Clarity of shots

[amitbarkan73]

I'm a beginner of sort, i've been taking photographs for a long time now, but never done much Post on them.

I was looking through the site, and other sites such as fliker and always amazed by the clarity and colors that are shown, and wondering how that is accomplished.

I can upload (if i knew how - i tried the attachment) a very nice pano i took of boston common, with a D70, but i don't know how to make the colors amazing! as some of the photos you have on your site, the same is true for my daughters images... just can't get that vivid clear image as you present.

I sent this to Darren and he mentioned I should post it to get some ideas.

Thanks,
amit

[vcw79]

I adjusted the curves first and then played up the saturation and contrast. The clouds were kind of gloomy so I selected them and colorized them some. Last thing is to sharpen the image. I can remove the image if you'd like.

[amitbarkan73]

Yes that looks a lot more alive, but how is that done? did you use photoshop to do that?
What do you mean by curves?

thanks,
Amit.

[OsmosisStudios]

You just need more contrast. The original shot you posted is flat: it needs a visual punch that is usually created by differentiating one colour from another: Contrast.

[vcw79]

I use GIMP. It's a free software you can dowload from the interet that is (in my opinion) just as good as Photoshop for someone that only does photography as a hobby. I taught myself how to use it and it takes a lot of practice to understand how it works. The internet will tell you everything, or you can so what I did and rent every Photoshop book from the library and learn that way. A lot of the Photoshop operations are similar to GIMP.

to answer your question, what is curves? I don't know the technical way to explain it, but basically you can alter the exposure and/or lightness/darkness of the photo using curves. It also allows you to perform those alterations on specifically red/green/or blue tones. Best of luck. This website also has a lot of tips for Photoshop, which can be applied to GIMP.