Originally Posted by dj_mocok
Those images from Leica ones are the result of the mastery of both photography and post processing skill. There is no way you can create that kind of image without the skills of Photoshop.
A long time ago at photo.net, there was one 'photographer' who got so many excellent pictures in his portfolio, and then he got busted for stealing images from other photographs and photoshopped it, mixed it with other bits and pieces and created a great picture. At first he denied it, but after evidence was presented, he couldn't say anything anymore. What he did basically was just taking other people's work and combining them together, and didn't really take the images himself.
There is no doubt that he got serious skills in photoshop and creative sense of creating a nice image, but sometimes you wonder if this kind of people is still considered as photographer, not image creator...
It really depends on the product. There are far too many pictures I've seen posted on photography forums which have been over-edited: over-saturated colours, over-aggressive sharpening, etc... Jim Radcliffe's photos are no doubt heavily post-processed, but they still retain a very genuine, non-pretentious quality which really appeals to me.
PS: Darn it Milk, if you wanna create such a nice, elegant picture of fountain pen, can't you at least write something nice, not diarrhoea & mucus discharge?
Haha! Having been inspired by Jim Radcliffe's photos (LOL!), I decided to see what my Panasonic FX-9 (a cousin of the Leica C-Lux 2) is capable of. To my dismay, it is even more basic than I had imagined and lacks any sort of manual adjustment. Post processing was done via some messing around in Picasa 2 with fill light, highlights, shadows, sharpening and a shadow gradient. I had a good laugh tweaking that picture though since I only noticed
afterward what was in the foreground