I’ve observed a tendency for digital photographers to just take what their cameras hand them. Folks put up on-line galleries of their digital photographs for comment, critique, and simple enjoyment, but it’s rare for those photographs to be anything different from what they downloaded from the camera.These folks are unconsciously operating much the same way slide film photographers did (more correctly, were forced to). Unless they are intentionally trying to present the world entirely as the camera saw it, this is a profound artistic mistake.

The Online Photographer: October 2006

Ctein raised a very good point, I almost never do a straight RAW to jpeg conversion and then share my pics, I at least adjust the raw converter settings, adjust the curve, some slight USM, USM after downsizing, and for pics with people in them I do some very minor touchups. And these steps are for snapshots only. I spend a lot of time in post-processing when I do more serious photoshoots. It bothers me when I see people with fancy gears on Flickr posting very mediocre straight-from-camera images, some of these are so bad that they wouldn’t even be kept on my memory card after instant preview. And most of these guys shoot JPEGs, which is completely insane now when memory cards are so cheap. I am not encouraging people to overprocess your images, but at least do enough to get more out of the captured frames.

technorati tags:photography, photoshop, digital photography, dslr

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