I would recomend that you use the viewfinder to aim and focus your shots live view can sometimes mis interperate what the lens is seeing if you are suggesting that you are aiming through the live view or do you mean just have a function in your camera displaying the histogram. You will find most dslr have a highlight\lowlight warning very useful function. you should enable it so that when you take your photo when you get that preview it will usually flash white in areas where they are over exposed and are pure white meaning it has taken the picture however parts of the picture has no recorded data as it is to over exposed usually bright lights skies etc they will flash white telling you the camera has only recorded plain white and no image data
and then it will also have the function of flashing black where there was not enough light in your scene and the only data recorded was black so no texture.
if you are shooting in raw format some data can be recovered in raw conversion. But if your highlights\lowlghts warnings are coming up it has no data to recover.
I always shoot in Raw + Jpeg fine so that way I can just plug in my memory card to my pc and have a quick scan and copy over the jpegs that I like to 1 folder then open up adobe bridge to view the raw files where you can rank your pictures and discard the 1s you dont like.
my personal ranking system for adobe bridge
5 star very little work possibly white balance touch up temperature or minor exposure\ contrast\ sharpening but overall a keeper picture
4 star needs general all round work but has potential to be a great picture
3 star needs raw conversion and a lot of adjustment and then imported into photoshop for editing such as object removal blemish touch up etc to make it a really good picture
2 Star is from the camera it will be a throw away picture but will use it to maybe add a lot of editing and special efffects and filters to.
1 star these will be boring flat pictures not a lot of character but not written off yet maybe go for a new crop black and white conversion or a colour tone. and possibly set up for HDR image and get to play with whatever filters I favour for that period and sometimes just go crazy and have fun
Any pictures that dont get a star are throw away images
the advantage of this system is that you can then categorise the pictures by your ratings and put them in there own folders I have a folder called to process and develop with 5 sub folders with 1 star 2 star 3 star 4 star and 5 star that way I know straight away what needs to be done and depending on how much time I have depends which folder I attack to process. I can go out in 1 session and take a 1000 images possible edit about 100 and only keep about 5-10 of good 1s and some you just dont know if you can make them good until after you have edited them just to still decide you do not like them
But please dont think just because you have gone a whole day of taking pictures with a good camera that they should all be good because I guarentee you that they wont and it will be a long time until you develop a style and know what shots work for you. Even so will not guarentee great images every time.
My big tip is from the raw control panel before opening it up in photoshop at the bottom you have blue text that looks like it is a link on a website click that and select the option open in photoshop as a smart object that way when you are editing in photoshop you can just double click the smart object and it will open it in the raw processing panel again to tweak settings you can not do this without the smart object so all your editing in photoshop can be a waste of time if you decide you need to fix some earlier issues and you will end up deleting it to start again.
I hope that helps you.
that is very good advice there Imac! my Camera switches live view off and opens the viewfinder as i focus the camera, i've turned the light and dark areas on, so overexposed areas flash red and underexposed areas flash yellow. and the histogram is in the lower right of my screen, i only use live view to as a sort of guide apart from that.
As for the Star Ratings, that is a pretty amazing thing to do, i might try that in a minute actually see where i get.
But please dont think just because you have gone a whole day of taking pictures with a good camera that they should all be good because I guarentee you that they wont and it will be a long time until you develop a style and know what shots work for you. Even so will not guarentee great images every time.
i was aware of that when i bought the camera, a guy on another forum said the same, the camera doesn't make the photos look good, the person behind it does. people must think i bought the camera thinking that i would automatically take professional looking photos XD. no, the main reason i got is was because I felt the need to expand my learning abilities, i wasn't going to get far with a limited capability point and shoot with a defective sensor, slow to respond buttons, slow shutter and a water damaged lens. so i researched the options, the original idea was a bridge camera by fujifilm, but that idea soon turned into a Nikon D3100 then i researched more, and found the underdog, Pentax K-r. after seeing it was the fastest entry level camera on the market with the highest ISO Range, i thought it was perfect for me, it felt the best in my hand compared to the 2 top dogs, so i got it. glad i did now, i don't see the hype in Canon or Nikon.
I don't think I'm quite ready to Shoot RAW yet, i think my memory card is too small, i have about a month to wait before any money comes in to get a bigger SD card and my bridge doesn't want to work because i'm using Linux and Wine can't register that it's wanting to open.
@hoogle, i agree, slow and steady wins the race. i'll ask mum about lightroom, she might be able to get it for me, no promises though.
