The imagery here in my pBase galleries illustrates 'the look' I like to achieve with my photography and in answer to the many requests I get, the techniques shown in this set of galleries are the ones I use to get it.

Keep in mind, that is all I have strived to show here - how I do things - which may or may not be the best or even the right way to get them done. These are just what work for me...for now.

Also, while these galleries contain virtually all the routine processing steps I go through, it's kind of like playing chess...it's easy to learn the moves, not so easy to put them together to play a winning game...so here are my moves. I leave it up to you how you put them together.

That said, 'the look' is what I think of as how the human mind, with its incredibly wide dynamic range and tonal compensation, perceives a scene and how we remember it later. The mind, by its nature, enhances, simplifies, and romanticizes what we saw, rather than giving us the stark reality our camera does with its limited dynamic range and literal record of the scene.

To me, this difference between human perception of a scene and a camera's literal record of it (excluding the vast difference there is between our human 3D vision and the camera's 2D record of it) explains why we are so often disappointed in what the camera gives us of a scene that had struck us enough by its beauty to want to photograph it.

So, since it has been my observation over the years that people have a much greater response to an image that looks like how it would have been perceived than they do to a camera's literal record of it, it is that perceived look (aka 'the look') that I strive for.

For my thoughts on post-processing in general, click here.