RAW pic here, Request to seniors edit it & please share your skills for new students

[sachinpt]

Opened in ACR and instead of using recovery I used -1.05 exposure; if I can still see bumps I know there is detail.

Used auto white balance on 16 bit.

Used mostly Topaz on 16 bit.

Helicon to crop, clone and straighten all 16 bit.

Then a bit of trickery in PSE10 in 8 bit.

1900px wide but I've got a 6000 x 4242 and don't know how to get it up here.

the sky is a bit dodgy, I replaced the colour 16 bit.

Thanks Steve & friends

Steve You shared your all editing details....... but I am very new (like primary school student in photography ) in photography so please tell me which software is good for editing. Now I am using DPP and after observing above images I got some details about DPP.

Please suggest good software.

[Colin Southern]

Please suggest good software.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the industry "gold standard" (that's what I use, exclusively)

[jeeperman]

I am cheap....we'll call it thrifty and have yet to break down and purchase Photoshop. I use Gimp, You can download it free online. While the learning curve tends to be most peoples issue with it....it is quite powerful.

[Photon Hacker]

I am cheap....we'll call it thrifty and have yet to break down and purchase Photoshop. I use Gimp, which is a shareware. You can download it free online. While the learning curve tends to be most peoples issue with it....it is quite powerful.

No, GIMP isn't shareware (Proprietary software that can be used without payment, usually with a limited functionality, but for which a payment for usage is expected).

GIMP (The GNU Image Manipulation Program) is free software; free as in freedom. That means you (General public) have the right to run, modify and redistribute it in contrast to proprietary software like Adobe Photoshop, of which you as user are forbidden to distribute copies, study its inner workings and modify them and even to run it unless you have paid for a license. Those are restrictions we (Free software supporters) consider immoral.

We several free software supporters aren't willing to support nor accept those restrictions so we don't use proprietary software like Adobe Photoshop. I use The GIMP and RawTherapee in GNU/Linux that have roughly the same scope of use as far as I know.

GIMP also happens to be free as in free beer to use, but from the free software philosophy that's not important. Most free software can also be downloaded by general public at no charge.

You can donate to the project in gratitude of the already done work, to promote further work.

You can learn more about the free software philosophy in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html.

Regards.

[jeeperman]

Thank you Mario for correcting that. I used the wrong terminology. Post above corrected.

[Photon Hacker]

Thank you Mario for correcting that. I used the wrong terminology.

No problem. Thanks you.

[Momo]

A lot of interesting looks in this thread. This photo has a lot of underlying color just waiting to come out. So, it is the color on which I focused.

1. Open in ACR (Adobe Camera RAW - comes with Photoshop)
2. Set white balance using 'auto' - looked good enough.
3. Pushed up Recovery to 100% to try and bring back some of the blown out areas. Press and hold down the ALT key while moving the slider to see the blown out spots come back.
4. Pushed up the blacks to 9. Again, press and hold ALT to see your changes in real-time
5. Hold down SHIFT to open as a smart object in PS
6. Copy layer and rasterize new copied layer
7. Spot healed light in the sky on the left to remove it.
8. Removed tree on left with content-aware fill
9. Removed railing in lower left with content-aware fill
10. Cropped image putting left tower on upper third intersection and water horizon on lower third
11. Used Topaz Adjust 5 to make colors sizzle and pop
12. Used Imagenomic's Noiseware to remove noise in the sky.
13. Export to JPEG
14. Upload to Tinypic
15. Type this stuff
16. Pet whiny cat next to me on windowsill
17. Done.

[Photon Hacker]

I was sliding sliders in RawTherapee for around 2 hours without settling on anything. I had no success. I couldn't decide on a white balance and overall contrast. I will try again tomorrow when I will be fresh.

Sachin: Didn't you shoot a white card for white balance reference?. By the way, any reason to shoot at such small aperture?.

[arith]

Thanks Steve & friends

Steve You shared your all editing details....... but I am very new (like primary school student in photography ) in photography so please tell me which software is good for editing. Now I am using DPP and after observing above images I got some details about DPP.

Please suggest good software.

Hi Sachin; I used to use GIMP but found it difficult. As I can't afford CS5 I bought PSE10 and have Topaz plugins to do the noise and sharpening.
Also I have Helicon Filter which is shareware but at arounf £20 per annum isn't too expensive. In fact Helicon is an aweful program on a slow computer because it does too much. But now I have a fast computer that can run as fast as anybody's and Helicon Filter is actually superior for distortion fixing, cloning and resizing to photoshop.

