Thanks for the reply, Ed. I knew you had the skills to do hand colouring of this standard if you had wanted to. I'm like you in one thing... feeling uneasy with excessive manipulation... but I agree that graphic software opens up some fun, interesting possibilities. You might like to try the PowerRetouche (sic) utilities, as they combine various PS functions and controls together into tools that are very intuitive for a photographer used to the wet darkroom to use. You can try them free...
Roger - I was just playing around with Photoshop Elements. I've always been a proponant of straight, unmanipulated images, but damn! its fun to experiment with these digital toys.
I was doing a holiday card photo session with this boy and his family, and he spied the boxing gloves as they were leaving. These were taken in about 30 seconds, and the light was rather flat, so I've been fooling around with lighting effects with PS.
And I used to do a lot of hand coloring, so I'm partial to those soft tones.
This may seem a very strange comment, Ed, but the colours in this shot look more like hand-painted on B&W than an actual colour shot. That's not a criticism; I think hand colouring can be most effective done sentivitely and delicately. If you've managed to teach your D50 to produce this kind of result then more power to you! It certainly doesn't look like a typical "leave it all to the auto camera" shot!
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{K:86139} 11/23/2005