Even though It’s my opinion to ‘get it right in camera’ I do use more post processing than you would expect. Sometimes the RAW image coming from the camera just does not live up to the scene I was witnessing while capturing the shot. And sometimes my search for dramatic images just makes me play with the sliders in the software just a little more until I’m happy.

I don’t know about you but I can spend between an hour or two to edit and post process an image. Usually I have about 30 images from one landscape subject and editing and selecting the best ones is rather easy but then the finetuning and tweaking of that one final image can take some time. (Come to think of it, maybe my old hardware is not helping in speeding up the processing.) Sometimes investing in new hard or software can really help you make a BIG step forward in the quality of your images.

My usual workflow was: RAW conversion, editing & selecting in Apple Aperture 3 and then lense correction and minor tweaks in Adobe Photoshop and back to Aperture for keywords, geotagging and organising. Pretty straightforward right? Nothing fancy.

Then I aquired Perfect Effects 8 from On One Software And it changed my game. Now this is not a sales pitch for Perfect Effects but adding something extra to my workflow added something extra to my images too… Not all of my images go through Perfect Effects but when Aperture and Photoshop don’t cut it I use PE8 and most of the time it helps me get the image I was looking for! It just adds that little extra bit to my images.

Lets take for example the following image. Taken over a year ago, it didn’t make my final selection of that shoot. I had totally forgotten about it until some days ago when I was cleaning up the photo’s on my phone. Usually I take a shot of my setup and tweet about it and this time had been no different. So when I was about to delete my iPhone shot of the setup of that day I could not help but see the back of my camera and the image on it. I had forgotten about that shot since it did not make the final edits. But I loved the composition and light even on the small preview of the back of the camera. So I decided to dig up the image and give it a try.

Here’s the original image straight out of the Camera.

Now more than a year later, armed with more experience and more software I set out to work on it.
So here’s the final result, tell me what you think? To much? Would love to hear your comments!

Martijn

p.s. after posting this post I read an article of Brian Matiash on almost the same thing… (he only describes it better) make sure you read his post as well!