Post your Horse Shots Here

[Maritimer1]

Well, I really thought the B&W was top notch, but I have to say that I now prefer your original because the colour and fog create such a dreamy, timeless atmosphere. Besides whatever cloning/tweaking might be done, I think I would try to tone down the greens a bit to give the whole a more muted feel. Personally, I don't find the background horses distracting, and I like the little pop of colour from the two halters. This is so nice, Wendy

[Maritimer1]

Shot this yesterday out on a walk in the Preseli hills, West Wales. He didn't want my apple!

Wild Pony

He's a cocky looking little fellow, isn't he? Rob, do they have vast tracks of unfenced land to roam?

[Donald]

If anyone has any hints on how to clone out the rest of the brown horses that are at the hay - let me know, I'd like to give it a try,

I know what you mean re giving it a try, as I wondered about that when i saw your original post. BUT .............

I think it would be possible, but would need a fair bit of patience and you'd need to be ready for high level concentration, working on very small areas at a time. But my BUT is - do you need to? What would it give the image to clone the background animals out? I know it's not a news documentary, but it tells a very powerful story. And in some stories there are things that get in the way sometimes. The jury would probably always be divided, but I wouldn't touch it any more.

[Maritimer1]

I'm with Donald. Keep the background pasture mates

[ScoutR]

I'm with Donald. Keep the background pasture mates

Yes, I think I will do that, it will be way to hard to clone them out, and I think the other horses catch the attention enough that they are not that noticeable.

I've done my rework per the suggestions given. Here is the original


Here is the rework. Don't know how I did with the cloning. It does not look too bad here, but let me know if it looks too messed up on your screens


You might notice a difference in tone and sharpening, which made me very aware of another very important thing to consider and that is WORKFLOW. Normally I save the PSD and a large jpg before resizing. Then I resize and resharpen to taste, and save as a smaller jpg for posting here. However, me being me, after I resize, I quite often do some other tweaks with levels or whatever... Sooo the problem is - if I want to re-edit as in this case, is it better to edit on the small resized image, so I keep all those tweaks - OR as I have done here, I opened the saved PSD pre downsizing and worked on that, but then could not duplicate the tweaks I made to the resized image. Is there a way to get around this, besides NOT tweaking the resized image.

Wendy

[Donald]

Wendy

I can't give you the answers to the questions you ask at the end of your post immediately above. The Elements users will need to come in on that.

But, and I'm sorry to put a dampener on what you've done, but the edit has, as you say, subtely changed the levels and, hence, the contrast and tones. And the original is better. The bodies of the horses, especially that on the left as we look at it, is flatter. The muscle does not show so well.

You're now going to get all stressed out about how to get the original AND clone. So, okay you could clone again on the re-sized image and it would probably look okay posted up here. OR you go back to the original, accept that it's a brilliant image about which a couple of us said 'Could clone a bit here or there', ignore those comments and enjoy you're succcess in capturing a beautiful image and turning it into a high quality picture.

[carregwen]

He's a cocky looking little fellow, isn't he? Rob, do they have vast tracks of unfenced land to roam?

A pretty large area. It's basically a long mountain ridge, about 1,500ft high, and about a mile wide including the slopes either side. There are cattle grids on the few roads so I guess they can't wander too far. See posts #44&52 above for more details.

[Maritimer1]

Thanks, Rob. I was skimming too quickly and missed those.

Myra

[ScoutR]

Wendy

I can't give you the answers to the questions you ask at the end of your post immediately above. The Elements users will need to come in on that.

But, and I'm sorry to put a dampener on what you've done, but the edit has, as you say, subtely changed the levels and, hence, the contrast and tones. And the original is better. The bodies of the horses, especially that on the left as we look at it, is flatter. The muscle does not show so well.

You're now going to get all stressed out about how to get the original AND clone. So, okay you could clone again on the re-sized image and it would probably look okay posted up here. OR you go back to the original, accept that it's a brilliant image about which a couple of us said 'Could clone a bit here or there', ignore those comments and enjoy you're succcess in capturing a beautiful image and turning it into a high quality picture.

Thanks Donald: I'm not stressed, I appreciate your comments, because you have confirmed that my screen is showing me the pretty well the same as what you are seeing.

