rgbivens said:
Great job 2Bhumble! Looks like a flash was used on yours...the shadow at the bottom gives it that impression.
Mike - That program is AWESOME! everybody should have that program...its sooo simple too!!! Thanks for sharing the info with us.
-Grant
My pleasure Grant,
I'm firmly of the belief that once the digital noise is removed from our photographs the actual quality of them goes up to the point where they become not just as good as traditional cameras, but exceeds them, especially in conjunction with image editing programs.
The images 'straight of' the card, though good, are only the first step, and need to be worked on to bring the TRUE quality of digital photography.
Just out of interest, here's my workflow for an average photograph, (once they are on your hard drive).
1/ Noise reduction and save.
2/ Load into Photoshop.
3/ Convert to LAB mode, this is recommended by many for a very good reason, any noise tends to be in the colour component of an image, LAB mode allows you to sharpen just the monochrome component, giving cleaner results.
4/ Unsharp mask on the monochrome channel.
5/ Reselect all channels.
6/ Adjustments to levels, sometimes adjustments are needed to individual RGB channels here first, especially on the blue channel to remove any blue colour cast on dull images (winter's days are often prone to this), follow up with overall levels adjustment.
7/ Adjust saturation levels, sometimes needed, sometimes not.
8/ Crop as required.
9/ If resizing the image is needed, then after resizing do a further Unsharp mask application.
10/ Convert back to RGB mode and save.
This sounds a lot of work, but believe me, it makes all the difference between a good image and a brilliant one, and you don't have to do everything manually, if you record the stages as an action it takes a lot of the hard work out of the process, simply start the action and let Photoshop do all the stages for you one by one, just entering in the 'numbers' as the input boxes pop up.
