How's my photoshopping?

Took some time this weekend to play around with Photoshop. I'm still fairly new to this technology, but wanted to give it a go with some older photographs that are in my archives.

Too much photoshopping in some? Not enough in others? My priority for the majority of these was some adjustments to colouring and some selective sharpening.


1

Too much colour on all for me.
# 3 could look good in B&W

I agree -- too much saturation and over-sharpened.

#1 is OOF, Also too much contrast and the exposure could be dropped down a touch.

The last.... has a bluish color cast although the grass looks good.

The rest is more a matter of taste although the car is a bit too much. If you could lower the saturation in the wheel/tire that would help, imo.

Just a quick observation regarding #1: In the original the histogram is nicely distributed; in the edited version there are big spikes on the left and right so that the highlights are blown and the shadows are blocked. My personal approach would have been to knock the highlights down just a tiny bit and darken the mid-tones a little, and leave the blacks pretty much alone.

Thanks for the comments all.

Rimmer - I didn't pay much attention to the histogram, which is my fault. I assume that the spikes are from the conversion of the tree to black and white, though I could be wrong in that? I'd offer that the face in the photoshopped version is a little bit blown out and should have been brought down.

Bohdank - Not sure if image #1 is OOF? It doesn't really look like it to me, but clarify if you have a moment please so that I can improve next time around

I'd also agree that the colours are a little bit overdone and a little bit over-saturated. It was hard not to get trigger happy on some of the adjustments just to see their effect, but then again I shoudl have known better than to post over-postprocessed images into a critquing area! My bad. Which photos do you specifically think are over-sharpened? Maybe I was too excited to explore the unsharp-mask feature.

Thanks for the comments all - would to hear further explanations and suggested improvements. I'll hopefully look at these in another year and think, wow, those photoshop adjustments are nowhere near what I would be able to do with them now.

OK, my total lack of awareness on the B&W conversion -- I just assumed that you had pushed the contrast way too hard! Sorry that I didn't pick up on it.

I know what you mean about maybe going too far with adjustments sometime. I sure can identify with that. I still find it useful to either shoot RAW + JPG or use DPP to produce a JPG from the RAW without any adjustment, and then make occasional comparisons as I work. That has saved me quite a few times when I had "run off the rails" with my editing but failed to recognize it until I went back and compared with "what the camera saw."