Mastering Wildlife Photography Part 7: The Secret to Post-Processing Wildlife Images

You've got the shot, but there's more work to do. The first thing that you might notice is that what's in the camera isn't quite what you saw. And, you might not be happy with the actual image (vs what you had in you mind's eye). This is the starting point for post processing.

In this episode we look at the importance of post-processing:

• Start with basic RAW Adjustments
• Enhancing Detail and Sharpness 
• Colour Grading for Mood and Storytelling
• Ethics of Editing Wildlife Photos 

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Next episode:

Start with the end in mind… what to do with your images.

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Transcript

>> Graham: 0:08

Foreign hello and welcome to part seven of this eight part miniseries about wildlife photography. So in the previous episodes we've looked at all the pre trip planning, research, or that kind of thing, knowing your camera, checking your gear, all of that. We've gone through things to do while you're with the animals. So what this episode is about, what this part is about is how do you now make those images something special? So we're not going to go crazy, but this is post processing. So why do you want to do that? Well, the first reason, and there are several, is that when you look at an image it's not quite the, the way you remember it, particularly if you've left things maybe, for a period of time since you took the original shot. So for me at least, the purpose of post processing is to kind of restore the image to what I remember wanting to photograph at the time. So it's putting details back in, maybe highlights that haven't come out so well in the initial shot, that kind of thing. And why do they not come out in this shot? Well the fact is with a lot of wildlife photography you have to be very fast. So a, big theme in this series has been being prepared, being ready at any moment to grab that shot because you don't know when it's going to happen. But when you do that, things might be wrong. Now it might be as, as minor as a horizon not being quite level, or you might need to completely re crop it because you've really snatched it a shot. You've got the bit you needed, you've got the animal, but everything else is a little bit wrong. So really the purpose of post processing, in my opinion is to create an image that supports the subject, presents the subject in a way that is appealing to you. Otherwise why did you take it? And hopefully appealing to other people. It's not about going crazy with saturation and things like that. It's not about taking things out, putting things in. basically, it's about trying to create a true version of the, the image that you took. So, and by true, I mean as close to actual life as you can. Now something I have been asked about quite often is how ethical is it to post process an image? Now this in my experience tends to come from people who are a bit older, who grew up with film. And back in those days we really didn't do much post processing. Some people would work a little bit with colors, but that was pretty specialist. black and white was probably easier to work with and I knew people who did their own developing and they could work on an image to bring out certain parts, but on the whole, once you press the shutter button, for a lot of people, that was it. So having access to post processing obviously opens the door to, to start manipulating, ah, an image in a way that it deceives. In other words, it basically shows something that never actually happened. So my answer to that, if that's one of your questions, is simply to ask what is your intent? If your intent is to deceive, to manipulate, to do any of that kind of stuff, then I don't really want you listening to the podcast because I don't like working with those people. If, however, your intent is to just try and correct things that are wrong in the shot, and there are all sorts of reasons why that can happen, and essentially to present a final image that is as close to what you saw as you can, then to me that's fine. There's no, no problem with that whatsoever. And in fact, I think as a, general guide, if you're really not sure, then have a look at, any photography competition. Most certainly the ones I've looked at, so I can't say is every competition, but certainly the ones I've looked at, they have very strict rules about what you can do in post processing. And I would use those rules as a guideline and it's essentially reflected probably in more concise way what I've just said. So having said all of that, you've got your images, you've come back from your trip perhaps, or your, your shoot. Now, one thing I will say, one of the traps we can fall into as photographers is when we take a shot, we generally have something in mind and we can be very critical. And, there's various reasons why we might do that and I'm not going to go into those, but we can be quite critical about the shot that we're looking at. The main reason for that is that when we took the shot, we perhaps had a particular result in mind, and then what we're looking at in the back of the camera is not that result, it's something different. So there's a temptation to just delete the image. And I would strongly advise against that. And very simply, because if you just leave it there and then leave it for a few months, then