1st Experiement with Nikon 200D by a newbee.

[Snooks]

So today I ventured into the garden for my first attempt at taking a manual photo. I've only had the camera a week or so and spent some time reading on here, looking at you tube videos etc and it sounds so easy. I guess on auto it is so i took some on auto and then had fun on manual.

The subject matter is pretty unexciting but i had fun taking some images of a pruned rose branch in the garden. I just took a photo and then changed the f stop and took one then just fiddled with different shutter speeds etc and it was fun, the differences were quite apparent, but i guess you all know that

I'm editing using GIMP and have a basic understanding but have never had to venture deeper than cropping, rotating and very basic colour changes and erasing some things. WOW, it seems harder to do than taking a photo. Is there anything special I should practise or learn first, regarding editing with GIMP, to improve photos? What would be the most common functions you use when working on photos?

Yeh...... this photography stuff is pretty cool

[ameerat42]

Basic PP functions using an image editor like GIMP? - I think you've got them covered, if by "colour changes" you mean to include
tonal changes, like contrast and brightness, AND re-sizing (re-sampling) to fit here on AP. Many others are just refinements on these,
until you go into such things as distortions using tools like perspective and other linear/dimensional transformations, and besides those,
sharpening.

I'd say proceed the way you're going, especially posting examples and describing what you've done, and maybe what you'd like
to be able to do. People can respond more easily than to blanket terms like "played with xyz function". For instance, if you say
that you have "sharpened with unsharp mask but something unexpected happened" then someone here might suggest some other
sharpening method. But there is no fixed way of doing most editing that is guaranteed to "work" for all images.

So to summarise: Take/work on/post pic with description (esp if requiring help), then learn/practise and... - go back and do it again.

So, how about a few of these pruned-rose-branch pics in the CC forum?

[Snooks]

Hi Ammereet42.

I am not quite brave enough to post anything I have taken a photo of and then fiddled with, but I promise to do so in the future as I can see how it will assist me.

This place is a bit overwhelming for the newbees like me, but having said that, people are friendly and willing to help and I greatly appreciate that.

I will post something, or Taylor my daughter will, in the near future. ( We are a joint team lol)

Cheers

[Mark L]

Do you really need to be playing with full manual yet? I use aperture priority most of the time. I decide the ISO I want and the DOF I want and let the camera figure the shutter speed.
Since joining up here you've asked some good questions but in the end you need to be posting photos for CC to get more feedback on what you and Taylor are doing with your photos. There are many members here that only look in the photo forums and simply won't look at this tread. Don't worry if you think the photos aren't good, it's the way to get feedback.
And another way to learn is to comment on other peoples photos.
"I like this because ......". Or "I wonder why you did ........ here" Makes you think about what you like and why.

[arthurking83]

....
I'm editing using GIMP and have a basic understanding but have never had to venture deeper than cropping, rotating and very basic colour changes and erasing some things. WOW, it seems harder to do than taking a photo. Is there anything special I should practise or learn first, regarding editing with GIMP, to improve photos? What would be the most common functions you use when working on photos?

...

No disrespect intended towards the GIMP here, but dump it!

If you want/need advanced cloning ability, get Paintdotnet(do a google on that exact name search).

If you want just a simple image editor to do some local adjusments, I'm not recommending Nikon's CaptureNX-D.
Download the latest version from Nikon's website.
Very important note too tho if you decide to try it and stick with it .. don't shoot in jpg mode! Set the D200 to NEF mode and make sure it's 14bit uncompressed. Not 14 bit compressed, nor 12 bit.

If you do try it, the single main advantage in doing so it to do your editing with Color Control Point system. This system works with jpg files, but the ability is about 1/4 of what it will do on NEF files.
So once you have an image loaded in CNX-D, first things you'll do on the NEF file are whitebalance and if needed exposure adjustments.
Then if you need to brighten a small area(eg., you need to brighten up a persons face), look up in the tool bar, for the control point tool(almost looks like an E). Click this. The click on the area that you want to brighten up.
Make the size of the circle just a little bit more than the size of the area you want to brighten using the top slider.
The next slider down is the brightness slider, drag that as you require .. and so on for all the other adjustment sliders.
I think by default, it only shows the BSC mode. That is, top slider is the size of the mask area. then the three sliders down are Brightness, Contrast, Saturation(ie. BCS).
click the down arrow below the saturation slider if you want more tools, like the three colour channels, hue, warmth, etc.

