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r/photography•
frostickle

Photography-Subreddit of the Month: /r/postprocessing

Why I have started this new initiative:

Hi r/photography!

We've recently hit 100,000 subscribers, and one of the new things I'm putting in place to celebrate is to help promote the smaller photography related subreddits with a monthly featured subreddit!

The "mission statement" behind r/photography is that it is the catch-all photography subreddit. Of course, as the largest photography-subreddit, it is expected that if there is any exciting photography news, it will hit r/photography within the hour and be upvoted to the front. But aside from that, anything to do with photography can be discussed here. We have a weekly album sharing thread for members to take a look at what everyone else is doing and get feedback on their own work (ala. r/photocritique), we have a weekly questions thread for members to ask any question they want (ala. r/AskPhotography), monthly inspiration threads for just sharing awesome photos (similar to the safe-for-work porn network or r/photographs). All sorts of posts should be welcome, but the smaller photography-subreddits are much better when one wants to learn a lot about a specific area of photography. In the more specific subreddits, one can find good, relevant information, rather than just a mass of random photography-related posts.

Unfortunately, side-bars don't work for directing new users to the smaller subreddits. Many users today are on mobile devices, where the sidebar is omitted, and most desktop users will ignore it too. r/photography has a wiki and FAQ, but there are hardly ever any visitors to those pages.

So, each month I wish to promote a different subreddit, to introduce the community to a new area photography that they may not have dabbled in yet.

For the first month, I'd like to promote r/postprocessing.

What is Post Processing?

Post Processing refers to any work done to photographs after the image has been taken. In modern terms, it is anything done outside of the camera. I've seen people boast about a camera's build-in art filters and jpg engines, claiming that no post-processing is required.

If you are going to do further work on your photos, there are a few different levels: from simple filters, to what we call "post processing", to full on photoshopping.

Filters

Of late, we've seen a very popular filter app hit the mass market. Instagram started life as a post processing app. Back in the day, camera phones did not take photos that were good enough to show, so by throwing a dirty filter over the photo, the photos would have weird colours and grain on purpose. (Of course, Instagram's social aspect, "the easiest way for your friends to view your photos is to get them to download it too!" was just as much reason for it's success.)

Post Processing

Typical post processing is using a program like Lightroom or Aperture to adjust the white balance, tones, curves, colours, remove noise, etc. from a photo. Perhaps red-eye correction or a small amount of spot removal.

A lot of people dislike using too much photo manipulation, photoshopping is often banned in competitions, where post processing is ok. Some consider the line between "post processing" and "photoshopping" to be; if it's something you could have done in a darkroom, and the only thing that's different is that it's just faster and easier to do with modern adobe lightroom, then it's kosher.

Photoshopping

I don't want to get too much into photoshopping, but if you want to hear what I have to say on it, you should take a look at this post.

Basically; this is an artwork by Dave Hill, notice I call it "an artwork" not "a photo". He may have used a camera, but he didn't produce a photo.

In the same way a painter may use a pencil to draw an outline of something before he paints it... but his final work is not called a sketch.

from u/ev149

Hi r/photography users! First off, we'd like to congratulate you on the 100k subscriber milestone. You guys have produced and shared some great content and made r/photography an awesome subreddit. The moderators at r/postprocessing are honored to be the Subreddit of the Month, and would like to invite you to join us and learn new techniques, receive critiques, and share your knowledge with our community. Sincerely, the r/postprocessing mod team.

For those keeping count, we now have 2 weekly threads: Albums and Questions.
We have 2 monthly threads: Inspirations and Featured Subreddit
I also wish to introduce 1 more monthly thread: A monthly competition

Posted Nov 30, 2012, 4:37 AM UTC · edited

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