look at the image again, what's happening there is you've probably forgotten the original image that you had in mind when you took the shot. So what you're doing is you're now Looking at that image as an image in its own right, you're not comparing it to what you had in your mind because you've forgotten what that was. In that way you can be a lot more objective. And I've certainly found that several times with some. In fact some of my favorite images are images that initially I was not happy with and because I was hoping to get a different result. So that image wasn't what I was hoping for. I didn't delete them. I looked back at them sometime later and then I started looking at them as an image in their own right. I could see potential in them. Bit of post processing that we'll talk about now. And then off we go. So very first thing, all the way through this I have been saying shoot raw. So the reason for saying that is that RAW captures all of the data that you can from your camera. So it has a lot of details of the image itself. There's also metadata and other things which can be useful. for example, if you're using Photoshop there is a lens correction, setting and what that does. Photoshop has a database of various manufacturers, lenses and once you've programmed them in, or if in fact I don't think you even program them in anymore, it can recognize the lens from the metadata and it can select a profile from its database which will correct any known distortions that that lens puts in. So little things like this can be quite useful. of course you've got your shutter speed, date it was taken, all that kind of thing, which is also very helpful. So the key thing though is that you've got a lot of information about that image and this gives you the best possibility of producing a corrected image that hopefully meets your expectations. So and, and I will just say sorry before I dive into that. Is that jpeg if you're not familiar? Because generally that's an option on cameras to save in jpeg. JPEG compresses data and the reason it does that is to create a much smaller file which is great for downloading on from websites, putting on Facebook, Instagram, that kind of thing. So by all means save the final version of the image as a jpeg, but start with a RAW always and go from there. So the kind of things to do, basic adjustments you can do are ah, exposure first of all so you can correct any underexposure or overexposed areas without losing detail. And you can use the histogram. So the histogram I'm going To refer a little bit of Photoshop because that's what I'm most familiar with. the histogram will show you a nice even spread from the darkest part of the image to the lightest part of the image. I think it's that way around left to right and you don't want any strong peaks anywhere. You can also adjust the white balance so you can adjust the lighting to be natural looking light. So sometimes though you can what we call warm it up. So make an image a little more kind of orangey, more like you would get in gold now actually or you can cool it down a bit to basically push it towards the blue. And why might you want to do those? You might want to want to, you might want to do that to just work on the mood a little bit. Now speaking personally, it's very very rare for me to change the white balance. I generally don't do that and in fact for pretty much all of my shots I would rarely spend more than two minutes in Photoshop on them. So that gives you an idea. it's just, that's what I do. Not saying that's what you should be doing but I like to minimize it. And as I say what I'm looking for is to try and recreate that original image as I remember it. So other settings are contrast and clarity. So with contrast you're really looking at the dynamic range I suppose is another way of describing that the difference between the darkest parts and the lightest parts. And if you get the contrast right from my perspective what I'm looking for there is the image starts to feel three dimensional. I can just see more depth, I can see more tones, I can see more detail in the animals musculature for example. So there's more shapes in there and if you're careful with the contrast you can just get work with shadow and highlights to get a really nice contrast. So that that animal in my mind it kind of pops is the phrase I use. But that's what I use that for. And clarity is another thing which can just sharpen things a little bit. So I can't give you an example here because this is audio. but do experiment a little bit but always don't go crazy with this stuff. Regardless of which editor you're using. You can try defaults, sometimes I'll just pop the default RAW editor setting on just to see what it gives me. And normally I'll take out the highlights and the the light settings drop Those to zero and then work in curve is, is what I do. And then just work on the contrast, work on the different elements until I feel that it's, it's where I want it to be. And this, this probably sounds a bit vague but simply because it's through experience and it's also I think very subjective at this point. So it's what feels right to you. What feels right for me might not feel right for somebody else. And the next thing to do is look at enhancing details and sharpness. So you've got the sharpening tool. Now I don't tend to use these things very much, but if you do want to really work on an image, then