Monday, September 03, 2007

Photoshop Actions + Wedding Photos

Photo by David Hill

Austin photographer David Hill wrote an interesting blog entry about post processing in wedding photography. I'm guilty of some of his complaints. :) Many of my photos are vignetted because I use a 50mm f1.2 lens with a hood in dim environments. And sometimes I vignette in Lightroom. I use canned Photoshop actions and presets sparingly. The problem I see with heavy handed Photoshop work is it will look dated in a few years. Remember the SUPER AIRBRUSHED Glamour shots of the 1990s? I custom correct the color and crop each of my photos and I sometimes use effects, but for the most part I try and shoot cleanly and keep "enhancements" to a minimum.

3 comments:

David Hill said...

Well, the natural vignetting that occurs as a result of optical limitations of a high quality lens looks way better than the craptastic vignetting generated in post production or that produced by cheap lenses. Also, any vignetting of your lens is practically invisible by the time you get to f/2.0. And Canon hoods are supposedly designed not to cause any vignette on the matching lens, so I would be shocked if the hood shipped with that lens actually vignetted your images.

Mary said...

oh no my friend. i use the hood that came with the 50. i am guilty of shooting on 1.2 and 1.4 (if the lens has the settings I'm going to use them. :) i certainly paid for them)

you are welcome to conduct independent tests sometime. btw david I really appreciate that you are bucking the trends.

David Hill said...

Why do I need an independent test? I already have a nice sample of your RAW files in my possession! Ha ha. I just did a review, and even at f/1.2, the vignetting that I see from that lens does not resemble the fake Photoshop vignetting at all. It looks really mild to me, even on the 5D.... The hood is not visible at all at f/6.3, so I'm pretty sure it's not obstructing the image at all. Canon would catch all sorts of hell in the forums if they shipped a hood that vignetted that lens... I think some scientific experiments may be in order, but I'd bet a shiny new quarter that any vignetting we see has nothing to do with the hood :)