Processing Pictures

I don't have the best camera.  I don't have the best program (I use Photos on Mac) to process the pictures I take.   I don't have skills to adjust picture colors in details of hues, selective colors, and some other adjustments.

I see pictures on some blogs that are so routinely perfectly-focussed, color-balanced and perfectly-lit that I just sigh in envy.  So it isn't like I'm fishing for compliments here.  I get by "well-enough", and that is about it...  LOL!

But I thought I might mention what I DO routinely do just in case it helps "someone" OR explains why some pictures look better than they originally did.  I mean, I have a routine I go with that "helps me".

1.  The 1st thing I do with a batch of raw pictures uploaded to Photos is go through and delete the hopeless ones.  Wow, who doesn't do that.  But I like to start at the beginning.

2.  I go through the pics and "straighten" them.  I seem to have a vision-tilt to one side.  Meaning I always seem to have to "straighten" in the same direction.

3.  Then I crop.  If you crop first and straighten later, inevitable some part of the picture is lost.  The is no cropping that requires using any 2 opposite corners.

4. After that, I switch to "adjust".  First, I go through "definition" of all pictures at about 90%.  THAT really helps!  If you haven't tried that, try it.  Cat furs show up better and it REALLY improves flower pictures.  And it is easy.  You keep the cursor on the "definition setting you like and then "click", forward arrow, "click" again.  It's repetitive but fast.  It's hard to have "too much" definition.

5.  After "definition", I go through again with light and color level.  My camera doesn't take pictures of The Mews well with flash.  "Low-light" setting works pretty well with normal ceiling lamps indoors.  It is more "even" light and that is more adjustable.

I generally have to raise the light level and then lower the color level.  Otherwise the light seems like a cloudy day and then after I raise the light level, Marley looks like an orange, the walls nearly glow, and the wood floor looks walnut.  So I lower the color level.  I know what color Marley's fur is, the walls are and the floor is, so I get it as accurate as I can.

You might think the light level and color cancel each other, but they don't.  Brightening an entire picture makes the room look brighter; color makes Marley and blankets look more accurate while keeping the picture bright.

6.  Then, I export the pictures to folders.  I have them by year subdivided into moths and then by days.  So, I have "Photographs".  That is divided into subfolders of Cats,Yard, House, Family, and Other.  Each  has a year, month and day.  So, a cat picture processed on May 23rd, 2021 may be in Cats/2021/2105/210523.  I use "year/month/day" because it keeps the pics chronologically and easily findable.  I don't give names to the pictures (OK, in special cases).

7.  But the exported pictures from Photo to the folders arrive at sizes like 1.5MB.  I cant save all that or post them (unless things have changed).  So I go to Preview.  It has easy re-sizing.  "Custom" allows several choices for all the pics from 320x320 to 1920x1920 pixels and there are inch size choices (but I don't deal with those very well).  I almost always use "custom" at 640x640 or 800x800.  For some reason, 640 works better for outside shots and 800 for inside ones

That keeps the resized pics above 100 and below 300 kb, which works well enough for the quality of the pics I use of the blogs.  And I don't yet trust the Cloud, so I keep my original full-sized pics on the hard drive.  I tried copying them to an external 4GB drive, but I couldn't get at them later.  Glad it was "copy" and not not "copy and delete".

8.  I do keep all the originals full-sized.  It is a lot easier to see them full-sized in Photo.  The reduced-size processed pics make me look through them one at a time.

    -------------

I hope this has helped someone, explained what I do with pics, or even made you think "wow, I'm smarter than TBT/Cavebear.  ;)

And if I'm doing some unnecessary work, PLEASE feel free to tell me.