Before and After

One question that seems to come up all the time, is if I did anything to my photos or if that's the pictures straight out of the camera. The truth is that all photos out of digital cameras really need to have "some" kind of post-processing done to them to make them look better after you take the shot.  Most cameras just make those adjustments automatically as they write the image to the card inside your camera.  If you snoop around the menu on your camera you can usually find setting that you can change to tell the camera how much or what kind of adjustments to make.

When you shoot with a higher end SLR camera, you also get the option of taking your photos and having the camera just store the RAW unedited version and then it's up to you to decide how that picture should be processed.  The first image you see here is one that was just taken out of the camera after a very slight touch of color boost and sharpening.  It's pretty much what you would see out of a point and shoot camera when you leave it set to auto mode.

With the RAW option in my camera I also get more data to work with in each image which then gives me the option to to a little more post-processing if I want.  In this example, I found the tree branches coming in from the top and sides of the picture to be very distracting and not really having the effect I'd hoped for when I first took the photo. (Not that this was really meant to be anything but a quick snapshot taking during my first trip to Vegas).  Using a program like Photoshop gives you some really powerful tools and you can do things like remove unwanted items from pictures... sometimes fairly easily as was the case with the trees in this image.  It also lets you take those basic color and sharpness adjustments to the next level to help make the photo really "pop".