Forget the whales, save the .jpg's

[95PGTTech]

Did I successfully throw the flotation device out to these two or just throw chum in the water around them?

These were both from my first day of owning the camera, but I figured I'd give a crop and see what the basic sharpen/RGB/contrast could do. I went for the over the top saturation on this one, figured I'd roll the dice.







This one I tried to bail out by darkening it up a bit and adding quite a bit of contrast to try and give it some sharper lines. At first I cropped out the very busy top, but it just didn't make sense optically to have a bench, which you sit on, at the top of an image, so I just sucked it up and cropped the bottom.

[GB1]

Tech - All very powerful images in their own right. You did a good job in isolating the subjects so that there are no distractions ! Your use of shallow DOF really helped that. I prefer the first one over the super saturated leaf shot btw. As for the bench I like the composition of # 3 (might want to crop out a tad of the foreground) but the extra contrast is interesting in # 4 , though may be a bit over the top and harsh. In general though, IMO all four work. Have fun w/ the new camera

G

[MichaelD]

Nice shots, but as for the corrections; you have gone too far. It's important with every correction that you keep an eye on your highlights and shadows, with your eyes or even better with color samplers that most image editors have (the combination of color samplers and the info palette in Photoshop is really helpful).

The red dots are areas in which you reach RGB 0,0,0 (pure black) or RGB 255,255,255. (pure white). In nature you will seldom see pure black and pure white, although in some situations, like with this bright background, it's possible to reach close to pure white in digital photography, but that's not a major issue.

Especially pure black is basically impossible to see in a photograph, since we need light to take a shot and it's this light (direct or reflected) that basically doesn't allow anything to be pure black. Too much pure whites and blacks results always in an image that has too much contrast, since you decreased the dynamic range. But mind you, as a Photoshop site owner I have met many people who tend to make this mistake. I hope that my advice was helpful.

[95PGTTech]

Thanks for the comments, I will keep that in mind. After looking at it again, just too much saturation brought out color in the gravel, which I really did not want. Also, a little too little DOF as the leaf tails off.