Originally posted by Christine Tham Note: if you just want to "blacken a part of an image", a better way is to increase the black level - this will just remove shadow detail without affecting the overall exposure.
Increasing contrast will also clip highlights, and also widen the exposure curve.
For example, in the picture you posted, part of the dog's fur is over-saturated, creating an unnatural glowing look. Maybe this is the effect you wanted, but it does look a bit strange.
I'd say you have to be careful with whatever method you use. Sometimes just increasing the black level can also lead to strange artifacting. Although, strictly speaking, if I wanted to darken an area of an image I wouldn't increase contrast. I'd probably use curves and adjust it so the falloff of the adjustment is natural, and then perhaps further refine with masking.
Anyway, you had said above that you prefer to get things right in camera. This is a bit of a strange statement I hear often. I think I know what people mean, but it seems to imply that there are serious photographers who don't care about getting it right in camera, so it sounds incoherent; get it right in camera as opposed to "getting it wrong in camera? As a goal"?. Getting it right in camera means a good composition, and capturing all of the details in both the highlights and shadows, exposing to the right as comfortably as you can. If the scene is naturally contrasty enough, it may be more or less fine as a final image, but almost as a rule it is going to have to be post processed. Whether the camera JPEG engine does it or not is irrelevant.
But to get back to how this all got started, I made the observation that the images on the site that Norm had mentioned looked heavily processed; not necessarily poorly (though I would consider several of them too much for my taste), just that they were really finely polished in a way that made me appreciate their Photoshop skills as much as their image capture skills (or to wonder what camera they used to capture the image). Is anyone willing to take the stance that those images are not fairly heavily tweaked and polished in Photoshop? I didn't say the original image was bad and only made good with PP, but only that they received a lot of TLC before making it to the published stage. (Yes, I had said "bad" before, but only in the sense that most images come off the sensor in a RAW state that is very flat and non-compelling.)
For instance, your image of the boathouse at Dove Lake, while nice, could really benefit from further editing (as well as a couple other of your images). Of course, if the image is how you want it then it is already "perfect", so I mean this only in reference to how images that are successful seem most often to be tweaked, polished, and presented. I'm keenly aware that how I finish my own images is not how others would finish the same image, so of course this isn't a purely objective critique. I am, however, trying to step outside of how I would handle an image myself, and think of how the images above relate to a "standard" of the more popular images, for instance of those on
PhotoExtract Photography Magazine .