Just purchased the Coolpix S8100 and I'm excited at the quality of the photos compiled by Photo-John in this gallery - Photo-John's Nikon S8100 Photo Gallery - curious though as to what sort of manipulation has been done to the photos. Just minor tweaks or serious reworking?
That's a good question, True. It really depends on the image. Snow photos are especially problematic and often require some real effort to hold detail in the snow and other elements. Pretty much everything you see from me was touched in Lightroom and Photoshop. The real question is, did I use masked adjustment layers or tricky curves. In the case of this photo, I did not. I did a bit of color and contrast adjustment in Lightroom and I also made a levels adjustment in Photoshop. I didn't do any masking or selective adjustment, though. That's mostly because snow detail wasn't critical to this photo. It's in photos where I really need snow detail that I get tricky.
In general the S8100 works great. But in contrasty situations you're still going to have the same exposure issues you'd have with any other camera. The image quality is excellent for a pocket superzoom. But it's still a tiny point-and-shoot sensor shooting only JPEGs and the camera isn't magic. Sometimes manhandling the files a bit in post-processing is necessary.
Photo-John
