The photography thread

soma1975

Lightroom is loads easier and faster to use than photoshop. 99% of my stills don’t get any further processing. 

boogieman

I use an older version of Corel Paintshop Pro. Does everything I need, has sone really good features like fade correction for restoring the colour to old washed out photos and is simple to learn. The latest standard version is only £35 on Amazon (don’t worry about getting the Ultimate version, it seems to have lots of unnecessary add ons). 

stickyfiddle

soma1975 said:

Lightroom is loads easier and faster to use than photoshop. 99% of my stills don’t get any further processing. 

This. I have literally never used photoshop, apart from the iPad PS Express app, which is literally just for removing blemishes and the odd piece of rubbish in the background. 

LR is awesome

strumjoughlamps

Lightroom is a superb all round photo management program..  

I prefer Affinity Pro when editing on iPad Pro w/ Apple Pencil which is 90% of how I edit pics now.

Grumpyrocker

I use Affinity Photo on Windows almost exclusively now. Though if a RAW file needs some tricky tweaking I'll use Capture One or RAWTherapee.

zepp76

Thank you for the advice so far, I've had a look at Lightroom and Amazon are selling versions 5 and 6, Lightroom 5 is significantly cheaper at nearly half the price of 6 but I'm not sure whether the extras that 6 comes with are worth the £110 asking price. Any advice as to whether I should go for 5 or 6 would be much appreciated, thank you.

stickyfiddle

zepp76 said:

Thank you for the advice so far, I've had a look at Lightroom and Amazon are selling versions 5 and 6, Lightroom 5 is significantly cheaper at nearly half the price of 6 but I'm not sure whether the extras that 6 comes with are worth the £110 asking price. Any advice as to whether I should go for 5 or 6 would be much appreciated, thank you.

6 is better, but 5 is absolutely fine if your new to it. The one thing to check is that 5 supports the files that will come out of your camera. 

Jimbro66

stickyfiddle said:

zepp76 said:

Thank you for the advice so far, I've had a look at Lightroom and Amazon are selling versions 5 and 6, Lightroom 5 is significantly cheaper at nearly half the price of 6 but I'm not sure whether the extras that 6 comes with are worth the £110 asking price. Any advice as to whether I should go for 5 or 6 would be much appreciated, thank you.

6 is better, but 5 is absolutely fine if your new to it. The one thing to check is that 5 supports the files that will come out of your camera. 

Yes, files and lens profiles as you add to your lens collection. Just to mention, stand-alone Lightroom 6 is still available (just) but Adobe have for some time now ‘encouraged’ customers to move to Lightroom CC which is subscription based @£10pm. Some customers have embraced the change and others have protested.

I use LR6 almost exclusively for processing and cataloguing RAW files. I frequently use the NIk Collection plug-ins with it -  particularly Silver Efex Pro for monochrome images. Having just picked up a Fujifilm XE-3 as a more discrete ‘pocketable’ alternative to my prosumer DSLR I’m wondering if/how Lightroom 6 will cope (if at all) with the Fuji’s files. Does anyone here have any experience of that?

As regards other processing software, I did use DxO OpticsPro for a while and found it had some very appealing features but I just slipped back into using LR mainly because it’s cataloguing is second to none.

stickyfiddle

re the LR CC package, I resisted until I got a decent iPad and now I wouldn't be without it. It's just stupidly powerful and I can work on photos however I want/need without having to have a laptop with me

strumjoughlamps

stickyfiddle said:

re the LR CC package, I resisted until I got a decent iPad and now I wouldn't be without it. It's just stupidly powerful and I can work on photos however I want/need without having to have a laptop with me

And yet when I got an iPad Pro and started using Affinity I actually paid half the subs to get out of my CC package because I wasn’t using it..

just shows why why there are different programs out there, a bit like iOS and Android, this is why it’s best to sample them all.

ThePrettyDamned

strumjoughlamps said:

stickyfiddle said:

re the LR CC package, I resisted until I got a decent iPad and now I wouldn't be without it. It's just stupidly powerful and I can work on photos however I want/need without having to have a laptop with me

And yet when I got an iPad Pro and started using Affinity I actually paid half the subs to get out of my CC package because I wasn’t using it..

just shows why why there are different programs out there, a bit like iOS and Android, this is why it’s best to sample them all.

