HELP WITH EDITING!?

[Jack Rhys Martin]

Hi there, could anybody please look at some of my latest aircraft images and tell me what you think? Where I am wrong and need to improve.

LINK TO IMAGES: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flightanimation/

Cheers, Jack!

[Ian Gains]

Hi Jack, I like all of your shots except the QF 767 which could have done with better lighting as they are such a common subject. Personally, I wouldn't crop quite as tight as you have to the nose & tail of the aircraft, unless the shot ends up that way when you take it as you are panning the aircraft.

I'm new to this digi game after shooting slides for 35 years & it's good to be able to improve a shot after taking it, but if it's a good shot in the 1st place, you shouldn't need to do too much to it afterwards IMHO.

Are you shooting RAW files or JPG's & which program(s) are you editing them with ?

Cheers, Ian.

[Jack Rhys Martin]

Hi Ian, Thanks for your Help, I didn't particularly like that QF767 shot either. All of these shots were taken facing east between 9-1PM, so i was facing the sun, I will upload the originals and see what you think.

I shoot in JPEG and edit in photoshop CS4.

I think I will re-crop these images and see how they look, what ratio do you also cropping with? 3:2 or 4:3?


Cheers Jack.

[Ian Gains]

Hi Jack. I'll be interested to see the originals. Generally with any 'action' type photo where movement is implied, the more successful photos work better if the viewer can see a little of where the vehicle is going, so with aircraft this means having a slightly greater gap from the aircraft's nose to the frame edge than is necessary to the edge of the aircraft's tail. Certainly with motorcycles & cars, this is true but probably less so with aircraft, so a 'tight' crop can work OK, especially if the crop is removing distracting content from the shot.

Seeing as I'm used to viewing slides which are 36mm X 24mm, I prefer the 3:2 ratio, but if they are going to be viewed on HD TV's or similar, I would consider changing the camera setting to 4:3 or even 16:9 so that the black border effect is minimized or eliminated.

I've only had my DSLR since mid May so I'm still playing around with various settings before an overseas trip in October, but a good mate who makes websites for his work has advised me to shoot in RAW to obtain the highest quality images. You can do more with the image after downloading it (even though you don't have to !) & some cameras in-camera JPEG processing can be fairly crude, so its good to have the control back in your hands. It just means re-formatting the card (CF in my case) more often & having larger cards available for a long trip as some RAW files can reach 25mb compared to 6mb for 'fine' JPEG's. At present, I'm downloading the images to a fairly modern PC and using Canon's DPP for minor changes, but I'm evaluating whether a Mac and Adobe Lightroom will be a better long term solution with regards to cataloging & image retrieval. More reading to be done here !

[Beau Chenery]

Ian, Lightroom is excellent! Made by Adobe for photographers..

Once you learn to make good use of the program in properly developing your photos you will find it so easy and notice how quickly your photography improves..

For example in Lightroom, I'll import all my photos from a session and go through them and mark each photo I don't want by pressing x, which rejects the photo. Then I will delete all the photos I don't want to save space on my computer seeing as though I will never use them again. From here I go to the editing phase. Say you are taking photos from one spot in afternoon conditions and you find yourself applying the same settings, contrast, exposure, sharpen, brightness, fill etc on all photos you can save this as a preset and then apply easily to all photos. Then exporting them is simply done by clicking export and bulk exporting them.

If you are really serious you can tag photos with meta data info, ie Regos for future use when trying to find photos. Do some research on this one.. I don't bother too much.

I think the Mac is excellent, new retina display on the MacBook pro is excellent.

Jack - your photos are fine. Airliners, jetphotos have their own standards and personally I have my own views about the thoughts of the quality of some of their screeners. I've sold photos to companies that they have rejected.. Time and experience will increase your portfolio.. Experiment as well!!

Beau

[Ian Gains]

Thanks for the advice Beau. I'm pretty sure that I'll go down the Mac with Lightroom road, but there is no rush, so more reading to do. I like the fact that it looks as if it saves 'processing' time as I don't want to spend lots of time sitting in front of a desk. The tagging by registration / location does appeal to me as that is how I remember the aircraft.

