7 Reasons to use Post-Processing

Do you use post-processing in your digital photography? For me, post processing is the third step in successful photography (after visualising the final image and taking it). Post-processing can be used to correct errors, change the framing and emphasis of an image and turn an average photograph into something outstanding!

Here are seven reasons to use post-processing...

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Transcript

>> Graham: 0:17

One of the areas that I know a lot of people have, well, either difficulty about or at least questions about, and that is editing and post processing. And perhaps rather optimistically, I thought I'd have a talk about that in an audio podcast. And, we'll see how we go with that. So I want to talk about, first of all, the ethics of, post processing and editing, because it's something I've been asked about a few times. I will also go through why I believe it's, an important part of digital photography. And finally what I'll do is talk through the steps that I use, with my photography. So that's using Photoshop. So first of all, the ethics, as far as I'm concerned, editing and post processing is just another step in the process of digital photography. So in itself, there's nothing wrong with it, I guess there's nothing wr, with it either, but it's just part of the process. So where I believe it becomes an issue is where the intention through editing is to deceive or manipulate. So what I mean by that is to take an original image and change it in such a way that it is misleading, maybe, probably deliberately misleading. I've seen this in certain political posts where, a, completely unrelated photograph has been edited and then presented as showing a certain situation which it hasn't been at all. So that sort of thing to me is totally unethical and I absolutely don't support that. However, where we would use post processing and where I think it has its place is to take the original capture and at the end of the process come up with an image that is satisfying to the person creating it. So to the photographer probably, it may be making an image appropriate for a client if you're doing client photography. And it's also maybe just to correct what was seen. an obvious example, it's one I've used before and you may well have seen this is when you photograph an amazing sunset. You've got these incredible vivid colors that you're seeing, and yet when you take a photograph of it, it looks pretty plain, pretty ordinary, not very exciting at all. And that is simply down to the difference in how our eyes and brain handle the situation, a particular, scene, and how our particular camera will handle it. And depending on the technology in the camera, it's probably quite likely that you'going have photographed amazing sunset only to get something that's actually pretty ordinary. So the reason you would post process in that situation is simply to correct the image that you've captured so that it more closely represents what you actually saw. So I'm going to run through, seven things that, are where you may want to, use post processing. So I'll hit them in order. So the first one is to straighten the horizon. Now, I've taken a lot of photographs of humpback whales. After a while, I actually got pretty good at keeping my horizon straight. But with the best will in the world, you're going to get wonky horizons, so horizons that aren't level. So obviously, one use of post processing is to just straighten the horizon. and it's not. Or the reason for doing it is not to deceive, but it's just to give a photograph that's perhaps easier to look at, maybe less distracting. I don't know about you, but I sometimes look at photographs where the horizon isn't straight, and that immediately distracts me from the subject. So again, when we're creating a photograph, we want to have a clear subject and everything else around. So the background particularly, but all of the other elements in the photograph are there to support the subject. So I think that's an important thing to bear in mind when you're editing. Having said that, you might want to deliberately change the angle of the horizon, may maybe emphasize the angle of the horizon. So this is part of the creative process, and we do that through the whole photography process. So thinking about the image we want to take, taking it, and then post processing. So those three steps, there are creative steps to each of those. And imp. Post processing, you might decide that to create more impact with an image, you would have the horizon not level or maybe at quite a strange angle. So there's all sorts of reasons to do it, but that would be the first one. The second reason for going into post processing is to recompose an image. So this might be, for example, putting the subject off to one side. So to create space within the image. And space is very powerful. I've spoken about that in another podcast, so I won't do that here. but you might want to do that. There may also be other elements you want to make use of. So it could be leading lines, there could be a row of trees, for example, or boards or something like that in a city sort of situation. So by just changing the framing of the image, you might make those more significant, and they may well help to draw the viewer's eye from the beginning or the front of the photograph, the lowest part of the photograph, through to the subject. So recomposing and reframing is important, particularly when it comes to telling more of a story. So this is another theme that I talk about a lot. And as I've said before, it doesn't have to be a long story. A nice short story is fine, but a little bit of, Re editing of the original shot may well do a lot to make that story clearer or more powerful. Now, the third reason for editing is to change the impact of photographs. So I've already mentioned that a little bit. But it could also relate to mood. So these kind of things would relate perhaps