Freelance photoshoppers

Anonymous

I recently got back from a once-in-a-lifetime trip (NEVER AGAIN!) and have a mass (1600) of photos which I want to whittle down and put into an album.

The downside is that I have absolutely no knowledge of photo-editing and I think that if I were able to take the best ones, if it were possible to ask/employ someone to touch them up (some the lighting isn't ideal so we're a bit pastey, some are a bit dark, etc).

I know there are some awesome photographers on here, but was wondering how to go about it if I wanted to employ someone to do the touching up. Nothing significant like removing spots/blemishes, just making them nice? Ideally I would like to share my favourite 200 photos with a view to working with someone to reduce it to 50-60 for a really lovely photo album to give to my mother for Christmas.

Any thoughts, advice, recommendations and expected cost etc much appreciated. I have a facebook link of 125 but not sure I want to stick it online, but happy to PM anyone who's interested in doing the work.

Sleeper Cell

I do quite a bit of photo editing and, to be honest, it's a PITA.

There are lots of cheap/free editing packages that you could try on a sample photo to see if you would want to do the job yourself. GIMP is one such package which has some good 'auto' features which will correct a lot of the obvious errors easily with little input from you.

What camera did you use for the photos? Sometimes the camera limits what can be done with the final image particularly if you're trying to recover detail from highlights or shadows.

Anonymous

Nikon D3100 and Olympus XZ-1. Obviously the Nikon pics are best, but I got some OK ones on the Olympus

nathancom

Lightroom (another Adobe application) is a much better tool for what you are looking to do.
You can use presets to just add a bit of contrast/vibrancy or whatever across all your photos
If you want to do a little bit more you can develop one photo and apply the same settings across a group of photos. It also has lens correction settings for a wide range of cameras and excellent tools for tagging and cataloguing your photos. Importantly it is very intuitive and doesn't have a steep learning curve

It is not cheap but you can probably get a trial and export your jpegs. They also have a monthly licence subscription for $10 so you could use that and then cancel when you no longer need it.

Photo editing is fun with Lightroom so I would recommend doing it yourself.

The Olympus XZ-1 and XZ-2 are excellent premium compacts. You will be able to edit the files much more if you have shot in RAW, especially in adjusting white balance and sensitive noise removal/sharpening

It is easy to publish collections of photos to whichever photo sharing site you use. You can add a photo to the Flickr/Facebook/Instagram collection and then click publish.

Anonymous

Thanks Guys.

I think the issue is that I don't really have an eye for this. I really enjoyed using the D3100 and trying to use the settings, with limited success. I got the XZ-1 on the cheap, but to be honest I don't really have a clue how to use it and get those 'warm' pictures which DSLRs get just using auto settings.

It's something I certainly want to learn and $10 isn't much, so I could have a stab. Plus the household has a new iMac which could make light work of this.

pblakeney

I take thousands of photos every year and post processing is a very time consuming project.

I tend to delete the duff ones, then if some are similar keep the best one and delete the rest and batch process an "Autofix" setting for posting on Facebook. The vast majority of the public will be perfectly happy with the results and that process is not too hard to learn or achieve.

I then properly post process my "keepers" during the winter evenings as a personal project and use those shots for albums and calendars.

Getting someone to do it for you could prove costly.

Edit:- iPhoto on the Mac is basic compared to Pro tools but more than adequate for your requirements.

arran77

Post the pictures up here and we'll have a go for you

Anonymous

Haha I dread to think. Mostly they're of animals from a safari holiday, but due to the lighting it's hard to get the colours of some of the animals to really pop.

If you want to see a very small handful, along with my 'guess the objects' they are linked below.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/65473577@N08/

graham.

I replied to your other thread on the same topic.

k-dog

That's a big job so it's a bit unlikely you'll find someone. Even a quick fix will take 10 minutes each so it adds up.

A lot of printing places have an automatic fix thing now and it can work okay - worth a look. When you upload them they just do some sort of auto enhancement.

Dajoca

Hi Coriordan.
For future trips, I would really recommend using the camera in manual with auto white balance, as it makes life a lot easier once you get used to it and it really doesn't take long to learn/guess the manual exposure.
Anything auto will get it badly wrong a lot of the time, no matter how expensive the gear.

For processing lots of images, use the manufacturers software or better still, use a demo of lightroom, as it's now very good with Nikon raw files(it used to be awful).

Good luck.

manglier

From your piccies I think you need to bone up on the effects of colour temperature. That seems to be the main problem.

esdavey

Coriordan,

ViewNX is the free SW you get with a Nikon - very good for quick editing & easy to use
I simple add pictures to a 1 page powerpoint presentation then print in A4 on good photo paper before putting in my album.

I have 2 simple rules : Is it a GREAT photo ? Is is capturing an experience you want to remember ? if no, delete !

joenobody

Dajoca wrote:

use a demo of lightroom, as it's now very good with Nikon raw files(it used to be awful).

I'm not sure you can get demo versions any more. You can take out a short subscription to Lightroom CC though, at £8.78/month (also includes Photoshop CC).

RDW

ViewNX is the free SW you get with a Nikon - very good for quick editing & easy to use

Nikon has now released Capture NX-D as freeware, which combines a ViewNX-style browser with some of the features of the old Capture NX (unfortunately not including the 'U-point' technology, which was developed by a contractor that Google has now bought out). It's a decent browser, and probably the best free raw developer for Nikon files (I generally prefer the results from Nikon's conversions to Adobe's). You can quickly triage your shots by tagging them for quality etc., then choose only to view the files you've flagged. http://nikonimglib.com/ncnxd/

southdownswolf

Lightroom trial version - https://creative.adobe.com/products/download/lightroom

As others have said, be REALLY picky about the ones that you want to edit as it will be time consuming. Then make sure that you don't have any distractions from kids/wife/dogs/cats/hamster. If you want to go back to the other photos, then there will be plenty of long cold dark evenings coming up when you can do that.

johnmiosh

Probably too late now, but with a Nikon 3100, you should shoot in RAW (as nathancon suggested for the olympus) and use View NX2 to alter exposure, white balance etc. You can then convert to JPEG or TIFF for printing. If you don't want to print then you can view RAW in most album formats, although you may need to download a CODEC file to translate for some software, like windows photo gallery

pinno

What's this?:

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..and where was this 'Safari'?

Anonymous

That is an old Giant Cadex I picked up off eBay, built up and sold as it was too small. Looked lovely though! The guy I bought it off had stripped down all the paint and relaquered it.

Oh. Safari was in Botswana.

pinno

coriordan wrote:

That is an old Giant Cadex I picked up off eBay, built up and sold as it was too small. Looked lovely though! The guy I bought it off had stripped down all the paint and relaquered it.

Oh. Safari was in Botswana.

Looks like a Vitus Carbon 9.

Bet you were a bit sad to have let that go.

capt_slog

I used to use an olympus and at the time it came with some free editing software. I remember that the 'instant fix' in that was quite good, and it probably do what you asked in your OP ....."Nothing significant like removing spots/blemishes, just making them nice?" and do so quite quickly.

Anonymous

Thanks all. There are a few where the lighting isn't good and I want the colours to be more vibrant, but my computer has just broken (power not HD issue) so am a bit stuck at present.