Are there any recommended courses or guidebooks you know of that detail that procedure?

Well it was blue, noisy & horrible. The only reason I didn't crop it all was that would mean cutting the treetops off around the basin behind the town. I thought people used to use, or still do, UV filters to reduce it? The problem I had with here was, apart from the massive contrast drop it gave, the blue tones were completely foreign to the rest of the image, which has almost no blue/cyan.

Aliengrove, the issues you mention I think arise really because there are different expectations from different individuals, and not many clear rules or dividing lines. I think whats happening is people pick up from others their reactions and get a feel for how thay can 'take' the critisism. Sometimes you get the wrong person!

Mostly I find that technical advice and pointers about processing is well received, and can be a good sharing of ideas and learning. It gets more tricky when the question is about the whole image, its point or purpose. I've been told many times a shot of mine was of something that another person would walk past, ie not worth the battery power! Well, fine, but we have the image there, it was taken and the photographer felt it was worth it for them - you have to accept that and work with what there is. Sometimes what an individual will take shots of is relative to the number of opportunites and access to locations they can gain - and that varies a lot.

No doubt I may be one of those posting the 5 at-a-time mundane images in the gallery that puts you off. I don't see why it should - any outstanding single image will only stand out more amongst many lesser shots. The gallery is interpreted differently also - I will put up what I feel are the better few of a larger bunch, those that best represent my photography as a whole. So its not a place for every shot. I don't expect much comment though, most of the activity there is just positive encouragement and much of it very similar, with many from the same people.

It can go some way towards it though ... now PP is part of the package of skills and experience that a digital shooter needs. Yes, you've got to see the shot and catch it right, but good presentation and optimising the image data can only be a plus surely?

The shots here would be worse if they were poorly edited, so that implies some inherant value to that editing?

Oh, really? I'd have thought the 80's postcard-style shots of olde Dorking town would have held a sort of nostalgic appeal? What about how I've managed to almost eliminate the pea-soup-like blue haze that blighted the far distance beyond the tree line on the Dorking ones, near-matching the contrast levels with the closer treeline? That took some skill!

Yes, excellent IQ and well shot. Clearly a very handy little machine to have in your pocket! No 3 is the best I think just for the unusual front-on angle.

Be aware that when a disc is read by Windows, and the explorer window opens showing all the photos, this has not actually copied anything onto the hard drive. What is happening is that Windows is reading the disc and making small thumbnails of the photos for display in the explorer window - these small thumbnails are being held by the computer in its temporary memory (called RAM) for you to see. Nothing is copied or stored on the conputer hard drive at this stage.

Select the photos you want (hold down the 'shift' key - up arrow) and click on the thumnails - once selected (they usually go blue) then 'right-click' on one of them and hold down the right button ... then drag holding down the right button across to the hard drive folder where you want them to be on the conputer ... release the button and choose from the small pop-up menu 'copy here'.

Now Windows will read the disc again and actually make a new copy onto the hard disc, but only of those few that had selected and dragged over.

9 is a crop of 7, its the same photo but looking on the website now I see there is a slight difference in colour intensity - I have no explanation for that at all - it was just opened again in PS CS2, cropped down more then resaved the exact same way using the 'Save for Web' dialogue. Could it just be the automatic 'bicubic sharper' algorithm working on a smaller number of pixels on the cropped one?

I've used 3 of these images to make 2 versions each, one a tighter crop, to get feedback on what works best. And of course same with the mono versions, just to see how people find them.

I havn't tried hard to make them look 'correct' - they were shot in fairly strong cross / back lighting making contrast fairly low in fact, and it was very hazy, so I used processing to draw out the effects of this, like the sheen on the trees and gritty detail on the grass. You can see the dramatic difference when I turned the other way and shot the views towards Dorking town.

Ralph, you're right about the mono tones - after the conversion and contrast work I used CS2's 'colour balance' tool to apply a little toning, mainly a touch of green, red and / or yellow. Just an instinctive thing to do really, I liked the results.

Thanks again to all contributors here, No 7 & 9 seem to be the favourites.

Guys, I welcome all views, the more the merrier as you know! Darkmunk, I don't think there's much point us comparing editing software's capabilities without any direct and controlled testing.

You are taking your assumptions too far with your idea that the reason I'm wary of raising shadows is because the software I use is inferior! The software I choose has quite extraordinary tonal abilities. I'm sure we would both find things to like if we tried each others software choice.

My aversion is not to raising shadows in general, if they really are shadow areas - here the key-tone is the kids faces, (ie need to be mid-high tones), and without the flash they would have been in deep shadow. My aversion is to raising key-tones like that excessively in software - that is the tones that should be correctly exposed at capture. My point is that only the flash could provide that correct exposure.

I trust the people above to say it as it is ... they usually do, and if there were technical criticisms they could easily have been voiced without causing any offence relating to the subjects. I have temporarily suspended my technical obsessions here and tolerated the 'bad bokeh' and missing tree data, for no reason other than I just like the effect.

Micheal, its good to have the other view - isn't it amazing that digital now provides us with such a range of choices for our photography and the presentation of each image - makes it very rewarding!

Thanks for the input guys. Oh yes, that car, I was going to clone it out - lucky I forgot to

I think you're saying there Bob that there's not a clear enough point of focus, a centre or subject? Fair enough. The images for me are of the 'place', of the 'scene' - I wanted them to convey an impression of the experience of being there at the long vewpoint and scanning around taking it all in. I was attracted to the strong lines, both soft of the tree groups, and curvy of the the roadway, and the way they pull the eye around. Thats the theory at least! Lucky I didn't use the 14mm

The B & W follows on from recent experimenting - does it work for this type of image?