How do you prefer your pictures to look?

Question

Do you like to download pictures that are original or do you use a program such as Photoshop or something similar? Why please?

Answer 1

As a general rule I take huge photos with my camera. I use photo shop to shrink them before adding them to the internet.

Then.. It depends on each photo, whether I might crop it, or sometimes remove things like telephone lines, or sometimes it's perfect the way I've taken it.

Answer 2

I like to take pictures myself, and I do edit them in Lightroom or Photoshop to improve the exposure, crop, straighten etc, and sometimes to clone out a piece of rubbish on the grass or something like that.

You don't always have the optimal weather or lighting when taking photos, so sometimes they need lightening and sometimes a bit of darkening if the camera has "blown out" the skies for instance. So sometimes the photo does not look like it actually did in real life, so I don't think it is bad to adjust an image for this.

But since I do graphic design as well, I sometimes get a bit picky about pictures, which is why I end up trying to take my own photos. I don't like the date appearing on photos (which others may have on their digital file), but on the other hand that can be very useful when it comes to family photos and records.

Comments

I am an old school photographer. I use film. I do not own a digital camera except for the one on my camera. Basically all they can do is point and click. What do you do with older pictures if they may have faded or have been torn or just poor quality?

---

I do digitally restore photos as well. Ones that have tears and holes, or burn marks. There are a lot of people out there that do digital restoration. I only do it for my own photos, and have had one my mother's portraits restored externally. It was well worth it to me.

Starting with a scanned copy, and digitising and restoring it will preserve the image for many more years to come, instead of relying only on the print copy, which you don't want to be handled any more, or in the sunlight. Also some old photos, as you say are poor quality. Some of the ones in my father's album were from his grandparents and only an inch in size. I use software made for upscaling images to make them larger and easier to work with and view. But you can usually only upscale them marginally when they are that small, but it gives a better result than simply stretching the image in Photoshop or something else, as that just makes the quality worse.

I have also used a negative scanner to get a better base image of photos.