oh! sorry… half the time my notifications don’t work on here or email and there was no reply arrow so… well thank you Aug!
As for Goldens church, i’m the opposite i love how the darkness of the church brings out the light of the SGW…and can’t get the “kingdom of god is inside you and all around u, not in mansions of wood and stone” quote out of my head, like the pure light of the angels is keeping the dark at bay… Golden did good!
It was natural light… which their wasn’t much [thanks to near-regular cloud cover]
Between my physical positioning and a relatively wide angle [28mm], doesn’t help the sizing
Was some activity going on, at the adjacent wing [by its MASSIVE stainglass pane] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2Fa9%2F25%2F46%2Fa925464422124bcfdd0322f2c54d37f9.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=3bc048a7cd0a4a3398fabd42bde2e58b23d773dceb581d3040e6e5e03eb04177&ipo=images
…I didn’t want to intrude
I’d like to do bracketing type stuff, but I’d needed my tripod n’ such [this was handheld]
how do you do the softness? its so awesome… like i tried playing around with levels to do the same thing but everything just washes out
Softness? You mean as in the whites aren’t as white and blacks are more muted?
You’re referring to the noticeable focal separation, right?
@Katie Macro Lens? Flipped a manual lens?
None of the above.
135mm f5.6 on APS-C camera The subject was just close enough to blow everything else out of focus. I can give all of the EXIF data if need be.
@MilzyBee to reiterate: I dragged the whites and blacks off the corners a bit in curves and balanced the rest out/made few other modifications. Like this:
oh no sorry, i got that stuff down pat with Apertures and stuff, just the smooth silky texture look, the professional look like @Katie’s one…
so an S curve, so thats what they were talking about lol… see i always drag the middle bit of the line back and down which makes things darker a bit… or try that split thing in levels…
whites n blacks off the corners a bit…in levels and then S curve in curves? or… all of it in curves? please ELI5, i am a mainly a sketcher : )
like…a matte effect i think im trying to say? sorta like this…(the one on the right)
S curve but you lift the corners as well, as it mutes the blacks and whites. Matte might be indeed the word what you’re looking for. Attachment is what it would look like without the curves if that helps to clarify.
@MilzyBee Yeah matte is what you mean. You can already do plenty by just lifting the blacks like that without ever touching highlights. I just felt that doing both did heaps for this photo.
which was literally in your screenshot and i just didn’t notice… 
sorry!!!
No worries~ You might also like Orton effect. Gives images this kind of dreamy effect and there’s ways to replicate in Photoshop or other programs. Mark Denney on YouTube has a great guide on how to do it as well.
Also pls tell me about your sketching. I need motivation in that area.
i think i am gonna have to do a bit of a deep dive on this because my attempts were less than promising Put into details because wall of text and stuff.
I use gimp and Krita so i am sure there is a comparable way. Just most of the tutorials are for photoshop but i am gonna go looking! maybe the effect needs to be more subtle or helps to have something properly color graded beforehand without the peaks going off the histogram, well that one flower piccie turned out okay
original:
1st attempt
but still not that silky smooth but matte goodness like yours, though maybe the DOF adds to it, i could try a thingy blur…
2nd attempt
just did a subtle blur a bit…does that help?
Depends what your goal is 2bh and your focus is too but practice really does help, and not even of any particular interesting subject matter either, sometimes random objects, just observing how the light falls on them…light is key. A lot of my personal works focus on light, but i do plenty of flat printing too. The object or subject itself is just as important as the space around it, the light that reflects all over it, the shadow it casts and also the angle in which you view it in your mind. Outlines are easiest, i mean… i am no where near some of those amazing photorealistic sketchers, no way…i taught myself so theres a whole amount of skills im yet to learn…
For me personally i have a love of the light and the darkness around and on subjects, and focus a lot on light before the subject itself. I’ve been drawing for most of my life but pretty much always in monochrome, no color…i feel people undervalue the tone charcoal or graphite can give a sketchpad or canvas, and i love sketching on canvas too because the texture adds a nw bit of difficulty but also tone… umm… im not sure where to really start to explain to be honest.
I like to draw people, and things…a lot of my stuff focuses on decay, or weathered or used items, like a burned matchstick, or a candle whose wax is almost spent… for people i draw a lot of sorrow and grief because of how raw it is, how vulnerable… its a side of myself i kinda usually keep to myself a bit to be honest so not sure how i feel bout sharing this with the world but yeah 
hope my ramblings help a bit like you helped me, n thank you for that!
I may have at one point, used Davinci Resolve for color adjustment in photos 
ah davinci, the one app i want and my little nuc says No, i’ve only got intergrated graphics, are ya trying to kill me?" 
I feel like the Kangaroo image isn’t the best for it though it does work. In terms of flower though, your second attempt is better than my current one on the same image IMO.
Blur could help but I do it the way this video taught me:
I don’t know how important it is, but my photos using the matte effect are usually quite dark from the get-go. Also second video wasn’t the one I learnt from, it was just in my history and I assumed that was the one. Leaving it here still as it might help you
I usually get mad already after the first line, either because how it looks or because I’m not happy with the proportions of things. I tried to trace some other people’s work before to help with that. It does help but I also lose interest fast.
I agree! Light is very important and that’s what I’m trying to emphasize in photos too, to almost no avail.
I do like the idea of weathered items though. People is not really my thing, given that I’m introverted and work retail as is, though mixing them into certain compositions can be really interesting, as that’s what one of my favorite artists does. Thank you for your rambling! I appreciate it lots.
@MazeFrame I’m mainly on Lightroom and Photoshop. There’s a program called Darktable too. That and Gimp could honestly carry through all of photography if need be.
I got the Affinity-Trinity:
I shall check them out. Also if you shoot stars or nightscapes, another good program would be Sequator or DeepSkyStacker. Both are on Windows, I don’t know about other operating systems though.
I’ve never used those… Just sticking with the Capture One version which I get access to for having a Fujifilm camera
And even then I try to edit as little as possible. I don’t really enjoy the process, would rather just get the result in camera if possible.
I rarely use the reply option when I’m reacting to the post just above mine…
Yeah… you’ve got to work with what you have and i understand not wanting to intrude! We’ve got some churches here which are awesome and I visited them during some cultural festivals to take some photos. Though that’s limiting in the options you get with light 
And I get not wanting (or being able to) drag a tripod out all the time
I think we all do 
. It’s very unlikely to get the desired results right away, at least for me.