more to contrast and colour. So if you've got quite a contrasty shot but with very little colour in it, particularly if it maybe is at dusk or dawn or something like that, you can get quite a moody shot. And it's a great thing to experiment with. just to see what you can do when you're in your, editor. Just to see what you can do to emphas to play around with mood. Because again, a moody shot is one that may well draw people to it. It can stand out from other photographs that, they're looking at. And they may find more in that photograph as they spend more time looking at it. The mood is very important. Color is another aspect. So again, you can completely desaturate the image so that you've now got a black and white image. That black, and white is really powerful as well, because we don't see in black and white. So when we see a black and white photograph, we tend to see what's in there more. Because if you're looking at, say, animal's head. Speaking of, as wildlife photographer, if you look at it in colour, you'll say, okay, it's cheetah. That's cheetah's head. You're not really looking. You've seen your cheetah's head. But that cheetah's head is whatever that means in your mind. Once you go to black and white, your mind works differently and you become more aware of the shapes, the textures, that form that image. So black and white has some great things to offer. That, in my opinion, is one of them. Equally, you might want to really up the saturation, the colour saturation. So you get a very strong, really powerful, impactful color image. And, again, some people like that. So really comes down to whatever floats your vot in that situation. But that's another reason to, edit the photograph. Looking at mood and impact, the fourth reason is simply resizing or it might be reformatting so you might have shot in and say regular landscape mode. You might need to crop it so that it's square so that it fits something like Instagram nicely, that sort of thing. So it can be as simple as that or just cropping an image so that it fits a particular placeholder of some sort or another, with a particular size. So I've used these, for example, these Facebook banner images and my YouTube channel, things like that. They like a particular pixel size and a particular aspect ratio in that image. So that's another reason for editing. Now the fifth one is creating errors. And that's quite important. I've already spoken about that in terms of correcting maybe the exposure and the saturation on a sunset so that it looks more like what you saw. So I'm going to describe that as an error. It isn't necessarily. But more typically the kind of errors you might get are under or overeposing an image, you could make a bit of a hash of the composition, and correct it that way. other things might simply be that something's out of focus or something else is in the way or has got into the frame which you don't want in there. Or it might be an element that didn't quite come off when you were experimenting. So again you can crop those sorts of things out. So that's another reason for getting in and doing a bit of editing. The sixth point I've got here is to just go ry. So that could be anything. It can be from playing with the saturation, making it black and white very contrasty. It could be overlaying multiple images. So with editors that are available today, they're really powerful if you start to learn more about them and what you can do with them. And if you are interested in creating very arty sorts of shots. and in fact this'one I particularly like on some of the social media I get. it's a guy putting together these kind of prank photographs of where he's left by his wife to look at after their young child. So he's cropped the. He's taken a photograph, the child, then crop. Put the child into all these really crazy situations. But it's done as fun. but that can be quite good too. So once you start, I'm referring to that as art. So once you get into art, that can be whatever it is for you. But it's another aspect of post processing of editing that can allow you to explore the boundaries of your photography. And then finally if you are well not necessarily working for a client it might, you have a collection idea of your own but it's just to create consistency in a collection. So that might be in terms of aspect ratio, it might be whether it's landscape or portrait format, you might want to crop to make certain things the subject. You might want particular elements in certain places in the photograph. So it's just about building a consistent look across a number of photographs. And obviously if you're photographing for a client then particularly if it's corporate client there might be some corporate media rules that you need to follow. So that kind of thing is another area where you might use post processing. So hopefully that's given you perhaps some useful reasons on why you might want to do it in the first place. Now I rarely show people how to do post processing. I really, I've done one or two videos on it but I didn't do very much. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that there are several tools available and some of them are free. Some of them might be on your phone if it's phone photography, some might be on your camera. Various things are available these days. And then there are some of the more established products like Lightroom and Photoshop. Now for those I don't think you can get them free anymore. I'm certainly on subscription. I use Photoshop and I've used Lightroom from time to time. I know Lightroom is very good for indexing. I'm quite bad at that. I tend to actually tend to remember images in my head which is probably about the worst way to do it. But nonetheless it comes down to is it worth you buying a subscription for one or more of these packages? I'm all for buying things if you're going to make good use of them. But I'm not one for buying things for the sake of it or doing a one off job and then been