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Beginners help


Alex G

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Hi everyone, I would like to thank you all for having a look at my photos after I sent out a previous post about my problems. The advice has been great and I have recently uploaded some photos from Europe. I was wondering if once again anyone could have a look and give me a bit of advice and also see if what I have taken on from the post and added into new pictures is good. Thanks a lot.

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4 hours ago, Alex G said:

Yes I have used a software to edit my photos but once again I am new to that so I am still learning and these are my original photos. I took these myself.

 

Hi Alex, thanks for confirming. Great that you're using software. We all started out as beginners, so please take the following in a positive sense.

 

If you're using Lightroom, I could provide more specific advice. But hopefully you can make use of the following. I would suggest looking at Youtube videos for learning to use your software. And photography magazines are also useful for learning how to edit to improve your images and about correcting common mistakes.

 

Just taking a step back, I'm not saying that the following images won't necessarily license. But editing will really increase the saleability of your images. A lot of your images currently look like the raw files or JPEGs taken directly from the camera, with no post processing applied.

 

 

Aerial view of Heidelberg and the river running through taken by a drone.

aerial-view-of-heidelberg-and-the-river-running-through-taken-by-a-drone-2WHP3NG.jpg

 

Caption still needs work. Which country? What time of year, summer, autumn? What's the river called? Google / Wikipedia is your friend! e.g. Heidelberg is a city in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. You don't need a full stop at the end of your caption. And you need to research better, incorrect keywords will hurt your CTR ranking. It's not the Rhine river. What is Heidelberg man? Kircheim is a completely different town in Germany! You are still keyword spamming.

 

Exposure - it's quite underexposed, and the lighting is not great making it very dull and flat. The sky is not far off; the land and buildings are far too dark. Needs correcting with software. A correctly exposed image should look the same as you see with your eyes in real life. And imagine you're a buyer. Would you buy your image, or this one:

germany-baden-wurttemberg-heidelbergaerial-view-ofheidelberg-castle-in-summer-2AH44NY.jpg

 

And you didn't have great light when you were there unfortunately, but this image probably had similar lighting to yours on the day:

aerial-view-of-heidelberg-in-germany-at-summer-time-2D88RAR.jpg

Look at the difference.

 

 

The white balance is off on all the lake pictures. Too blue. Should be an easy software fix. You've also got blown highlights in the sky. Need to reduce the highlights. Again, an easy software fix.

the-lake-next-to-the-neuschwanstein-castle-in-schwangau-germany-2WHNW81.jpg

 

 

The image is underexposed as a whole, and the land is too dark. The shadows / blacks need lifting on the land to the left, way too dark. Easy software fix again. You'll need to reduce the highlights and possibly the whites when you raise the overall exposure of the image, so you don't blow out the clouds.

the-lake-next-to-the-neuschwanstein-castle-in-schwangau-germany-2WHNW6C.jpg

 

 

Unless it's deliberate, e.g. a backlit subject, having your main subject in shadow and a brighter background is just a big no no, it just looks terrible. You might be able to fix this with software, but it's touch and go. I know it's annoying when you're on holiday somewhere and the lighting or weather is terrible for photography, because you only have one chance to get the shot normally. But if the lighting in an image is terrible, it's generally not worth going to the trouble of taking it editing, keywording and uploading - someone or many people will have better images up than you.

a-beautiful-view-of-the-neuschwanstein-castle-in-schwangau-germany-2WHNWF6.jpg

 

This one is even worse. Probably not recoverable. Will probably always look flat and dull. And the sky is overexposed.

a-beautiful-view-of-the-neuschwanstein-castle-in-schwangau-germany-2WHNXB9.jpg

 

Hope this helps. You may want to re-edit and upload some of these images at some point when your editing improves, so keep the raw files.

Good luck, Steve

 

 

Edited by Steve F
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