From my limited study of photography, it seems there's a pretty standard line of progression, which may meander directly due to one's specific interests. However, the intangibles seems to be post processing...which seem ti easily exceed the hardware costs.
I'd imagine I'm not the only hobbyist caught up in the cashflow abyss. I've spent a great deal of time over the past couple of months learning photoshop. Due to those dreary hours, I've gained the opinion that anyone who says Canon's DPP is an adequate PP program has lost their mind. I'm quickly leaning towards the camp that an average picture-taker with exceptional e-technical prowess will inevitably embarass a great photographer.
Consequently, due to my observations of the differences between the pics I upload, and what I finish with, I quickly recognized how important software has become to processing.
By no means have I mastered anything, but everytime I become competent in a process, I learn of 2 more programs that can take that aspect/skill to an entirely new level. With the acceptance of CS 2/3/4 as a software basement or otherwise accepted to be photographer's kindergarten. What would be understood to be 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade?
Noise Ninja/Neat Image seem to be great for noise, Painter X seems to be the industry standard for any photographic artistic interpretation. There's also a couple of amazing, yet adsurdly expensive filter programs lucis, fred miranda's, etc.
Ultimately, I'm looking to see if others have charted a linear approach to their acquisitions? Because lord know, one can easily drop four digits chasing perfection....
John Korduner wrote:
From my limited study of photography, it seems there's a pretty standard line of progression, which may meander directly due to one's specific interests. However, the intangibles seems to be post processing...which seem ti easily exceed the hardware costs.
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Ultimately, I'm looking to see if others have charted a linear approach to their acquisitions? Because lord know, one can easily drop four digits chasing perfection....
I don't think processing is an intangible, but I don't spend money on it (ExifTool, GIMP, Hugin, ImageMagick®, UFRaw, and so on).
I think both DPP and Photoshop® can have places in a workflow - they do not perform the same task. If you want to talk about basic, easy to use programs, maybe look at digikam, iPhoto and Picasa.
Overall, I think your question(s) are mostly philisophical and the answers depend on personal preference.
it really depends on how much editing you need to do. I rarely use photoshop to edit a photograph unless im just messing around with it for fun. 99% of my photographs go thru lightroom and thats it.