you do have tools that allow you to select things like the eyes, fur, feathers or key parts of the image and just sharpen them. And bearing in mind that if, particularly if you're doing portraits, the eyes are going to be the most important part of the animal that might be something worth looking at. do avoid over sharpening because you start getting a kind of halo effect. Anything that looks odd, you really want to avoid that. unless you're deliberately going for an abstract feel that's, you know, it's whatever floats your boat basically. But if you're looking for something that's real, which is what I'm interested in, then be very careful about over processing images because it does start to show up. noise reduction is a good one, particularly if you've got a lot of either smooth sky or backgrounds that have a lot of one color in them. So things like noise from, perhaps you had to shoot in a higher ISO, they become a lot more obvious where you've got a block of single color. So use what you can to reduce that and think about cropping as well. Think about how you're putting your final image look together. What's the composition? So you might have used rule of thirds, which is fine. but then you might decide it's not working. And in fact something I tend to do because sometimes when I've worked on a few images I started to get a little bit punch drunk with it to be honest. So I suddenly can't, I can't quite get it where I want it and I'm not even sure what I want. So what I'll tend to do if I need to get something finished. Just what I will do is just change the the orientation of the shot. As in I'll switch from a landscape format to portrait. And that makes me, it's kind of like looking at the image again. But if it was originally shot in landscape, which is what most of mine are, if I flip it to portrait, then I'm just looking at a more detailed area of that particular image and I start to see different things there and that gives ideas. So if you are getting stuck sort of writer's block with the post, processing, think about doing that. Just do something, something different on the color side of it. You have on Photoshop, Vibrance and saturation. so saturation Vibrance tends to work with more specific colors. So I tend to use Vibrance if I want to bring out sky, the blue in the sky, things like that. again, with different images, I tend to work with the balance of the two. Again, don't. I might slightly over saturate from time to time, but I don't do it very often. And in fact the guideline that I use when I'm setting the color is quite often there will be grass or leaves in the shot because I'm shooting wildlife. So I'm out in nature and I just try and get that green to look as realistic as I can. And as it happens, I can look out of my window here and see a hedge and some grass. So that gives me a visual reference and it just gives me, a way of keeping things together. So I might have that kind of little bit of punch I want in the image. But I've not gone crazy with totally, oversaturated images. Now I do see a lot of saturated images about. And again, look, it's subjective. It's whatever works for you. the thing I would say when you're working with all of this is to think about mood. And I've spoken before in the portrait episode about using, when you're shooting, using depth of field to maybe get in tight on an animal, but kind of either, blur out the background or even make it sort of almost disappear. So this is something you can really work on in post processing. And also you can just change elements. If you, for example, got leading lines in there, anything like that, you can just change the composition a little bit so they start maybe in one corner of the frame. So there's a lot you can do. as I say, I tend to minimize it because my interest really is in creating something that's as realistic as I can get it. And to be perfectly honest, in a nutshell, that is most of what I would do in Photoshop. Now, there are other packages around, Topaz Labs that I might have got the name wrong in an earlier episode. But Topaz Labs produced specialized software, designed to sharpen images, get rid of blur, to get rid of pixelations, to get rid of noise, and also to make an image much bigger. So I spoke about Gigapixels in another episode and what that does when you, when you use Gigapixel, what it does, it actually increases the size of the image because you. And where I would use this is if I'm trying to produce an image that I can maybe print out at a one or a zero size. And, and even though the negs I start with are as big as I can get, so I've got a lot of data to work with to get something that big. I like to have a little bit of extra size to the image. So what Gigapix LAI does as it's moving the pixels apart, which essentially what Digital Zoom does, it's filling in using quite a sophisticated algorithm what these new pixels should look like in order to match the rest. And, and I've been quite happy with the results, so far. They do another one. I, think it's photo AI. I haven't tried that. I think, I believe it's a combination of the the, the other three packages but I can't really comment on that. They also do have a version that is JPEG to raw. I haven't tried that, based on what I've seen on from Topaz Labs, their stuff is quite good. So really I guess almost to round up because I don't have a huge amount to say on post processing. Why do