I plan to go back to the one I just worked on (I saved it) and resize it again and then duplicate the tones in the original. I'm pretty sure I can do it, but need to wait till I have time. (and patience, which I would rate myself as a 1/5)

I would like to avoid this issue in the future though. I'm missing something here when it comes to when to save the files or how to keep track of what I've done after the save. Another good lesson.

Thanks again
Wendy

[Donald]

Wendy

I can't give you the answers to the questions you ask at the end of your post immediately above. The Elements users will need to come in on that.

But, and I'm sorry to put a dampener on what you've done, but the edit has, as you say, subtely changed the levels and, hence, the contrast and tones. And the original is better. The bodies of the horses, especially that on the left as we look at it, is flatter. The muscle does not show so well.

You're now going to get all stressed out about how to get the original AND clone. So, okay you could clone again on the re-sized image and it would probably look okay posted up here. OR you go back to the original, accept that it's a brilliant image about which a couple of us said 'Could clone a bit here or there', ignore those comments and enjoy you're succcess in capturing a beautiful image and turning it into a high quality picture.

Why do you save the PSD to a large JPG (I'm assuming you mean you overwrite the PSD and it becomes your JPG)?

If you kept the PSD and save a copy as a JPG then you have both (I assume you can do this with Elements). This is what I do with GIMP's .xcf files. Then if people, like me or Dave, come back with ideas that you think are worth trying, you can go back to your PSD, make the changes on a new layer (or however Elements works) and save another copy as JPG. Again, I don't know how it plays in Elements, but I NEVER flatten my .xcf files. Every layer remains there, so that if I ever want to go back to tweak, I can do so quite easily.

So, you have your large JPG seperately from your saved PSD and you can resize it. OR, you make a copy of the PSD, re-size it, put on your final sharpen and save it as your JPG. Lots of of ways to play it.

And then, you write out 1000 times - "I will never again tweak a JPG other than to put on the final sharpen"

[ScoutR]

Donald: I've always saved the PSD before resizing. I have lots of disk space so I just recently started saving a large jpg too. I'm not sure why, but I think it had something to do with maybe wanting to print something at some point, so I thought I would have the full size edited jpg ready.

I don't flatten anything either, so I don't have problems going back and editing the PSD. My problem is that after resizing I always seem to want to do more than sharpen. It just looks different when I resize and even though I was happy with the PSD before I decided to resize, after resizing and sharpening, I almost always end up tweaking. So, I will have to spend more time before resizing, but sometimes I think the final sharpen does change things a bit with regards to tone, and that is when I start tweaking. Perhaps it is a case of anticipating or knowing what the final sharpen will do and then adjusting for that beforehand. I will also have to check into the History function on Elements, I'm not sure, but perhaps that might help in a case like this if I learn how to read it.

"I will never again tweak a JPG other than to put on the final sharpen"
"I will never again tweak a JPG other than to put on the final sharpen"
"I will never again tweak a JPG other than to put on the final sharpen"
"I will never again tweak a JPG other than to put on the final sharpen" ...

[Maritimer1]

So, is it OK to delete the raw file if you have a PSD saved? I've been saving those as well, on thumb drives, as I don't have much computer space.

Glad you two brought this up!

Myra
Listening to the wind and rain from Hurricane Earl (He may just be a tropical storm by now)

[ScoutR]

Hi Myra, glad to see you have not blown away yet. We are getting sideways rain and wind gusts over here in Ontario so I can only imagine what it is like for you. Hope it all goes by quickly without any damage.

I have lots of disk space so I keep my originals and the PSD and the large and small jpg. I'm not sure about deleting the originals. I suppose if you do as Donald said and don't flatten the PSD you should always be able to go back to the original if you end up wanting to start over, as I often end up doing. With me they have to look good the next day and the day after that. Quite often when I go back a couple days later, I wonder what I was thinking.

I hope others will chime in, but in the meantime here are a couple old threads that I've been going through. I don't know if we will get our answers here or not, I just started reading them. As long as your power is still on they might be worth a look.

Tips on PS Editing For a Beginner

Workflow/Post-processing Overviews

Take Care and stay warm and dry
Wendy

Edit: here is another link that might help
Best method for archiving image files?

