Comments on: Photography with Jason Collin

By: Gakuranman

Gakuranman — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 08:32:42 +0000

I kept meaning to put your edits up but got tied up with other things. Will put them up on this site sometime soon so people can see the difference. :)

By: Jason Collin

Jason Collin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 08:17:00 +0000

Hi Tiffany....ok, I will actually be posting on my site another person's haikyo photograph I re-edited in the near future, I'll be sure and comment back here with a link.

Of if Gak has the re-edits and originals of his shots he can post them here too?

Strong editing skills are KEY to making great photographs. Everyone says get it right in the camera, and that works pretty well for outdoor shooting of sports and wildlife, but everything else, strong editing skills can often save or much improve your shots. Just being able to clone out shadows, stray objects, makes a huge difference.

The before and after shot I'll put on my site of my own work, a kid put a shadow over his dad's face, which would have ruined the shot if not for being able to simply remove that shadow.

By: Tiffany Harvey

Tiffany Harvey — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:36:05 +0000

Thanks Jason! I was actually thinking of the photos that Gakuranman mentioned you editing for him ~ “Jason offered to touch up my images for me and show me what he could do. I was amazed, and for lack of a better expression, converted.”

It would be great to see what kind of improvements you made to his pictures. I thought maybe he could post some of them.

By: Jason Collin

Jason Collin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:46:19 +0000

Yes, I have upgraded to Aperture 3 and only used its brushes once to lighten part of an image. Basically Aperture 3 has not changed my workflow much, yet, save for slowing it way down because it takes much longer to launch the Nik plugins in Aperture 3 and Aperture's own adjustment sliders, which used to show instant changes in Ap 2, now have a nearly intolerable couple second lag in Ap 3. May have to upgrade to Snow Leopard after all, but then Nik plugins are not 64 bit yet, so would still need to launch Ap 3 in 32-bit mode. Ap 3 is dog slow, and before the 0.1 update was crazy buggy. Still has its quirks and freezes though.

By: David

David — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:37:35 +0000

thx Jason, I recently upgraded to Aperture 3. Maybe a little bit off topic, but would you recommend Nik Color efex pro 3 considering the new presets and brushes in Aperture 3?

By: Jason Collin

Jason Collin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:53:05 +0000

Tiffany, these particular shots Gak selected of mine actually have very little editing to them. The lead temple shot was made during the golden hour, so required very little editing beyond a bit of color correction.

The girl smiling is a pure candid street photography shot, just a bit of sharpening added.

The 4 kimonos, just minor exposure and color correction.

The leaf with bokeh shot is basically straight out of the camera (Nikon D80 then with Nikkor 50mm 1.8D lens, as cheap as a lens gets)

The Mt. Fuji shot is not edited much either, just a little vignetting fixing, as the Nikkor 18-200mm lens I shot it with suffered from that problem, I long ago sold it due to that problem and other issues with it.

Here is a shot that I did do a substantial amount of editing on, and in my view saved a shot that would have been a fail:

http://jasoncollinphotography.com/blog/2009/11/...

Silver Efex Pro did most of the work, but I did clone out shadows in Photoshop CS4.

By: Jason Collin

Jason Collin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:48:56 +0000

David, for processing my RAW images I just import them into Aperture 3 and his that app's specific RAW profile for my specific camera (Nikon D300). That's it. No mess, no fuss. Then from there I follow my usual editing work flow, which relies heavily on Nik Color Efex Pro 3.