Well not all compact cameras are bad, even though i'll give it to you most are crappy, but the Canon Ixus serie is known to be a good one, for both optical and usage reasons.
As i mentionned in my journal, i'm not totally satisfied of this specific picture, because i actually significantly lost in quality compared to my master picture. I thought a slight rotation would make the composition better, which it does, but the loss of quality is very saddening. Everything comes with a price as some friend of mine just noticed :) But i don't think i shall ever rotate a picture again.
As for post-production, i'm usually not too heavy-handed for i don't want my pictures look like some expressionist painting. Nevertheless there are basic adjustement operations which can greatly improve a picture's look without altering the natural feeling.
First, if needed, the composition can be corrected and balanced by cropping judiciously the right portion (the rule of the 3-thirds can be of some use). Then contrast and brightness should be adjusted, for raw pictures out-of-the-box rarely give justice to the reality. For this purpose, the Auto contrast, Auto levels and Auto colors in photoshop can do wonders. Curves can afterward eventually be adjusted, that is a magical tool as well - it can make a masterpiece of a picture, or totally kill it, choices to make, that's where post-production becomes an artistic part of the creation as well. The selective color tool requires a bit of practice as well, but can be very useful to correct color tones. Add a bit of cloning to that in order to remove disturbing artefacts, and a final, wisely dosed, unsharp mask filter on the reduced picture to reveal fine details, and you should be able to do miracles :)
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Date: 2005-03-12 08:12 pm (UTC)even though i'll give it to you most are crappy,
but the Canon Ixus serie is known to be a good one,
for both optical and usage reasons.
As i mentionned in my journal, i'm not totally
satisfied of this specific picture, because i
actually significantly lost in quality compared
to my master picture. I thought a slight rotation
would make the composition better, which it does,
but the loss of quality is very saddening. Everything
comes with a price as some friend of mine just noticed :)
But i don't think i shall ever rotate a picture again.
As for post-production, i'm usually not too heavy-handed
for i don't want my pictures look like some expressionist
painting. Nevertheless there are basic adjustement operations
which can greatly improve a picture's look without altering the
natural feeling.
First, if needed, the composition can be corrected and balanced by
cropping judiciously the right portion (the rule of the 3-thirds can
be of some use). Then contrast and brightness should be adjusted, for
raw pictures out-of-the-box rarely give justice to the reality. For
this purpose, the Auto contrast, Auto levels and Auto colors in photoshop
can do wonders. Curves can afterward eventually be adjusted, that is
a magical tool as well - it can make a masterpiece of a picture, or
totally kill it, choices to make, that's where post-production becomes
an artistic part of the creation as well. The selective color tool
requires a bit of practice as well, but can be very useful to correct
color tones. Add a bit of cloning to that in order to remove disturbing
artefacts, and a final, wisely dosed, unsharp mask filter on the reduced
picture to reveal fine details, and you should be able to do miracles :)