Adobe Photoshop & Post Processing

I'm going to deviate from my normal type of blog post of showcasing pics from recent sessions. Today I want to let you in on some of the secret sauce that goes into making awesome photography. What can make a photo go from dud to stud? What can give you the extra POP an already good photo doesn't have. If I can name 1 single tool that has single handily change the photographic medium it would UNEQUIVOCALLY be Adobe Photoshop.

Photographers have always had a degree of "photoshop" applied to their images as long as cameras have been around. The darkroom was the photoshop of it's day. Many WELL know photographers spent MUCH time in what is known as "post processing" to really make an image shine. Today the darkroom is still very active albeit not as subscribed to by as many in contrast to the "digital darkroom" found on any computer. In short, post processing has never been easier nor more fluid then it is today. The post processing/photoshop capabilities are absolutely endless. Painfully however, with such ease also comes the innumerable amount of BAD attempts at the craft of post processing. If you have some time to kill and don't mind your ribs hurting for about an hour, hop over to the cesspool of mediocrity that is PhotoshopDisasters.com It's not bad, it's OMG bad. It's in my bookmarks :)

I recently did a model shoot that ended in a historic graveyard just on the outskirts of Sacramento. The photo in my header was one of my favorites from the day in way of composition, posing and message. The image you see is almost SOOC, (straight out of camera). I have VERY little to no photoshop work done to it at all. I had some extremely talented photographer friends have at it with their take on my "graveyard" shot of Chantal our model. I LOVE these renditions. All of them VERY creative and so different from the starting image I presented. After viewing, please clinck on their names and visit their sites. You'll leave inspired.

Their take:



Rian Flynn (My favorite in the set. I LOVE what he did)
Jim (notice the green grass she sits on. Very clever and story telling)
Richard Lavigne, (Dig his desaturated, low contrast look)

Tony Hoffer, (this guy needs no intro from me. Hoff always brings it)
Diane Stredicke (Diane's take is a close second for me. I really like this rendition)
Zoltan Kenwell (this one is SO awesome. I LOVE IT)

Sam Obeid (did deviate much from what I did. I like :) Steven Bonnau (Check out that sky. So angry and fitting IMO, you never would have guessed it was a 70* day.
Corazon Photography (The tones and the dead grass in this one stand it out amoung the rest)
Trent Ferguson (Trent rounds us off with a well done B&W. Excellant)