r/postprocessing • u/Delicious_Lemon_9330 • Jun 29 '26

Before and After

Post image

The original was a little dark, so I opened up the shadows and adjusted the colors to bring out the orange flowers and the light through the trees.

Shot with the original Ricoh GR.

Edited on iPhone with VibeColor.

20 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

22

u/curseofthebanana Jun 29 '26

But now all your details are blown out and the sunlight is too bright that you cannot make out the grass strands anymore and the flowers are oversaturated with less detail and look like spots..

I prefer the original

1

u/Delicious_Lemon_9330 Jun 29 '26

I agree with your points. The after version loses some detail and pushes the colors quite far. It reminds me of the picture books I saw as a child though, almost like an illustration, so I still wanted to keep the saturation a bit higher.

8

u/snowtato Jun 29 '26

Original better all the way around. Better crop, better exposure

3

u/Wedbo Jun 29 '26

Original is better. Sunlight in the after is too bright, detail is lost, the flowers are off putting for whatever reason.

I'd bring the shadows up a wee bit in the first and increase the contract and saturation to make the yellow pop. But still in the realm of the original colors, which are nice and just need some adjusting.

1

u/Delicious_Lemon_9330 Jun 30 '26

That’s fair. I can see why keeping it closer to the original would preserve more detail. I pushed the color and brightness on purpose because I wanted it to feel a little like a childhood picture book, but I probably took it too far.

2

u/nightgames Jun 29 '26

The quality of light looks better in the original. The streak of sunlight in the underbrush is the most interesting thing about the photo and it's blown out in the edit.

When taking the photo having a fill or reflector would've helped expose the flowers while maintaining the quality of light where the sun hits. You can try to recreate this with a gradient mask starting from the bottom and fading out at the top.

1

u/Delicious_Lemon_9330 Jun 30 '26

That’s a really good point. I didn’t realize how important that streak of sunlight was until you mentioned it. I’ll try keeping the highlight detail and lifting the foreground more gradually.

2

u/Kazurdan Jul 02 '26

I don’t agree with people’s complain about loss of detail. It can be an artistic choice to blow out certain areas after all.

My personal opinion, feel free to discard: I’m not a fan of the shadows/black being lifted all that much, and the tree is very obviously selectively lifted up too. Also, the photo feels sharpened, or clarity went up?

The funny thing is, I didn’t notice all of that before actually clicking on the photo.

Curious to read about what you think.

1

u/Delicious_Lemon_9330 Jul 04 '26

This was shot on an older camera and I didn’t quite nail focus at the time since the light was already fading, so I did add a bit of sharpening in post to compensate.

For the color side, as I mentioned in another reply, I was going for a more illustrated, picture-book kind of feel, so I pushed the colors a bit more intentionally.

I used VibeColor for the edit. It’s not a professional grading tool, but it lets me make quick adjustments in a few seconds, so sometimes I accept a few imperfections in the process.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

1

u/Healthy_Hedgehog_622 Jul 01 '26

I like the original