Photographers? Official

[MarkRyan]

Took a trip to the beach today.(I love clouds) Close to sunset.

Nice shots. I used to take lots of cloud photos with my digital camera when I lived in Washington. They are sort of endlessly fascinating--the other day I was walking back from the beach with my girlfriend and the contrast of the natural, boundless and flowing clouds over the man-made city was pretty striking.

Anyway, just to show how you can make photos look with very, very basic photo editing (I use Photoshop): I ran a pretty generic process on these--no careful color manipulation, just duplicated the image on a second layer, changed the blend mode to Soft Light, did auto-levels on the bottom layer and unsharped it just a touch. You can no doubt get even better results with careful editing, but I like doing this general process to quickly edit a bunch of photos to make them more presentable.

[sapphire]

Nice shots. I used to take lots of cloud photos with my digital camera when I lived in Washington. They are sort of endlessly fascinating--the other day I was walking back from the beach with my girlfriend and the contrast of the natural, boundless and flowing clouds over the man-made city was pretty striking.

Anyway, just to show how you can make photos look with very, very basic photo editing (I use Photoshop): I ran a pretty generic process on these--no careful color manipulation, just duplicated the image on a second layer, changed the blend mode to Soft Light, did auto-levels on the bottom layer and unsharped it just a touch. You can no doubt get even better results with careful editing, but I like doing this general process to quickly edit a bunch of photos to make them more presentable.

Thanks it looks awesome....I don't have photoshop, used to, its too expensive.

[Josh]

Nothing is expensive when you have the internet. Noob.

[Dyne]

Anyway, just to show how you can make photos look with very, very basic photo editing (I use Photoshop): I ran a pretty generic process on these--no careful color manipulation, just duplicated the image on a second layer, changed the blend mode to Soft Light, did auto-levels on the bottom layer and unsharped it just a touch. You can no doubt get even better results with careful editing, but I like doing this general process to quickly edit a bunch of photos to make them more presentable.

another dirty edit is to dupe the layer. change the new layer to Overlay, knock it's opacity to 30-60% and flatten.

[Dyne]

snapped a couple of really quick ones to stitch before i got drenched or lightning bolted.

[K3V]

I like the bit of blue in the background. Very nice.

[Dyne]

i'm going to be in the market for a DSLR in the near future. limit would be $500 for the camera if possible. any ideas? i was poking around DPreview.com yesterday and got overwhelmed.

[Dyne]

so the Canon in the first link says body only. i take it it's useless until i get a lens which will be another couple hundred bucks?

[Dyne]

Shit never mind then, for some reason I thought it was the kit. Kit goes for $675, so thats a little out of the $500 limit.

Unfortunately, my only experience recently has been with the Xti, so I can't really give any advice on the other models. The Nikon on the second link is a kit, comes with an 18-55 lens, and is under $500. Reviews seems pretty good as well.

I have a Canon now, and while it's good it doesn't do reds or purples very well. And as B-Ri and myself have talked baout before, it tends to add a bit of glaucoma to the whole picture. I'm bored today so I'll start reading up on some of these.

[B-Ri]

nikon d40.