However if you like CS5, then if you buy an older version of PSE from version 8, you may be offered CS5 at half price. This is not guaranteed however; but every year I'm offered CS5 usually when I have just spent all my money on something else.

[Joftan]

Hi - Here's what I've done. ACR - LAB Colour - Curves - Gaussian Blur -Crop and Final Sharpen.

[sachinpt]

Thanks Friends.

Now I purchase CS5 in next week.

[KCBrecks]

I have been accused of having a great big northern chip on my shoulder but this is a very evocative image of Tower Bridge. I am a novice at post production and don't have any of the expensive tools, so I adjusted the colour temperature to just around 3000K and dropped the brightness a little in the Canon provided Digital Photo Professional which gave the blue tinge to the bridge and river but left a little of the orange in the sky. I used Irfanview to rotate it to the left by 0.7degrees and then cropped the image. Then I used Photoscape to sharpen and their Clone tool to remove the bright pink dot in the left and the tree twigs. An interesting exercise. Thanks for the opportunity.

[pwnage101]

I used RawTherapee and GIMP.
RawTherapee processing parameters

[sachinpt]

Thanks Friends,

Tomorrow (19 April) I am going to India (Pune) for 15 days.

Thanks.
Sachin

[Colin Southern]

Thanks Friends,

Tomorrow (19 April) I am going to India (Pune) for 15 days.

Thanks.
Sachin

Hope you have a great trip. Don't forget your camera!

[sachinpt]

Thanks Colin,

Camera is my second wife now( My wife get angry if I say 1st ). Going to home town so camera is important.

Thanks,
Sachin

[Tony M]

Those are restrictions we (Free software supporters) consider immoral.

I know this is a photography thread, but I can't leave this one alone. Mario, do you think the same about digital photos?

I read the link you referred to and it doesn't really address the fundamental reason for charging for software, which even Karl Marx would support, which is to compensate for labour expended on its creation. It is the foundation of capitalism and communism and every other system in-between. The 'Economics' argument of the GNU site is surprisingly weak - the analogy of the sandwich is flawed. I can do anything I want with the sandwich, but if I eat it (the primary purpose behind buying it), then I can't give a copy of it to someone else.

I develop software for a living. My compensation for my labour is in the form of a salary. I admire people who develop free software and would consider doing it if I won the lottery. (I'm quite selfish with my spare time.) But I don't think it is any less moral to charge for software than it is to charge entry to a ballet and prohibit the use of a camera during the performance.

Tony

[Tony M]

Sachin,

Your photo is great and it's interesting to see how the experts are manipulating it. I'll be studying their edits in more detail later.

I lived in London 17 years and during some of them I cycled over the Tower Bridge every day to go to work. I sometimes had to wait while they raised the bridge for boats to go through - a remarkable piece of engineering.

(I won't hijack this thread to discuss free software. Apologies to all but I had to make my thoughts known. I propose that if anyone continues that conversation, then he or she create another thread.)

Tony

[pwnage101]

I use The GIMP and RawTherapee in GNU/Linux that have roughly the same scope of use as far as I know.

Amen. I refuse (as much as possible) to pay for proprietary software and will donate to open source projects. This summer I plan on contributing code to RawTherapee.

I use GNU/linux, RawTherapee, and GIMP exclusively.

[Colin Southern]

Amen. I refuse (as much as possible) to pay for proprietary software and will donate to open source projects. This summer I plan on contributing code to RawTherapee.

I use GNU/linux, RawTherapee, and GIMP exclusively.

Just had a look at "the link" and actually found it quite disturbing in terms of what I consider to be a lot of evangelism & extremely weak arguments. And to be honest, having read it, personally, I'd go out of my way to give it a wide berth.

My view is that if one group of folks want to put the effort into creating something for free then that's their right - and if another group want to then use that free software then that's their right too -- no problems with that at all.

But I also share the view that if someone creates something then it's their right to put whatever they like into any agreement covering it's use -- and it's everybody elses right to reject that agreement if they don't agree with it (but with the consequence of course that they then can't use the product). And the creator gets to "enjoy" commercial success or failure based on the quality of the product - the effectiveness of the marketing - and the scope of what they put into their agreement (and other factors too).

Personally, I'm the complete opposite to Troy - I use paid for products such as Windows, Photoshop, Microsoft Office (and many more) - and are more than happy to have paid for a licence to use them. I also believe that packages like Photoshop give me a commercial advantage.

At the end of the day it's business (the commercial exchange of values for want of a better definition) that keeps the global economies turning over.