The advantage of this system, is that once you create one Control point of an area you want to adjust, if another area needs similar adjustments, you copy and past that same control point to those other areas.
This is how I learned to be 'efficient' with my processing.
What you do with these control points is then so variable, it makes PP almost fun to do.
You can control them all via the one control point, or control a specific few in one way, and another set of control points another way.
eg. you may want 6 control points on a blue sky area, and another 6 points on a darker ground area.
You click on the one set of 6 in the tool area on the RHS, and drag one control point slider the way you want, and all 6 control points slide along together.
You then click on the other set of 6 control points and control them another way. If you don't like how one area was affected, you can then click on just that control point and readjust it to suit .. etc.

the way I see Color Control Point editing is that, once you understand it, it's the most efficient manner of localised image editing .. ie. the lazy bugga's PP method.

Nikon have a clone/heal tool, but for all intents and purposes, it's useless!
So don't expect to clone stuff in or out of an image. it's barely works on dust spots, let alone any detail of complexity greater than a dot of dust!
I once had to clone a hand out of an image of my mum, and I used PaintDotNet for this purpose.

The other thing that may have some importance as well(considering your Sigma lens thread) is that by default, CNX-D will not remove any exif data in your images.
Because you will now set your image type to NEF in camera too, you then have to convert that NEF file type to a jpg type to share with the world.
This is easy as, look for the convert tool icon in the tool bar. set to 'about 80%' quality. The quality setting is not a given, it's just an estimate.
When you hit the convert tool, it pops a box up and you then set some settings up. Just for starters keep images file names and locations simple. Use the source folder, and file name. With the size and quality, adjust them to suit the file size estimate you see in the box at the top right.

About 350 to 500kb is a good size to limit yourself too.
If you want to use the Nikon Image Space site to upload too, CNX-D has a built in access to it too.
But I found that Image Space was hopeless for when it came to share images on forums.

Anyhow, that's what I'd recommend for 'ya.
Hope that helps.

[Snooks]

@ arthurking83

Thank you so much for explaining in such detail, it would have taken quite a while to do and it is greatly appreciated. I have read it but will do so countless times so that I actually understand it.

GIMP is an issue I have struggled with for years, one important reason for using GIMP is that it is free and seems as capable as Adobe if you can learn to handle it. My first choice would be Adobe but it costs each month and sadly, financially I simply cannot afford the ongoing costs so I have forced myself to try and use GIMP. But I have struggled. My use of GIMP has always been for simple editing for websites, ebay, stuff like that. I have never used it for anything really in depth like taking photos where HQ is required.

In all honesty I never dreamt that photo editing would be such an important aspect of taking photos....I thought the camera did all that stuff and the editing programs were for resizing, cropping and stuff like that. I now see how wrong i was (lol)

I looked at Nikons Capture days ago and I thought it sucked. I joined up with Nikons Image Space and yeh, sharing is a task and a half. I haven't looked at Paintdotnet but will do so as soon as I finish this reply.

@ Mark L.

Hi Mate.

I agree and actually last night, (before this thread was posted), I started reading the Learning Plan in the Beginners Forum. Typical male I guess......I jumped in rather than reading the instructions and just wanted to fiddle.

I have been so short on time this last week and honestly have not spent any time taking photos at all, rather, I have been reading on the forum and other places. Taylor has probably taken a fair few but at the moment won't join the forum and post, she says it is too scary. She will change her mind soon, probably when I start making some posts.

Be assured I am not scared of CC, I appreciate CC and have a skin like an Elephant, sadly I have the same stomach shape (lol). I am actually going to pop up to Lennox Bridge in Knapsack Gully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennox_Bridge,_Blaxland which is only 4 minutes up the road. It looks a great spot to take some photos in full auto, perfect for learning framing and composition, the two main areas in the first bit of the learning plan.

So I will have some images up in the next few days.

Thanks again everyone, I appreciate not only your assistance, but your patience with my recent questions and posts

[ameerat42]

On downloading and installing "Paint.net"...
https://www.getpaint.net/download.html

"Options" for downloading and installing Paint.net... (I picked the first, as I couldn't figure
out why involve MS, except for the product legacy name.) Else, the blurb on the MS opt
page said that some of the plug-ins do not work with Win 10, but that they're "working"
on it...
painntdotnet.jpg

[Snooks]

That Pint DOT NET program looks awesome and well worth trying. I have downloaded the latest version and as soon as I get some spare time, which will be late tonight just before bed, I will check it out.

Thanks for the tip