Today I’ve decided to post a series of “before” and “after” sequences (in the form of a slideshow) where I show you images, all of which have appeared on the blog in the past, as they were straight from the camera with no processing whatsoever and how the finished post-processed result turned out. I showed these images at Dublin Camera Club’s member showcase last night, and the idea to do so followed on from yesterday’s post on how I was able to rescue a badly exposed RAW file. That post has proved to be one of the most popular posts on the blog to date with 9 re-tweets of it on Twitter and double the usual number of page views for a post’s first day (though interestingly, no comments yet!). It seems that as photographers, we like to see not only post-processed images, but also images as they were straight from the camera.
Rather than walk you through each image’s processing and the steps involved, I’m going to let the slideshow speak for itself, except to say that what is illustrated here is processing that varies from very basic adjustments to create a decent JPEG image from a RAW file (particularly adjusting contrast to lift what can be flat RAW files) all the way through to less basic merges of multiple exposures from one RAW file to create a psuedo-HDR image where there’s detail throughout the range of highlights and shadows.
In between you’ll see some cropping, which is something I often use for action sequences where I frame that bit wider (be it a rugby scrum, a child sliding down a bouncy castle, or a first dance where I know not where the bride and groom will go next) and you’ll see some straightening, where I fix my in-built horizon which is regularly about 2 degrees off.
In all but one case, the processing is done entirely in Aperture (some are Aperture 2, some are Aperture 3) and could equally be performed using Lightroom, Photoshop Elements or Photoshop. The exception is the image you see at the top of this post, which is a composite of two shots, and the processing of each (again, Aperture-only) is shown separately first.
So if you’re interested (and not browsing this site on an iPhone, iPad or other device that doesn’t support Flash – sorry!) set aside 2 minutes to see some befores and afters and click on the image below or on the play button at bottom left to begin.
Oh, and as always, comments (good or bad) are very welcome!
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