saddled with extra costs. So if you're not going to edit a lot I wouldn't recommend getting a subscription package. If you're just starting out and experimenting I would suggest seeing what you can get for free and see what that does for you and then maybe experiment with something like Photoshop or whatever really floats your boat on that one. And again the important things with these packages is first all get a free trial of them and then you can see if you understand the user Interface and how much of the product you're making use of because things like Photoshop can do a huge amount for you. Now the other reason I don't share videos, on post processing or don't do it very often. first of all it may or may not be what you're using, so it may or may not be very helpful. And secondly, I find that they update the user interfaces every now and again. So that gives a definite shelf life to these videos. So what I don't want to do is start to take people through a sequence that's no longer valid. And I find that really frustrating when I'm trying to go through software online and I'm trying to follow somebody else's video and set something up. And what they're showing me is completely different to what I'm looking at. So that doesn't help. So having said all of that, I'll do a quick talk through of my process. And for most of my images I would rarely spend more than two minutes on an image, when I'm working on it. So these would be images that I'm editing maybe for a collection or for photo books or something I've experimented with. And I produced a couple, but where I'm using images. So the first thing I do when I go into Photoshop and the and important point to make here is that I always shoot raw. And the reason for that is you have all of the information that the camera recorded and it means you've got a lot of subtlety in terms of color variation, tones, that kind of thing. If you just shoot JPEGs, you lose a lot of that information. So yes, you absolutely can still edit your image, but once it starts to get into making subtle changes to again colors and tones, that kind of thing, modifying a JPEG image is going to be a lot more clunky than a RAW image or even a TIFF file, something like that. So I don't recommend shooting in JPEG at all. I always recommend that you shoot the largest image you can in the RAW format that your camera offers. Because that way you start off with the most information. And it may be that you're only intending to use your image for social media or something where you don't need big files, which is fine. So most of the time that may well be a complete waste of memory space, and time shooting in that format. But you never know when you're likely to get that one shot that you absolutely love. And you just think would look amazing either on your wall or is a gift somebody or in a photo book or something like that somewhere where're having that higher resolution really pays off because once you start Puttingg low res JPEGs into books, it becomes really obvious to anybody who knows anything about photography and images. You can immediately spot the difference. So we're shooting raw, we've got a RAW file and I'm opening up Photoshop. So the very first thing I do, in fact when I'm opening the file there is an optics, part of the menu. And what I do in that I just program in the lenses I use. and in fact that lens information is on the metadata I get with the image. So the metadata is simply kind of like a header. And it gives you things like the time of day that it was shot, the time, the date, maybe GPS coordinates, but also the camera settings, stuff like that. So it's information that isn't immediately important in the image itself, but it does give you the sort of header you, the contextual information if you like. So Photoshop will give you a lens correction based on the lens that you're using. So I just tend to use that, that's under the optics. Pretty much all I do on optics. I'll open the image up and then there's a drop down level which is image adjustments and levels. And if you click into that you'll get a little histogram. And what I look for in that is just to make sure that there is information. So there is bas, if you think of it as a graph, like a humpy graph, there's graph right the way across the histogram. If there isn't, if you've got areas where it's just a flat line then what that means is there's no information there. So there's no information because either the image was overexposed, partly you've got a lot of very bright light, or it was underexposed, you've got a lot of very dark areas. So what I do is simply use a slider there to slide across the flat area. So let's say the flat part is on the left of the histogram. I'll just put the slider along from left to right until I hit where all the data is and that's where I'll stop it, that's where I'll save it. And what that does, it means that what you're doing with the rest of the Post processing on that image is that you're only working with parts of the image that have real data there. If you do that and you've got one that has a lot of information missing, so a large flat area, you'll notice that the contrast changes and you'll notice that you're probably seeing more detail than you were before you made that change. So that's the very first thing I do. I will save that and then I just jump into filter and camera raw and often I'll just click on auto because I'm always a little bit curious to see what the software will do on its own. Often I'll ignore it, usually I'll ignore it. but what I will do is then drop to the light, menu, which this is in the camera orw filter. And there are a few sliders there. one of them is highlights, one of them is whites and I slide both of those full over to the left so they're down to zero. the other thing I might do is just pop the exposure slider into the center so that's the overall exposure of the image. That's why I'll generally start it. what I then do is drop down to the color, menu