Out of interest, what ISO setting do you guys use ? I'm winding it down to 100 for static shots, but I'm preferring the action shots at 400, to use a faster shutter speed even with IS on the Canon lens. Quality doesn't appear to suffer any to me on a Canon 7D.

[Beau Chenery]

Daylight iso 100, morning/dusk 400 maybe higher, then reduce The noise post processing.It's about light not so much about planes are moving or not. If your shooting a plane during the day in broad daylight your adding unneccessary noise to the image by shooting with 400

I've become a bit more picky with the 7D. I think it gives off abit too much noise compared to the 5dmkii and mkiii however the fps wins it for me because I photograph sport as well.

I can't recommend Lightroom highly enough..

Hope this helps

Beau

[Jack Rhys Martin]

Here is my before and after, I re-did those I had already done and added a few more. http://www.flickr.com/photos/flightanim ... 80/detail/

I agree with Beau, Lightroom is a fantastic piece of software, I used to use it but found Photoshop had more of what I needed.


While we are on this topic, can anybody tell me how this photo was accepted by 'jetphotos.net' http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=7375602

It is by far one of my worst photo's I have tried to upload and it was accepted... To me it seems over saturated, over exposed and the nose is blurred!?

[Ian Gains]

Hi Jack. I can see the cropping differences & that the colours are more vivid, with whiter whites. Seeing as I'm new to this, what editing did you perform on the originals ?

I can see what you mean by the QF 767 shot, but it is useable.

[Jack Rhys Martin]

THIS IS HOW I HAVE EDITED THEM STEP BY STEP:

NOTE: Using photoshop CS4

1 - I level the photo.
2 - Manually adjust levels.
3 - Adjust shadows from 0-5%
4 - Adjust hhighlights from about 0-10%
5- boost saturation from 0-5%.
6 - Boost brightness from 0-4%.
7 - Adjust contrast to liking.
8 - resize image to 1024 pixels wide.
9 - use unsharp mask for sharpening.
10 - Fine tune to my liking.
11 - Save as jpg. As max quality usually between 300-700Kb file size.

I hope that's what your were asking for Ian, if not let me know

Yeah, the QF 767... it's usable but the aircraft shadows pretty much ruin it.

I used to like that orange (sunset) feel to it, but I Guess it is more natural to have them white as seen by the eye. So I stopped changing those colours around and left it white.

[Ian Gains]

Thanks Jack. They will be a good reference point if/when I start doing some post shooting work on my images.

Thanks for your input too Beau.

[Beau Chenery]

And then steps 1 - 7 can be done in one click in Lightroom

No worries

Beau

[Dave Parer]

Hi guys,

Thanks for this thread. I myself have only really taken to serious aviation digital photography in the last few months.

After reading your posts, I have downloaded Adobe Lightroom and find it a very good program.

Cheers,
Dave.

PS - Beau, I have just PM you.

[Ian Gains]

Hi Dave,

Can I enquire how much you paid for Lightroom, & are you using it on a PC or a Mac ?

Guys, what is the best & most cost effective way of calibrating the screen/monitor before making colour & density adjustments ? MTIA.

[LUKEJOHNSON]

Hi Ian,

I have used Lightroom (4) on both a PC and a Mac and I would have to say I very much prefer it on a Mac (might just because my PC is getting on a bit).

As for the price - I got mine thought work so I'm not exactly sure but I'm pretty sure it's around $200 for Lightroom 4, depending on where you get it from.

It really is a great product especially for large batches of photos which are similar in nature (I.e a day at the airport) because of the settings you can preset and apply to the whole batch. I would still recommend editing in Photoshop when you have only a few good photos to edit as I believe it is still better for getting down to the nitty gritty of photo editing but for large batches (I.e airshows etc.) I would highly recommend lightroom.

Hope this helps,

Luke