[Donald]

So, is it OK to delete the raw file if you have a PSD saved?

Myra
No, I save the RAW as well. So, for every image that's been kept there is (in my case):

1. The RAW file
2. The GIMP xcf file
3. The full-size jpg, should I ever get around to printing it
4. The small jpg with border that's uploaded on here.

[revi]

I seem to be a bit of an odd duck here:
Usually I end up with:
- the original RAW file,
- a 16-bit PNG produced with the Digikam editor (this program is mainly a classification/viewer program, but includes an editor that allows raw development, and quite a few global corrections, all in 16 bit per channel)
- trickier pictures also get a GIM xcf file
- and jpg as needed

I'd never throw away a RAW file I considered worth working on: it's the unmodified captured data, and as such irreplacable . As I'm still learning the details of PP, it happens too often that I go back to the original RAW.
(also my science training goes against throwing away raw data)

[Dave Humphries]

I always keep the RAW file too.
Previously, when disk space was limited, I would save a large unsharpened jpg, then down-size, final sharpen and Save As again for web publishing.
Sometimes I will save two sizes of web jpg; a 700px for CiC plus a larger one (around 1400) for PBase. In this caseI would downsize, sharpen, save, undo, undo, downsize differently, sharpen (slightly differently), save as different name.

Recently, with the band shots, I did start saving PSDs too. Once a file is saved as a ".psd", it won't get overwritten by a ".jpg" because as far as the computer is concerned, they are differently named files. Especially with Elements where cloning, layers, etc. has to be done 8 bit, I might Save As a 16 bit version too, I have a filenaming convention so I know which is which later.

I rarely print, but if I do and I have a full resolution PSD, I'd re-open that, sharpen, Save As an even larger jpg and print, I don't see the point in doing it 'just in case' because I do it sooo infrequently - but that may change

On the topic of seeing stuff and tweaking after down-size, yes it can be an issue for me, but as soon as you spot something, hit undo twice, make the change(s), the downsize and re-sharpen again - Elements users will find that USM will have remembered the settings, so there's little to do there. I always leave the image open in PSE until after I have uploaded to PBase or CiC as often I don't spot things until then. After the undos and changes, you can go back to Save As and change the file type back to PSD to save over that with the new changes and similarly for any large unsharpened jpgs, it will not degrade the quality as long as you have kept the image open in PSE all the time and haven't re-opened the jpg.

Back to the pictures; I can't see too much difference tonality between Wendy's revised mono and the original.

I hadn't 'detected' the missing bay legs (under the tummy), so I agree it definitely wasn't worth trying to clone them out between the two lead characters and doing so would quite drastically change the image.

Cheers,

[RonH]

Even has the makeup

[ScoutR]

On the topic of seeing stuff and tweaking after down-size, yes it can be an issue for me, but as soon as you spot something, hit undo twice, make the change(s), the downsize and re-sharpen again - Elements users will find that USM will have remembered the settings, so there's little to do there. I always leave the image open in PSE until after I have uploaded to PBase or CiC as often I don't spot things until then. After the undos and changes, you can go back to Save As and change the file type back to PSD to save over that with the new changes and similarly for any large unsharpened jpgs, it will not degrade the quality as long as you have kept the image open in PSE all the time and haven't re-opened the jpg.

Cheers,

Thanks Dave: I think the part in bold is the key for me. Undo Undo edit resize and sharpen again. I just have to catch myself before I start doodling around on the resized image.
I remember a long time ago you asked about organizing files. I only had a few at that point and thought I had a system. Now that I am getting more files it is turning into a real can of worms trying to decide how to organize them. Add all the different file formats and resizes and it can get pretty crazy trying to keep them organized. I think I'm on the right track, but your comment about having a file naming convention to distinguish between different versions is another idea that I think I will put into practice.

Thanks
Wendy

[ScoutR]

She is a pretty girl Ron. All dressed up in her Sunday halter and such a nice hairstyle - that middle part must be in vouge this year. I think she needs a tissue though her left nostril needs a wipe. I'll bet that is why her ears are back, she is distressed about having her picture taken in such a state. Perhaps you could help her out.

Wendy

[Maritimer1]

Even has the makeup

That is a very pretty girl! The colours of the background blend in nicely with her coat, too.