Does affinity compare more to photoshop or Lightroom? I could maybe be convinced to switch if its replaces Lightroom...

zepp76

What are the main advantages to having editing software? As of a week ago I wasn't even aware you needed software! I thought you just uploaded your photos to your pc and that was it. What are the kind of things I will need to look at editing in my photos? Any tips and tricks are much appreciated, thank you.

RaymondLin

zepp76 said:

What are the main advantages to having editing software? As of a week ago I wasn't even aware you needed software! I thought you just uploaded your photos to your pc and that was it. What are the kind of things I will need to look at editing in my photos? Any tips and tricks are much appreciated, thank you.

1 - You need it if you shoot RAW.  Why do you need to shoot RAW???? That's a can of worms.  Put it this way, RAW is a file that holds the maximum amount of information for a photo, so basically your photo can be the best quality that it can be.

2 - You can save a photo in post, clean it up.

3 - You can turn it into Art.  Adjust exposure, contrast, etc

4 - You can make it your own, have your style.

Jimbro66

zepp76 said:

What are the main advantages to having editing software? As of a week ago I wasn't even aware you needed software! I thought you just uploaded your photos to your pc and that was it. What are the kind of things I will need to look at editing in my photos? Any tips and tricks are much appreciated, thank you.

Your camera can produce photos as jpegs or RAW or both. JPEGs have already been processed in the camera so, yes, you can just upload them to your pc and job done. The jpegs will be perfectly adequate for social media. However, uploading RAW files of your photos to your pc and then editing them in software such as Photoshop will (depending on your skill) almost always result in better quality images than the in-camera jpegs. You also have the opportunity to modify the images, e.g. removing unwanted items. How much you can do to your images depends on the editing software.

Bear in mind also that the more photos you take the more it will be necessary to catalogue them in some way so that you can easily find them in the future. This is where a program like Lightroom is so helpful as it has an excellent cataloguing system.

RaymondLin

Jimbro66

RaymondLin said:

Perfect examples @RaymondLin. In this case pictures really do speak a thousand words.

fob

RaymondLin said:

Is the picture on the left before compression (RAW with JPEG as the after) or is it before and after software manipulation? I prefer the one on the left.

benmurray85

Question - I have been trying to make a real effort to improve my (zero) photography skills. Amongst other things I find I just don’t have the eye to see a shot. I’m snapping loads and getting a few decent images but it is definitely more luck than management. In short I’d love to improve my “artistic eye” is that something that people on here think is doable or is it just one of those things that you either have or you don’t. 

In other news I went to Blackpool last night to try and get some nice sunset stuff and bumped into an old guy wandering up and down the front. We had a proper chat and he gave me LOADS of tips. So shout out to that guy for being incredible! 

RiftAmps

benmurray85 said:

Question - I have been trying to make a real effort to improve my (zero) photography skills. Amongst other things I find I just don’t have the eye to see a shot. I’m snapping loads and getting a few decent images but it is definitely more luck than management. In short I’d love to improve my “artistic eye” is that something that people on here think is doable or is it just one of those things that you either have or you don’t. 

In other news I went to Blackpool last night to try and get some nice sunset stuff and bumped into an old guy wandering up and down the front. We had a proper chat and he gave me LOADS of tips. So shout out to that guy for being incredible! 

Type 'photography rule of thirds' or 'golden ratio' in YouTube and watch a few videos on each.

strumjoughlamps

ThePrettyDamned said:

strumjoughlamps said:

stickyfiddle said:

re the LR CC package, I resisted until I got a decent iPad and now I wouldn't be without it. It's just stupidly powerful and I can work on photos however I want/need without having to have a laptop with me

And yet when I got an iPad Pro and started using Affinity I actually paid half the subs to get out of my CC package because I wasn’t using it..

just shows why why there are different programs out there, a bit like iOS and Android, this is why it’s best to sample them all.

Does affinity compare more to photoshop or Lightroom? I could maybe be convinced to switch if its replaces Lightroom...

does not replace LR, nothing does IMO for overall photo management, but Affinity on iPad (especially Pro and Pencil combo) is unbeatable if you ask me.

editing with Affinity can be as basic as LR or as advanced as PS