Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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I’ll preface this with an admission that I’m a lazy photographer (amateur). I don’t even rename most of my pictures. I totally agree with you, Ant, that a professional should take advantage of the post tools. I take pictures and try to highlight my main subject in how I compose the picture, available lighting (most of my stuff is landscape), framing of the subject (i.e. - mountain framed by trees/branches, etc.), and such. I “catch” HOP as I have TWIT.tv on as background when I’m at my desk, but photography as a hobby hasn’t demanded upping my game. All that said, I was very impressed with the before/after editing that Ray Mitchell did. Two things came of that portion of the show. His skills, brief as they may have been are very impressive, for one. Gmp as a tool that I might have to look into, is number two. Prior to this, cropping a photo is about the extent of my editing. Thanks to you, and Ray’s example, it looks like it might be time to up my game 
I am subscribed to HOP, BTW
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Ray’s processing is a lot better, but I’d have done selective (area) exposure adjustments, Lincoln now looks overexposed and still drags the eye away from the supposed subject. In fact, I’d probably have pushed up the exposure on her and dropped the exposure on Lincoln.
It is the same with the portrait photo, the eye is automatically drawn to the sky in the background.
For such a professional photographer and team, I think the results are very disappointing. If I had been at Vogue, I wouldn’t have accepted those images, how the got through quality control is a mystery.
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I am very similar. Most of my post processing is restricted to cropping and maybe a little light adjustment, but I grew up on film and you always tried to get the image right before you press the shutter release, because that was normally the only chance you had, unless you had thousands of pounds/dollars of equipment and your own dark room to experiment with, and each experiment cost money, because you’d have to expose it to paper to see the result properly.
I do mainly nature photography - landscapes or close ups of plants (90%) or wildlife, I’m not much of a person photographer, although I did take a bunch of pictures at the party after the open baptism of my granddaughter, but they were mainly candid shots, but, even there, I was automatically going for correct framing and lighting, so there was little to do in post - apart from an issue I mentioned in the TWIT thread from last weekend - one of the nieces was running around the whole time naked, I tried to cut out as much as possible, without destroying the images, but if I’d been using an Android phone, instead of my Sony Alpha, I might have had my account blocked and be facing a police investigation, because of Google’s overly restrictive rules…
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Yeah, I came from film, too. Early on, I did have access to B + W developing but we were still encouraged to just produce and not rely on post-production. My hobby photography is, like you, mostly nature. I do take a lot of pictures documenting my work (I design and install septic systems). I document soil evaluations, construction processes, tank and pipe locations, etc., so the unlimited picture taking with digital leads to more than enough documentation. These don’t get any post-production since they are documentation. I try to move these into specific client folders and are really the ones that I mentioned regarding renaming.
I just took pictures at my daughter’s wedding and like you at the baptism did my best to compose the pictures re: lighting, background, etc. I might go back and see if I can make any improvements, even though most of the pictures turned out pretty good. The group portraits might gain from that, as getting everyone lit properly was challenging (outdoor at the lake in the sun), so we’ll see what I can pull off in post. No nieces running around naked, so I won’t have that challenge 
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Oh maaaaan. THANKS for subscribing. Hobbyist photography is fun. Hope my show helps ya where ya want help in the photography space