New to photography, a few questions

1. photoshop and lightroom (torrent them or buy them, your call)

That's totally a matter of opinion.

When you're shooting film, you buy films that produce more or less contrast, deeper blacks, etc. Also, in the darkroom or in film processing, you can do things to deepen your blacks, and all that as well.

When you're shooting a digital camera, you can do some changing in the camera of what gets spit out of the sensor. Or, you can do it in post. It's all electronic, either you're doing it in the camera's software or your computer's software. Cranking that shit to the extreme will dramatically change your image and I might consider that "cheating"; shooting a little flat so you can pull details out you want in post isn't cheating. It's actually one of the advantages of digital shooting.


OP, I shoot photos with the intent to capture the moment I am experiencing, not the moment the electronics capture. 90 percent of my post is done with RAW dialog (all stuff you can do in a darkroom technically) and the additional 10 is little changes I might make to make the image become what I see as the best it can be. Going overboard is cheating, but in my opinion (people may disagree) making small changes to fulfill your vision is a part of what makes it artistic and interesting. Just keep it under 10 percent.

I agree with you however, he is a beginner, did you learn to write an essay once you put your 1st sentence together?

haha, that's wonderful. I see what you are saying now. My point is that you aren't always cheating with that, but it's certainly a much better idea to learn how to shoot without ever needing to use those things.

I guess the idea in any case is to have to do post as little as possible, so shoot for that OP.

For workflow I personally use Bridge & Photoshop, when I'm touching up photos usually think "CLR" Crop, Levels, Rotate. Those are the most basic things you should being doing to all you photos, then you can think about some of the more fancy things. ie: curves, HDR (don't go overboard), panoramic (this is awesome), Saturation (again, don't got overboard 10-15 is good enough), among other things.

NS is a really good place for feedback, just remember to be humble and accept criticism

bump and +k/thanks to everyone that's helped out.

Couple more questions

1. What are the photo editing programs that are a step below photoshop and lightroom (I'm not really looking to do too much to my photo's in post)

2. I have a mac and for my video footage I'd like to get crisp slow motion by shooting 60fps and converting this to 24p. Is there anyway to do this in say.. i movie or another program that isn't final cut. My old macbook really can't handle final cut very well or premiere.

Thanks again!

You could try gimp. It's a free open source photoshop ish program, but it's confusing sometimes and not very user friendly. That being said, I've been editing a bunch of photos just with resizing, a bit of colors/levels and such and it's fine for that. After you're used to it you're fine. You could also go for photoshop elements. It has all the basics with the photoshop layout, so it runs nicer than gimp.

Tips: Shoot with sharp pictures, that are postworthy by manipulating your aperture..Set it to around 5.6 and get ready for some really sharp pictures.

Also, it never hurts to use and unsharp mask on Photoshop, set it to 10% ish and that will sharpen your pictures as well.