and I just bring the saturation down so that there's either almost, well no color or very little color. Because what I'm interested in in this part of the process is actually contrast and I find the colour a bit of a distraction. And also what tends to happen during that process, if I leave the colors as the software has left it is they tend to be quite bright usually. So I want to cut that down. I then go to the curve, part of the menu and there are four sliders there and they are highlights, lights, darks and shadows and I will just slide each one. Generally the highlights and lights I tend to push over towards the right to make them brighter. darks will vary on the image a little bit, might go to the left, might go to the right a little bit, might even stay where it is. And then shadows I'll just look at bring making sure I can bring out the detail I want to have visible. But essentially what you're doing with those sliders is setting the contrast. And for me when I've got it right the image kind of pops a little bit. It suddenly feels like it's a three dimensional image, not just something flat and great. And in fact a good image to start with is one that's got a Nice even exposure. So it might look quite a flat image. But once you start going through the post processing, process you can really bring that image alive. So don't worry too much. If your initial image, if the captured image looks pretty flat and dull, that's probably a good one to work with. So having got my curve, I want, having got my contrast where I want it, I'll generally just pop up and bring the color back, the color saturation, until I feel it's kind of where I want it. Now I don't I don't generally like to oversaturate my images. Occasionally I will, but not very often. And as a guide, most of my shots are wildlife. So usually, not always, but usually there's some grass in there somewhere. So I use the grass as my reference point to make sure I've got the right kind of intensity, the right kind of saturation in the colours. Because if the grass looks pretty much like the grass I can see out of my window. that to me is telling me I'm pretty much where I need to be. Generally, the colors will look right. So sometimes on animals I'm actually thinking of lions. Sometimes if I get that saturation wrong, they'll start looking orange and they're not. so again you need to just be a little careful. And again for me it varies with each image. And what I'm trying to bring out about that image. I love to try and bring out the eyes, again of an animal. Mostly I shoot animals so I like to bring out the eyes. Some of them have quite cool orange eyes, you know, things like cheetahs. So if you've got good lighting on the eye itself, that can be a good way to bring color out. But you also have to look at what you've done with the rest of the color. And the final thing I might do is use texture which if you slide it to the right it tends to make the detail more visible. So things like fur, become a little bit sharper. And also with that I use clarity. So that just changes the contrast around the edges of a photograph. And again it's just to make it look normal, not blurry, nothing like that, but just make it look a little bit sharp and there you go. So that's pretty much the process I use. So just to recap, you definitely want to be thinking about editing and post processing but it's really important to get a package that you get along with. So it's always good to try something out first, ethically it comes down to what's your intention. If your intention is to produce a nice image, then there's no issue. If it's to deceive, then, that's not something I recommend. And then the reasons why you would post process. So the first one is to straighten your horizons or not, but to maybe remove that as a possible distraction. Secondly to recompose the image. So to get your subject in a place where it's perhaps more impactful and make use of other composition elements, not elephants elements. the third one was to look at mood and impact. So this is where you're working with contrast and colour. Fourthly, to resize and reformat. So, it might be for social media, it might be for a particular end result. You're looking for maybe a photo book or, a large print. The fifth reason was to correct errors. So that will typically be exposure, because there's been an exposure error. but you might also want to crop something out that's in there and you perhaps didn't realise was in there or maybe you thought it was a good idea at the beginning. Then when you look at it again you realize it wasn't quite such a good thing. number six was to get arty and just experiment and maybe use a lot more of potential in the editor. So I don't use very much of, Shopify, not Shopify, Photoshop at all. Ah, as anyone who uses Photoshop will gather from the description I just gave. So I do use other things occasionally, but on the whole that's my general process for working with images I've shot and that I want to, make use of, for my own, what my own clients, if you like. And then the final one, number seven, was to create consistency across either a collection or to meet a client requirement so that you're consistent with what they need. So that is it for this podcast. I hope you found that useful and I will speak to you again next time. Bye for now. Oh, and a couple more things just before I go. The first one is to please give me a like or subscribe. you're particularly if you're listening to me on YouTube. And the other thing is just to remind you that I do have a live online workshop running on Sunday 30th March, so there is information on the website about that, but please take a look and I'll be taking you through how to make an immediate improvement to your photography. So if you're struggling a little bit and you just want to see immediate changes, sign up and, I'll give you six things that you can apply straight away. Thanks again for listening, and, I'll speak to you next time.