Another one for the trial list, thanks.
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I have LR and PS and find the subscription reasonable. LR is outdated now but still not bad apart from the fact it is slooow. PS is great still.
I find Exposure is good for film emulations, colour adjustments and does a better job than Adobe on sharpening (especially useful for birds).
The raw processor I really like is Photo Ninja which has brilliant noise reduction and good sharpening - I use it when working on single photos that deserve that ‘special treatment’.
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Lol, I would quite like to keep it down to one software package. I can see that some have an advantage over others in certain departments but I would like to avoid having multi platforms for processing.
I’ll give the various free trials a spin and take it from there. Thanks for your input.
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Does nobody use “out of the camera” images any more ?
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Not very often.
Don’t think that it’s a new thing, photographers have been manipulating images in darkrooms since the birth of photography.
Digital just allows you to do it without stumbling about in the dark and playing with messy chemicals. Ok, the tweaks are much more advanced, but the principle is the same.
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It was sort of a rhetorical question Paul. It just seems a real shame that out of the camera shots aren’t considered good enough.
Nothing is actually ‘real’ any more 
If a ‘model’ and I use the word VERY loosely photoshops her pics it’s an outrage, anybody else …
It never was.
Do you think that Henri Cartier-Bresson (other photographers are available) published images without any darkroom manipulation?
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Doesn’t make it right or, in my jaundiced eyes anyway, desirable.
It just seems to cheapen the skill of taking a truly stunning picture (as opposed to ‘photography’).
Well you have two choices.
Either accept it, or don’t look at any image in any magazine again, cos I can guarantee they’ve all been edited.
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Which absolutely cheapens the art of exceptional picture taking.
Is it now the picture taker or the image manipulator who is the artist ?
No axe to grind, I just find it a bit of a con really.
Both.
The problem is Mike, no matter how good a photographer you are, you’re at the mercy of the available light. Ansel Adams spent days pointing his massive camera at this view waiting for the light to be perfect:
But it still got dodged and burned in the development stage. Does that make the image less valid? I would argue that the manipulation is part of the creative process and might actually increase it’s artistic value.
Admittedly these days the sheer amount of manipulation that is possible is incredible, but every pixel that is altered is a reflection of the artistic vision of the photographer/artist.
Arguably the only professional straight out of the camera images that we get to see, and maybe have ever got to see, are news type images, where the immediacy of the image is the paramount consideration.
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Even then, I would wager that in the vast majority of cases, someone did some form of editing before publication. Other than that, I agree with your post wholeheartedly.
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Of course, someone had to develop the film, back when that was a widespread thing, and they’ll have had an idea or preconception of how something “should” look, especially if they were employed by a news agency and knew the style that the picture editor of a particular paper or whatever wanted. And these days there’s a lot of processing fairly quickly available in the camera before the photographer has to submit the image.
RAW is not really an image file, it needs to be converted into a JPEG. You can either do this in the camera, which has a fairly limited processor and firmware, or you can do it on the computer, which is much more sophisticated and lets you make decisions about how it’s done to get the best results.
So there’s nothing more purist about “out of camera” shots, really, it’s just reliance on generic software rather than making the choices yourself.
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yes, mostly. Cropping is a main thing I often do. Used to use PS, Lightroom, and a dark room and member of a photography club back in the day. But stopped.
and
Then our definitions of a photographer are different.
My concept of the art of photography is to capture the image of what you are physically looking at, as well as is possible, not to alter it in any way, to either make it look “better” or to be your take on what you are seeing / wish you were seeing.
Just a different viewpoint.
The issue is. A lot has to be done to turn what the sensor sees into an image. There is no correct white balance for example.
You can let the camera do it, or you can do it your self.
There is no such thing as out of the camera or no manipulation. It’s a fallacy.
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Photo Serge has spoken
Ah, that’s disappointing. In which case, I stand corrected. Best I just stick with my phone camera then.