editing/re-touching photos

[Gerryatrics]

I like to take pictures, but I'm not a professional by any means, I'm more of a point and shoot kind of guy. Every once and a while I manage to get a decent shot, but I do almost nothing with them after they are done. Beyond simple cropping and red eye reduction, I'm worthless. I took some pics of one of my favourite bands at a music festival last week, and I want to do some basic post production stuff, adjusting color levels, brightness, contrast... all that stuff, maybe sharpen a few of the photos a little bit.

Are there any programs out there that will do a really great job of all that stuff on it's own that I can easily get my hands on? How about a program that takes a little input but I should be able to figure out how to best use everything in a couple of hours? Better yet, anybody a whiz at this sort of thing that wants to go through a dozen pics or so to punch them up?

I don't have any of the pics online yet, but you can check out some pics of a different band at a different concert taken with the same camera, to give you an idea of what the raw photos are like. http://s17.photobucket.com/albums/b84/DCTORN/Thousand%20Foot%20Krutch/

I know I'm asking for a lot, but if any of you guys could help me out, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

[SpursWoman]

Are there any programs out there that will do a really great job of all that stuff on it's own that I can easily get my hands on?


Do you have Limewire? :nerd :angel

[NorCal510]

Do you have Limewire? :nerd :angel
limewire doesnt fix up pics it dl's music nahimsayin

[kobe_bryant]

watermark those pictures son

they might end up on gay lance bass websites

[Kori Ellis]

limewire doesnt fix up pics it dl's music nahimsayin

You missed the point of her question entirely. Go back to the Troll forum.

[MoSpur]

TFK is a very good band. I saw them here in December. Good pictures.

[Gerryatrics]

Do you have Limewire? :nerd :angel

I could...


TFK is a very good band. I saw them here in December. Good pictures.

Thanks. They are a very good band, they were at the music festival but I was only able to catch a few songs. The pics are from last summer, they played before a Tacoma Rainiers (local AAA baseball team) game. Lots of fun.

[boutons_]

I've used Paint Shop Pro for 10 years. It was on the edge of getting to complicated for my purposes, when they added a whole bunch of photo touchup features which are just great.

Very few digital cameras, including the Nikon D70 of a friend mine, put out images that cannot be significantly improved. Mabye the D70 owner doesn't know how to use his camera, but my 5 year Sony Mavica + PSP turns out better pics.

Most raw images can be improved with just a touch of increased contrast and saturation.

full-sun and flash shots are often over exposed, colors washed out, so reducing the brightness and increasing the saturation and contrast help.

indoor shots in available lighting are nearly always way off color.

overcast/shade/skylight shots are nearly always too blue, missing red.

Evening/morning shots can be too orange/red.

shots in fluorescent lights are a bitch to correct for color

And many digital images like cameras and scanners tend to err with too much red in shots that have natural lighting.

The entire area of photo touch up is very subjective. But Paint Shop Pro is a good tool.

[SpursWoman]

Corel Photo Paint & Photoshop are good as well. :)

[NZ Spurs]

^ Thats a very simplified way to look at it. If you want to get into it seriously there is alot of reading to be done in RAW conversion.

Your friend obviously doesn't know how to use his D70, You can set the camera up to adjust "in camera" if he doesn't know how to use photoshop properly, that will produce better photos.

Photoshop is the tool you want, the camera raw feature is excellent.

[Gerryatrics]

I've uploaded a couple of random pics from the concert, and a couple of other random pics from the trip, to give you guys an idea of what I'm working with, or want to work with anyway. I should add when I said "raw" I meant in JPEG format straight out of the camera, not in RAW format. The pics are shrunk automatically by photobucket, so there is a little artifacting. http://s17.photobucket.com/albums/b84/DCTORN/Creation/

[Fillmoe]

i have a copy of photoshop... i could up it to yousendit.com if you want it.... it would take awhile though.... my upload speed is like 30kbps

[1369]

Buy a Mac.

[Gerryatrics]

OK, I decided to give Photoshop a try. Now I just need to know what to do with the images in Photoshop. I opened up Photoshop and pressed lots of random buttons, which didn't seem to do much to improve the pics. I also tried out ImageReady, but couldn't do much with that either. Anyone want to walk me through touching up one or two of the pics so I can get an idea of what I'm supposed to be doing?

[Kori Ellis]

With the picture open, click Image/Adjustments/Auto Levels.

If that doesn't correct it how you want, click Image/Adjustments/Brightness & Contrast and see what you can do when you fiddle with that.