jfriend00

joined 1 year ago
[–] jfriend00@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

First off, you don't get great photos by taking 10k shots and hoping you get a bunch of good ones.

Instead, you get great photos by learning and understanding what makes a great photo and then diligently working to learn how to create those conditions and capture that shot appropriately.

You generally need a combination of a bunch of things such as good/appropriate lighting, interesting composition, interesting subject, technically good focus, technically good exposure, appropriate post processing and so on.

I'd suggest you pick a day that you took a bunch of photos and just try to be your own critic. Go through each photo and evaluate each one. What is good about each photo and what is not so good about each photo? What do you wish was different? Can that be enhanced with post processing? What should you have done differently when capturing that shot?

For example, in your imgur link, I see three photos of airplanes. I don't really know what you were going for in each photo, but the first one is just a challenging angle to shoot at and contains overlapping foreground elements (plants of some kind that are blurred because they're so close). It appears you may have gotten the exposure and focus correct with a low sun angle, but the composition leaves me wondering what you were trying to capture, what story you were trying to tell or capture with that composition?

Then, there's a RyanAir plane shot with a side view. The lighting is challenging. It appears like it may either be backlit or there just isn't very much light - either way there isn't much light on the side of the plane you can see. You could probably work on it in post processing to enhance the visibility of the plane, but frankly you really just want to shoot planes in a direction that has better lighting. It appears to be decent focus.

Then, the third one is a plane going away from you and partly obscured by trees. It's just a missed composition. Planes going away from you are probably not all that interesting on their own unless there's some other interesting part of the composition, but partially obscured by the trees is just a shot you should probably avoid entirely. Like the previous RyanAir plane, this one also looks like its shot from an undesirable lighting angle. In real estate, the old saying was that only three things matter "location", "location" and "location". Well, in photography, it's "lighting", "lighting" and "lighting". The very first ingredient to making a great shot is setting yourself up with good lighting. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't occasionally take great shots with very challenging lighting. Some people can sometimes capture good shots in challenging lighting, but that requires either extra skill or really good creativity and often post processing. But, if you're going out somewhere to shoot planes around an airport, you should diligently plan to be shooting in a favorable lighting direction so you're shooting with the sun behind you so your subject is front lit by the sun.

When I go out to a local wildlife area to shoot birds, I only go when the primary shooting direction has the sun behind my back (which means early morning at this spot). And, I know that the magic time (best lighting) is from about 15 minutes before sunrise to about an hour after sunrise, though I can still get good shots for 3-4 hours after sunrise. I don't even bother going there in the afternoon or evening because it just won't be worth it due to the challenges of the lighting. And, I know that based on where the sun is, it's only really worth it to shoot certain directions.

[–] jfriend00@alien.top 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A catalog is a structure by which you can organize your photos, create collections, search, keyword, etc... Both Lightroom and Capture One have catalogs and it becomes your primary mechanism for finding and managing your images. The RAW files themselves can still be stored in the regular file system, but you don't generally access them direct from the file system - you access them through the catalog which you structure the way you want your images organized.

If you don't know what a catalog is, then I'll assume that DXO isn't offering one and you just open images one at a time directly from the file system (much like you would do in Photoshop).

[–] jfriend00@alien.top 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Does DXO have any type of catalog or is it just edit individual images?

[–] jfriend00@alien.top 0 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Moving your Photos to a new Tool

There is no such thing as a drop-in replacement for Lightroom. Most edits from Lightroom do not transfer to non-Adobe products because how they render is proprietary. You could export all edited files in Lightroom to 16-bit TIFFs and then you can put those TIFFs and the corresponding RAWs into some other tool. The TIFF will be already rendered by Lightroom so it will contain all the edits. You can then either edit the TIFF some more in another tool or you can go back to the RAW and redo your edits in your new editing tool.

Other Tools

Capture One Pro: If your father is using the Lightroom catalog to organize his photos, then the most similar (in concept) tool would probably be Capture One Pro. It has an excellent RAW editor, though not as many extra features as Lightroom. It is available either as subscription (like Lightroom) or as a perpetual license. One of the problems is that it's more expensive than Lightroom. List price for a perpetual license is $299, though it sometimes goes on sale for $179. You can use that license for as long as you have hardware that it runs on (e.g. many years). There's currently a new version coming (probably by the end of the year) so I wouldn't buy a new license right now unless it was a deal that includes the upcoming new version.

DarkTable: On the other end of the pricing spectrum is DarkTable which is open source and thus available without paying, though if you make regular use of it, you will probably want to support the ongoing project. DarkTable has a rich set of RAW editing tools and a catalog, but it is not known for its ease of use. When I'm frustrated with both Lightroom and Capture One (for one reason or another), I've played with DarkTable a few times, but never took the plunge to commit to really learning it.

DXO PhotoLab: Available as a perpetual license (non-subscription), the DXO products are known for their RAW processing, particularly their DeepPRIME denoising technology and their lens correction profiles. I've played with a trial version and found it very capable, but haven't used it day to day myself.

Affinity Photo: It's worth mentioning Affinity Photo because it is such high value ($69.99 for perpetual license). It's not a direct Lightroom replacement as it doesn't include a catalog, but it can edit RAW files. You essentially open a RAW file you want to edit, make the edits and then save the edits and they are saved to a sidecar file. Affinity Photo is more analogous to a replacement for Photoshop (tons and tons of pixel editing features), but it can also do RAW editing. I use it in conjunction with Capture One and go to Affinity Photo when I need occasionally need pixel editing capabilities beyond what Capture One Pro can do.

Photoshop Elements: If super advanced editing features are not a requirement and ease of use and perpetual license are the main driving needs, then you should consider Photoshop Elements ($99) which is kind of a mini-version of Lightroom.