Assistance in editing photos

[masterg]

Can anybody assist me in editing some photos? going through a friends wedding photos and i want to sharpen, unblur fix colors etc but as per what each photo needs to look its best, im quite lost. I want to print them to a 8x11 photo album for them. I have GIMP and Nikon View NX2 as photo editors. Gimp is large and confuses me with so many buttons.

using Nikon Viewer NX2 i took this original photo which was a photo on a tv screen:


and cropped, straightened, sharpened, played with exposure and color and came out with:


Is that ok? what could i do to the original to make it look nice?

[G.Foyle]

Text is not horizontal, other than that it's ok. If you can't use warp to straighten text you can just rotate the whole image - it won't show on people since they don't have any vertical/horizontal lines I would also fill white text with 100% white (rgb 255,255,255) and pink text with the color of her scarf - that will bring the text contrast up to original levels. I think the original photo was manipulated a lot, so any further manipulation doesn't look very bad.

For other photos just make sure you can see well whatever the photo is depicting. Wedding photos are all about the subject, don't worry too much about photography quality

[Vinas]

It might sound funny but I use picasa to post process and rarely open Lightroom or PS 6. Don't get me wrong, I still need photoshop for some things, and I just upgraded to PS6 so it has it's place for sure... But picasa is quick and does 90% of what I need to do in my post process workflow all within one program.

[masterg]

I only use picasa to upload photos anymore. Picasa just guesses how to open up a NEF file and completely screws up the color of the photo. Paint.Net cant even open the files even with the proper plugins. I have had to open the NEF in nikons software and convert it to a 16bit TIFF and then open the new TIFF in other software just to edit. its a pain. Then i open Paint.net ( which i got to test ) and it has a billion different effects and idk where to start

[Vinas]

Well, I don't have any experience with NEF files. It does sound like a pain and I wouldn't use picasa if it messed up my raw files either.

Have you tried lightroom, or were you wanting to stick with the freebie programs? If you are going to do photography professionally then I'd recommend purchasing either lightroom or if you can afford it PS6 now, and just use that. The tools I use are mostly pay (picasa is the only free one I use, but it works fine with canon raw files). I use photomatix for HDR, DSLR Remote for macros, PS6 for serious edits, but I started with Lightroom (trying to save money but I ended up buying PS6 anyway). There are some really powerful plugins for PS that can't be matched (like selective color and contrast control, so I don't have to alter the entire image, etc).

If you have the time to learn GIMP then I understand that it can be a very cost effective way to do most of the things PS can do. I tried GIMP several times, and while I think it has its place, I moved on after a while... But I will say that using GIMP allowed me to do more jobs and save up for better software (I'm a part time photographer).

[itznfb]

Actually no software opens .NEF files and processes the data except for Nikon's software. ViewNX and CaptureNX2. Those two application are actually capable of processing the raw data. All other software is essentially guessing at the interpretation of the data. That's why color is accurate with Nikon's software and not with Adobe or anything else.

As for what looks good... and how to make it look good. Everyone's opinion will be different on what looks good. I'd start with some online tutorials.
I typically follow a workflow in CaptureNX2 and process my files to TIFF and get them as natural looking as possible. If I want to do any post processing or anything artsy I'll typically import to Photoshop and use some action I find on deviantArt. I don't spend a lot of time in post. I try to get what I'm looking for straight out of camera.

[masterg]

I even tried CS3 and while it allows and excepts RAW images (.nef and all the others) it cannot recognize my .nef photos either

[itznfb]

Adobe has a hierarchy that you need to follow. Each version of Photoshop has a corresponding set of CameraRAW versions. They aren't forward or backward compatible. So newer cameras aren't supported in older versions of CameraRAW. For instance. Support for the D800 and D4 were added in CameraRAW version 6.7 (CS5) and CameraRAW version 7.1 (CS6). Version 6.7 is not compatible with any version of Photoshop earlier than PS5. Version 7.1 is not compatible with any version earlier than PS6. So if you have a Nikon D4 and Photoshop 4, you won't be able to open your RAW (.NEF) files until you upgrade to at least Photoshop 5.