Dunno what I did to this mug of coffee, but its horrible. A huge disappointment and not at all up to my expectations. I know I can do better… dammit, I drink enough of the stuff. Frustrating!
Bit like my photo exploits really.
Having spent ages yesterday sorting through the “mist photos” I shot (see previous post), ditching the truly terrible ones, refining the resulting lot even more, processing the remainder, converting to JPEGs and optimising, then uploading them to Flickr, what do I find?
Well, they looked ok in Lightroom, but on the Flickr pages some of them were truly embarrassing (must be something to do with seeing them against Flickr’s white background as opposed to the muted dark grey background I have Lightroom set to. And its not helped by the fact that I’m not using a colour-calibrated screen and, no matter what I do to it the screen on this machine’s got a distinct colour cast to it!).
So spent even more ages today going back to the original RAW files and doing some fairly significant re-processing.
Just as well really that my thoughts on post-processing have changed somewhat (see this post) since I’ve been involved in this photo lark.
I’m still not into the extreme processing (yet!) where the end result bears little relationship to “real life” as it were (like the HDR stuff though I have to confess it has great impact and I find it quite impressive) but I’m not now quite as averse to a bit of substantial tinkering and moderate cropping to achieve a reasonable effect.
Then more ages still replacing about half the original batch on Flickr with an internet connection that for some unaccountable reason was not up to its usual standard (and Lightroom seemed to be working incredibly slowly as well – maybe its about time I rebooted the computer).
Still, the upside of this is I suppose that its good never to be satisfied, cos that’s then a constant goad to try to improve. Anyway, that’s what I’m telling myself.
