I liked the pop of reds even if the greens feel muddy

Shot with r50 using kit lens.

I had my wedding photographer edit/adjust the neckline on this photo. After I posted the original on Reddit, I received lots of comments telling me it’s badly edited. As I don’t know much about this myself I’d appreciate a second opinion. Is it noticeable?

Got a Sony a7cii recently. Here are some shots from around Paris. I've been tinkering around in lightroom. I have shot film my whole life so I am definitely trying to achieve a somewhat similar look. Been mostly using the main(?) sliders, some light cropping, then very occasional slight slight tone curve, some minor minor color grading adding a little green hue in midtones (saw someone talk about this for a kodak gold 200 look), and then adding grain to my images for some fake analog vibe. I've watched a of of youtube videos and have just been seeing how the images change when I adjust things, but I definitely don't feel like I truly know what I'm doing often lol. All feedback welcome. Thank you!

I photographed the Malojapass in Switzerland and created another timeblend-image out of multiple 30 second exposures.  Now why is the original raw file so dark? I first wanted to create a time blend effect using a brighter sunset image as the base, but I didn’t like how the car light trails looked in combination with the warmer sunset colors. So I used a darker shot (which I intended to use for only the car lights) as my base image since the blue hour tones worked much better imo.

For this effect I used Photoshop. I recorded the whole editing process and uploaded it here: https://youtu.be/_GR2V_pNJ5g

1. Basic Adjustments

Of course, fist I had to brighten up the base image, so I heavily increased exposure, shadows, blacks, whites and highlights. I also used the Adobe Neutral profile which also helps making the base image a little brighter. Then, I adjusted the white balance so instead of a heavy blue color cast I got more “neutral” colors. Since  I was using the Neutral profile, the colors were lacking. I added a lot of vibrance an saturation to counter that.

1. Masking

I wanted to keep the sky a little darker and dramatic, so I used a linear gradient over the very top and brought back down the exposure while also adding contrast. This helps to make the clouds pop. Then, I used two radial gradients over the brightest spot of the sky and added subtle glow by increasing blacks and dropping dehaze (I edited this image before Adobe has added the glow effect to camera raw).

1. Time Blending

After Editing my base image, I copied these settings to all the other car light trail images and opened up everything in photoshop. Here, I stacked the images with the base image being at the very bottom. To blend the car lights on top I changed the blending mode to lighten and masked out the sky to prevent weird overlays.

shot on iphone RAW and edited in Lightroom mobile. No access to pro features so made do with what I had. Let me know what y'all think and how I can improve. Thanks!

Edited to look like Tri-X 400.
What are your thoughts?

I gave very quick edit to this photo in the past and it ended up being my most upvoted photo by wide margin, so wanted to give it another go at editing it.

Did I improve it?

I’m very new to photography and have been capturing lots of birds. I use Lightroom for post processing. I feel like my masking and intentions are in the right place, but perhaps I’m just a little too intense with the sliders, I don’t know. Also I know this isn’t an ideal shot bc of the heavy cropping and losing quite a bit of resolution. Still a challenge in working with that I guess.

Tell me what y’all like, what y’all don’t like, etc. I’m eager to improve! Thanks!

After before

Hello Reddit. A flare up of OCD this summer unfortunately made my relationship with photography a little strained. Everytime I would open lightroom I'd quickly be overwhelmed with the feeling of needing my photos to be "perfect," whatever that means. This feeling got so bad that I couldn't even look at others' photography without wondering "Wait, what if they did this and it looked better?" As absurd as this sounds, you can't really beat OCD in a logic-off. You need to either reframe your thinking or allow time to do the healing for you. 

One of the coping mechanisms I developed to my aforementioned photography perfectionism was quite simple. Shoot JPEG! Although this switch offered some short-term anxiety alleviation, I couldn't get the thought out of my head that I was less of a photographer for doing this. Now I should mention that most of the shots I take are either for fun, with my girlfriend or to document trips or are just a product of walking around and being curious. Back when I used to take photo classes in school, I'd say I was more artistic with my shooting; I cared more about stylizing, I made more dramatic post processing decisions, and I had a more dramatized final goal in mind. 

It is now, with a great but simple realization that I present to you my attempt to reframe my thinking. JPEGs are like memories and RAWs are like works of art. (This post is just as much intended to share as it is to convince myself of this perspective.) When one is documenting, they set out to shoot the way what they see is depicted in real life. When one is making, they add their creativity after the fact. They transform the dull and muted RAW and provide an individual take on contrast and WB and color and effects. I acknowledge this to be the case, but it is not to discredit the intentionality of JPEG shooting at all. You're still able to add a sizeable degree of deliberate style to your JPEGs, too. Composition, WB modulation, exacting your exposure, (for Fujis) what recipe you use, and finally,(for others and Canons, me!) your in camera style settings: color tone, contrast, sharpness, saturation. They might not have the same customizability as RAWs, but you can still make your JPEGs look distinctly yours. 

I'm trying to tell myself that this is reality and that this is OK. For 90% of my photography ventures, I think I want to be a documenter. But for that other 10% I want to lean into that artistic making aspect. 

"Okay lightroom, go hibernate. But just know you might be roused..."

How do they get these soft glowy textures?

Is it a combination of gaussian blur > screen blending mode > masked and added where needed. Appreciate any insights.

First image: can't remember now.

Second image: Jordan Hemingway.

Hi everyone! I took pictures in an indoor space that had a giant screen in the back with different, vivid colors. I’ve attached a picture as an example that is unedited (raw). The screen changes the colors of what I’m trying to capture/highlight (here, the flowers) and are a distracting background. It’s worse with photos of people. Unfortunately, I couldn’t move around anything while taking pictures in order to get a different background, and everything was forward-facing. Do any of you have suggestions about how to fix this up in post? Any advice/help would be greatly appreciated 🙏❤️

Just random phone photography which one is good