I'm friggin sick o this

[dooda]

Every time I mess with the sky I get posterizing and blobbiness. When I change to black and white, saturation, desaturation, contrast, darken, Hue, it doesn't matter, the sky inherently turns into blobs. When I print out my pics the printers are always like, "you use a D70? That shouldn't happen" and I shake my head and run out of the store balling my eyes out and my ass is on fire.

Here's what I do. I take the pic, import to Iphoto, load into photoshop CS, then I PP and this is where I start seeing the problem. It happens with every single shot. Including this one I was just working on. I darkened the sky more than usual to illustrate the problem. Please tell me what's wrong.

[Greg B]

OK doodles, steady down fella, are you shooting NEFs or jpgs?

[big pix]

Do not import to iPhoto. Place your images into a folder on your desktop first, then use Photoshop. You can import to iPhoto after you have done your processing if you want. You can make ps your program of choice when you double click on an image in iPhoto. This should give you better results

Big Pix

[dooda]

Okay, (pant pant) I'm better now. Thanks Greg.

I shoot in JPEG fine, and I was afraid that you were going to ask me this. Damnit, you're going to tell me to shoot in Raw aren't you? If you do I'm going to lose my mind for sure. I-I-I...need to settle.

Thanks all

[big pix]

raw is better.......but iPhoto is a good viewing program but always start with Photoshop and all your images will improve, then try raw, and don't forget to download the new PSCS raw plugin

[kipper]

I swear by using NEF+Jpeg now as I feel it's like training wheels for cameras. If the print turns out 100% no need to PP, just put all the NEFs into a folder and batch convert to JPEG/TIFF etc. If they're no ok, just use Nikon Capture Editor to adjust the settings such as EV or WB and then save out to JPEG/TIFF.

[dooda]

Thanks Big Pix. Do you download that off of the Adobe site? I'll have to look into importing directly into PSCS (if that is indeed what you mean). A little worried about importing all of those pics though. Thanks again.

[big pix]

I am a Mac user and I get better results this way and my original files stay untouched. iphoto uses aliases so you are not sure if working on the original or not. iPhoto makes a new file every time you change an image. It hides the original. You can download to your desktop on a PC

I just use PSCS after downloading to my desktop. I always shoot in raw, and bracket exposures, old habits are hard to break. D70 set to auto white balance which you can change when processing the raw files in photoshop. I quite often save the processed files using save as, as a tiff file and then a jpeg, that way I am only doing one lot of sorting and processing of images

Hopes this helps

Big Pix

[AlistairF]

A warning with the new version of iPhoto (5.0.1) and NEF files.

Although it now imports NEF files, any exports to external editors uses the JPG format. You can import into iPhoto, but you'll have to open the NEF directly with NC or PSCS from you iPhoto library file structure. Also, make any PS adjustments in 16-bit.

Alistair

[big pix]

Dooda are you using mac or pc...... on mac always save to a folder on your desktop then make a copy to cd or a copy of said folder to work on, so your originals are untouched. On pc {I may be corrected} but save to a folder in my pictures or your desktop and also do a copy as above.

big pix

[dooda]

I use Mac. When I need to get the original I just go to file- revert to original, this seems to work. I'll set up a folder on my desktop for these and see how they work, thanks Big Pix. Looks like I'm going to try and shoot RAW, not something I've ever really done.

[Matt. K]

You've got nothing to worry about. That blob is a mountain.