you want to post process? Well, the first thing is to correct just basic errors. It might be in framing or you might think of a better framing once you've got the shot or you might want to change the orientation altogether. The next thing is to get things like the color right and the contrast so that the image pops a little bit. It's got, it's attractive, it draws the viewer in, it brings the viewer in. And one of the definition I like I heard this some time ago and I definitely have mentioned it before another podcast. But my favorite definition of what makes a good photograph, because what does make a good photograph is simply that the longer somebody looks at it, the better the image. In other words, the more time they spend not trying to work out what it is. I don't mean that, but just looking at it, just being drawn in, maybe drawn to the eye of an animal. But maybe there are other things in the composition that support it, gives some indication of where it lives, its environment, maybe what its challenges are. The longer you have somebody looking at that, the more successful the image, because it's something they're likely to remember as well, because you've engaged them. Whereas there are a lot of images that are very flat, very uninteresting. they haven't really made good use of the subject. And it's the kind of image you'll just flick past without a second look. So that's not where you want to be. So do that. Think about composition. You might even go black and white. Because once you take the color out, you're then looking at shapes and textures, and that can be quite different. In the last, episode, I believe I spoke about this, and certainly with things like elephants. So I produced a book which was Elephants in Black and White. First of all, you can really get a feel for the texture in their skin. But also on the headshots, portraits, you can see a lot of the hairs that are on the face, which you don't normally see, and around the lips. So this is something I like about black and white, because it's not how we see things. When we do look at something in black and white, we see it differently. We perhaps see more there than we would when it's in color, which is how we normally see things. As I've said, the key thing, in my opinion, is to enhance what you've shot in such a way that it feels it's more accurate, it's closer to what you actually experienced. And it allows the viewer, to feel a connection with it. And if you don't know what I mean by that, just think about wildlife photographs that you really liked that maybe you've got on your wall or somewhere. Go and have another look at them, just. But do it through the eye of a photographer and look at the steps that that photographer took in, in getting that image. What I mean by that is things like composition, lighting, have a stab at what they may have done in post processing. What have they done with the color? Have they oversaturated? Have they kept it fairly neutral? Have they gone black and white? how they use light, how they use shadow, how they used contrast. Do you get a feeling that you could almost reach out and touch that animal? So these are the kind of things to, think about. So next steps, what I suggest you do is go. Go back over, particularly older shots and have a look at them again. But with new eyes and just have a look at them in post processing, see what you can do with them. Because you may well find you've suddenly got an image that you absolutely love that you'd overlooked before. And a good idea is to put them together in a portfolio. That could be something that you might want to use in some sort of professional way. It may just be for your own pleasure or it might be for another way of sharing your images, which is what I'm going to talk about next time. So I'm going to leave that there. I hope it's given you some clues about post processing. I've deliberately not been very specific, primarily because things like Photoshop, Lightroom, all of that, that they tend to change their user interfaces quite often. Normally when I'm just getting used to them, they change them. So I don't want to get too specific on the post processing, but I do want to set down some guidelines, I suppose, about where I feel post processing sits in creating the final image. And of course that final image, once you finish your post processing, that stage four, so stage one is planning the shoot, planning the image. Stage two is acquiring it. Stage three is post processing. Stage four is where it becomes art because that's where other people look at it and they're looking at that image through the lens of their own life experience. So what they see in that image may well be something different to what you're seeing, when you put it together. So that's it for this this part and I'll speak to you in the last, the final part of this mini series. So speak, to you then. Bye for now. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. Now I just want to say thank you for tuning in and joining me in the Wildlife and Adventure Photography podcast. If you have enjoyed today's episode, please give me a, like a subscribe, maybe tell your friends, and by all means leave a comment and if there is a subject you would like me to cover in the future, please let me know and I'll be very happy to do my best. So thanks again for joining, me and I look forward to seeing you again next podcast. Bye for now.