I've been going through old photos in the process of redoing my website. Looking at some of my earlier work has been a little humbling. I definitely had my moments of missed focus, underexposure and horrific composition. But the funniest thing to look at was how horribly I massacred my pictures in Photoshop afterwards. Here's a picture from the very first time I took photos for a stranger in 2007. She requested that I processed them in sepia and I found this "great free" Photoshop action online. I thought I pretty much rocked it. Um... Wow. So just out of curiosity I reprocessed the same picture today to see the difference. A little better don't you think? Better skin tones. Softer feel to fit with a newborn photo. Less contrasty. Much better.
So with this I pass on a few pieces of advice to new photographers so that they can learn from my mistakes:
1. Just because you can do something in Photoshop... doesn't mean you should.
2. Unless an action is fully adjustable... don't use it.
3. Less is more. You can ruin a perfectly good photo by overprocessing it.
4. Pay attention to blown highlights and clipped shadows. If you don't know what that means... learn.
5. Get critique. I asked some pretty awesome photographers to critique some photos for me. They let me have it. It hurt... I cried... but it was the BEST learning experience ever.
1 comment:
I can totally relate. Technology is also another one of those things that amazes me as time goes by. Moving away from .jpgs to ACR processing. The control we have now, compared to just a few yrs ago, is so vast!
Happy shooting!
Kristin (friend of Christie's)
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