Cherry Blossom Festival 4.02.06

Hello everyone. I'm pretty new here and this is my first thread. I'm posting pics from the DC Cherry Blossom Festival which I attended this past Sunday. The shots were taken with a Rebel XT and kit lens. I'm learning more and more each day about photography and my camera but I'd like to have some of you guys critique my shots. Here they go;

1. This was one of my favorite shots but when I uploaded it, I realized that it was out of focus. Can someone explain why it came out this way?

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OOF reasons can be too slow of a shutter speed - handheld shots, wind blowing the flowers. Wind is the bane of macro photographers

If you are okay with me editing one, I will show you what a little unsharp mask will do. Great tool in order to bring some sharpness out. Can be selectively applied to certain areas only as well.

Sure go for it. Thanks!

Okay here is one edit of one of your shots. The only thing I used was unsharp mask and the levels adjustment.

I used three passes of the unsharp mask with the following settings:

160, 1, 0
15, 100, 0
15, 100, 0

I then used the levels adjustment and adjusted the mids to get the image brightened back up a bit. That's it. And it makes a huge difference. You can also do the unsharp mask, and then go back and use the history brush to paint in the sharpness only where you want to.

All digital photos usually need at least some sharpening to get them ready for viewing and printing. The camera can be set to add some for you - or it might be set to do none at all. I recommend not doing any at all and doing it in photoshop. Or if you shoot raw you can change in the raw editor whether to add sharpening or not when opening the file.

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Wow, that brought out lots of detail. Thanks for the insight. I guess I have to do some more research in image editing.

You really really have to do post processing on digital images. It's just like all the little things you would do in a darkroom with film. It's a critical step in the process of photography and can't be ignored. Luckily I had been using photoshop myself since version 4 in a more graphics design fashion, so I was already very familiar with the program and what it could do before I got into photography. Photoshop was just a program I played around with for fun growing up - making wallpapers for my computer and such and it progressed into some logo/web design as well as my photography.

There's people here that know about editing, and you might also try these forums here:

RetouchPRO