Touching up/post-processing photos?

[RagingBITCH]

Question for you photography guys - obviously shots taken in magazines or "well received" shots have been touched up and processed. What exactly is done to these shots, out of curiousity? Is it mostly manual touchup, or is there a program that automates it and makes it look "pretty" with ease?

 

[laurenlex]

It's pretty much on a picture by picture basis. More art than science.

 

[Jack Ryan]

Google's Picasa isn't bad considering how easy it is to use. It can do some simple touch ups.

 

[mugs]

This doesn't apply to every picture, but a lot of the pictures I've seen that people have liked have had their color saturation either jacked up or reduced significantly, depending on the subject.

 

[LS20]

a quick and general way to make a picture more "appealing" to most people is to bump up 1) contrast 2) sharpness (via unsharp mask in PS)... and maybe some Saturation, too. though generally the first 2 will get pictures to "pop" out

 

[Gooberlx2]

I'll second Google's Picasa for quick and easy post-processing for simple tasks. Programs like photoshop, Paint shop pro and The Gimp can do more advanced tasks.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

It's a picture by picture basis if you want to do it well. It even goes so far as taking brushes and manually darkening/lightening/saturating/desaturating small parts of the photo, versus photo-wide color adjustments with slider bars and stuff.

For when I want to just do something really quick and easy for non-serious snapshots, I just do auto levels, contrast, and color in Photoshop (Image -> Adjustments or their shortcut keys). Then I do a quick sharpening with USM or Smart Sharpen and save as JPEG. The results are hardly ever optimal, but it just makes the picture a bit better than out-of-the-camera.

 

[tfinch2]

Originally posted by: RagingBITCH
Question for you photography guys - obviously shots taken in magazines or "well received" shots have been touched up and processed. What exactly is done to these shots, out of curiousity? Is it mostly manual touchup, or is there a program that automates it and makes it look "pretty" with ease?

It's manual touchup, and I can guarantee Picasa is not used. 😉