Have you ever posted an observation photo and thought to yourself, “Dang, if I only knew how to really handle Photoshop better, this would be a much better pic!”
As a photographer, I’m comfortable in calling myself an amateur, but I’m also (after 3 decades of experience) a retired pro graphic designer. And more importantly, I was an in-house corporate designer. In that kind of position, you continually have to rescue and work with sub-par submitted image files to make them work in print and other targets.
As I still have most of the gear and tweaking software that I used on hand, I thought that I would like to try a little testing of an idea to offer volunteer image tuning to observers here who are struggling with the quality of their submitted photos.
That is, I would like to test out this proposal and perhaps figure out a way to scale and organize a group of other volunteers here to support more demand.
How would it work?
Just for the testing, I could simply post the test results back here in the forum as an attachment as a reply to the links to the observation shared in this thread. No need to send original photos unless I really feel it would help. I’d like to avoid getting into privacy complications, and this seems the simplest solution.
I should stress that I’m not talking about changing compositions, or adding/removing anything from a composed observation. I’m talking tone, colour, detail, sharpness. I’m sure in some instances it would involve some back and forth between the original photo creator and myself to arrive at something closer to the true scene of the observation.
If I get absolutely swamped with requests, I will update this post to inform everyone so I can finish what I can actually handle.
So if you are interested, send me a link to your observation and we’ll go from there. I’m going to limit this test to just 10 images to begin and see how it goes.
Ideally, maybe we can find other ‘tweakers’ out there who can help improve the collection photo quality. How that would work out in detail, I’m too naiive at this stage to understand. I just know that I have seen some excellently composed photos that would truly shine given the right handling. I’d like to try and start doing that. Thanks for your time, and hopefully… your request.
Cheers.