very informative and helpful to someone like me, who can use all the help she can get! I saved them all so I can refer back to them when I need to. As they say, “All good things must come to an end.” Thanks for sharing!

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    • Thank you very much Patti 🙂 I was going to totally shut down this site but I thought about it and decided that wouldn’t be fair to all the people who have been following me for years, so something had to give so I can squeeze more hours out of the day 🙂

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  8. Excellent photo, Joe. I’m always interested in reading about processing techniques other photographers use. Not very many posts I follow described their process and I myself rarely get technical. But being a technician at heart I appreciate your efforts.

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