Starting off with the puppo! Her name is Stellar, and she’s adorable (I might be biased)

Challenge Information:

I have to post one picture every day, I can take pictures in advance, in case I’m unable to take a picture for whatever reason (vacation, weather, idk) but I still have to post once per day.

I can’t post pictures of the same thing within like, a week or two, idk, I might get rid of this “rule” if I feel like it.

Don’t be afraid to give me any feedback on any of my pictures, I’m still veeery new to photography and would love any feedback given.

I’ll do my best to only share pictures taken with my Canon EOS Rebel T2i (or better if I ever get a new camera) but some days may be pictures from my phone, (I’ll let you know if that happens)

All images shared are originally taken as jpegs (5184x3456) without compression, but I always compress to 80% and convert to webp to reduce stress on Lemmy servers and make things load better. If you want a full-quality image, just ask me in the replies or dms, I’ll happily send it when I get a chance.

Also you’re free to do anything you want with any of my pictures, just don’t claim you were the one to take it :)

  • Guy Named ZEROOPEnglish
    1•6 hours ago

    I was just looking stuff up as well and found darktable, which seems to work well, but I feel like I’m doing something wrong, what exactly should I be using darktable for? I’ll have to explore GIMP and Affinity, as I don’t have any experience with them.

    Thanks for all the feedback! It is greatly appreciated.

    • @KammicReliefEnglish
      2•4 hours ago

      My pleasure!

      So yeah, the idea is, once you have a jpeg, you can only make small changes before you start getting artifacts (banding, etc.). So you want to do the big changes to your raw file (in darktable/rawTherapee/AdobeCameraRaw/etc), such as white balance adjustment, bringing up your too-dark shadows to bring some details back in, bringing down your blown-out highlights to bring any details back in, etc. It’s amazing how much info is stored in a raw file, and you can really tweak those shadows/highlights sliders without bad artifacts. Once that’s done, you export a jpg that you will then edit in photoshop/affinity/gimp, to do the less heavy-handed, but more artistic and more fun stuff like adding a little contrast here and there, adding a vignette, some painter-ly dodging and burning to make your subject look cool or to add drama to your clouds or buildings, color adjustments, cropping, etc…fixing flaws like a loose hair or a rock or a random person…

      Everyone has their own workflow, and I got mine from watching a bunch of videos and sorta settling on something. it’s a fun journey! But totally ok to start small, just have one little goal like “I’m gonna add some contrast.” then you’ll be like “oh maybe I’ll make this eye a little shinier.” then you’ll watch a youtube video about how to do one trick and then you’ll be like “I’m gonna do that on every photo!!” hehe. It’s very open ended and there’s lots of fun to be had. I’m no expert by any means! but happy to answer questions.