S3is - Post processing

I forgot to mention the post processing that I did in the 2007 to 2009 period when I was using the S3is.

It looks like I used Photoshop Elements 5 for some of the images I have posted here and Photoshop CS2 for the others. I recall trying some other editors before purchasing Elements and Photoshop, so presumably I did this before I bought the S3is. I had had a small point and shoot, not much used, for a year or two prior to getting the S3is. I don't remember what make or model.

There may have been other applications, but I recall trying Helicon Filter and GIMP. I was impressed with the ease of use of Helicon Filter but it did not provide all of the functionality I wanted, and its implementation of some of what I did want seemed not good enough for my purposes. I think raising shadows  was one such area. GIMP was certainly powerful, but it had sufficient rough edges and I found it sufficiently difficult to use that I decided to buy Elements and Photoshop (I don't remember if they were both second hand but Photoshop CS2 was not the current version at that time. I also don't remember why I bought both.) 

As with GIMP, I found Photoshop too difficult to use and so I used Elements. That was very usable, but I found it had one or two limitations that troubled me. I think one of them was cloning. So I tried using Photoshop for what I couldn't do in Elements, and that went ok and I realised that having used Elements for a while it now seemed fairly straightforward to use Photoshop for the rest of the processing. I quite quickly moved over to using Photoshop most or all of the time because I didn't like the idea of moving JPEGs back and forth between Elements and Photoshop and losing some image quality every time I swapped an image between them.

My use of Photoshop was fairly superficial. For example I never used layers, apart from a brief experiment with high pass sharpening. About the only non-basic photo editing I did in Photoshop was using local contrast enhancement (know as "defogging" by some people at that time, or, I think, "Clarity" enhancement by others). This used unsharp mask with a small Amount, a large Radius and zero Threshold.