I know a lot of people adjust the images they shoot
I dont usually tend to do more than crop them

I have set my cam to shoot raw+jpg now and got adobe lightroom 3

Just having a quick look at exposure and white balance

What else should i be looking at to make my images better?

I never got my head around Lightroom when I was forced to use it after upgrading my camera. Thankfully Camera Raw + photoshop seems to have sorted itself out now.

However Lightroom uses camera raw and most of the settings I used in CR were in lightroom in develop. The things I tend to look at are the white balance, I tend to go down the following list clicking things to see how they look and either leaving them as is or making a change and moving on:

WB - I click it from as shot to auto, most of the time it makes the image look a little better, but sometimes it makes it look a lot worse, EG the snow shots came out bluer than shot. However for the snow shots I still tweaked manually by shifting the scale bar to the left a little bit which made the snow whiter (it was a little grey)

Camera Raw then has 2 button for "auto" and "default" I tend to see what CR thinks the image should look like and click auto, and then default and toggle between as Xenity said to see what changes were being made.

It tends to be 50/50 where Ill use auto or default and then tweak the things that were changed to either highlight something or reduce how severe auto might be.

The things that get toggled are exposure, recovery, blacks, brightness...and recently, clarity.

I tend to leave recovery however as it tends to make an image a little bland, and Ive not used fill light. Clarity seems to be a sharpening tool.

This one was processed fairly heavily today. I basically left the camera outside with the remote on in the hopes of catching some birds on one of the feeders, and got lucky. However as Id left everything in P mode and the lighting in the garden wasnt too hot the exposure was pretty bad. I decided to give the HDR from a single Raw image suggestion made in an earlier thread a go. I changed the white balance to auto and then saved about 4 different copies of the image at about .5 increments to exposure.

I opened up PS and used the merge to HDR command, selected the images and ran it. The highest exposure image turned out to over-expose the whole thing, but when I deselected it I got the resulting image, and also I tried a noise reduction process to denoise due to a highish ISO being used to catch the wildlife in the act.



Robin redcrest by Chris_Moody, on Flickr

Lovely sharp shot Zpyder - was that cropped or full frame?

Binary - if youre processing from raw in lightroom youll want to look at sharpening too as the RAWs generally look pretty soft in comparison to a pre-processed JPG. A few different ways to do this, some good guides available on the web.

Worth playing with some of the preset templates, punch etc to see what difference different types of processing.

To me, when I see amazing post processing on a photo, thats as much a great skill as taking the photo in the first place and all part of a photographers arsenal in creating a great image. And there are some truly stunning examples out there.

A couple of my favourite processed shots:


Going home... by CCSawyer, on Flickr