Post-processing....

...or the Digital Darkroom. This is the correct term for Photoshopping your photos.

To the uninitiated this is when people can take a subject and place it somewhere it has never been in the first place, or, like when celebs are made to look like gods and goddesses when really they are just like Joe public.

This isn't the method I'm talking about. There is nothing unreal or fraudulent about the images here, they are just tweaked a bit to make brighter and sharper or closer looking.

To the old school, this is frowned upon as cheating but for me its a real asset!

 It makes my best shots even better that I would imagine. So, imagine what some of my photos would be like straight off the camera....its not pretty I can assure you. If you check though the blogs, ALL of the best ones 'enhance' their images in some way. Caution is needed though, too much 'enhancing' makes the pictures look artificial and hard on the eye - 'noisy' as it is known.

What is the point of this you ask, well, this morning, patch year tick 103 arrived in the garden and was visible from a misted up kitchen window. Wanting to get a record shot, with little time to mess around two or three shots were taken that looked like this -

Male Blackcap, straight from the camera via our kitchen window.

After a few minutes mucking around the result is a bit more pleasing. Its never going to be magazine quality but it will do for the blog. The 'cropping' removes a lot of the clutter, the light balance adjustment removes the fog and the sharpen and unsharp mask, well, make it sharper.

A photoshopped male Blackcap.

103. Blackcap