PB Monthly Assignment, May, 2010: The Magic of Postprocessing and Spring Has Sprung

[dcg0317]

 

[budmonster]

Signs of Spring:
The dragonflies love the new crepe myrtle trees I planted.

[/IMG]

 

[Marlton Mom]

Here are some pictures shot in Ocean City NJ from May 15th to the 20th. For this thread, I included the ones where I did a lot of changing in Photoshop.

This link will take you to my original post with all of my "keepers" from the trip.
http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2473500

I usually shoot in raw and jpeg. Somewhere along the line the focusing mechanism locked up and I had to "reboot" the camera mid shoot. Doing that switches it into just jpeg exposures. I didn't discover this until I downloaded the memory card later. (Damn Nikon D60!!)

I use Photoshop CS4. I start first with the camera raw settings and then I save it and open it in Photoshop for more tweaking with levels, Hue/sat and contrast. Click on the pics for a link to flickr and the EXIF data.

For this trip I shot on manual and bracketed my exposures by varying shutter speed. My ISO was chained to 100.

Here is the before shot (jpeg) for Corson's Inlet sunset. I don't save the original Raw files once I have edited them.



And here is the Photoshopped one



Here is another difficult shot from an exposure perspective.

The before jpeg of beach fence at sunrise



After PhotoShop





For the "Sandy Wave" picture I decided to go with an extreme blue on the ocean. I thought it looked intriguing and I feel it draws one's eye into the picture. The contrast is maxed out and that's what highlights all of the the white spots on the water. "Sandy" was also a jpeg only pix as the camera settings had changed due to the "reboot"

Sandy wave before:




And after:

 

[ColleenG]

Beautiful pics Marlton Mom. Great job on the processing!