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Photo editing or processing

What is this about "editing or processing" you ask?

Let me give you an example first:

(Pete Henderson, with the Bobby Watson Band at Gilrein's)

Looking at these two versions of the same photo, it should be easy to spot which one is edited.

The unedited version is as it looked straight out of the camera.

I often find people are surprised that "professional" photographs are edited or processed. With the advent and proliferation of digital (and Photoshop), this understanding might be changing, I'm not sure yet. But the reality has pretty much always been that photographers can spend hours trying to get an image to look just right, even with Photoshop. Most photographers just don't expect perfect images straight out of the camera. One exception would be with studio portrait photos, where they have all of the lighting and the backdrops set just right, to make printing the image as simple as possible. But even the best of those types of photos can still benefit from some editing.

So, what is this "editing" thing?

Well, it can be and usually is, a number of things. Here are some of the adjustments that I made to the above example: adjusted the overall brightness and contrast; adjusted the color balance; adjusted the color saturation (globally and/or locally, or for specific colors); selectively darkened or lightened small areas of the image (dodged or burned, respectively), such as darkening the brick wall so it is less distracting, which helps Pete (the subject of the photo) to stand out a bit better; and sharpening, which is usually done as the last step, how much sharpening is applied is dependant upon the image's final size, as well as whether it is to be printed or viewed online. Those are the basics, but depending upon the image and what it is going to be used for, there are many, many, many more things that can be done to "improve" upon how a photograph looks.

Here is another example.

The top image is as it was straight out of the camera, it is a bit underexposed (dark) so that the white in the flowers wouldn't be all washed-out.

(Shelburne Falls, MA, shot from the Bridge of Flowers)

For this example I also used some more advanced techniques such as contrast masking (you can read a tutorial on that here) and selective color adjustments.

Basically, the camera cannot capture as much contrast as the human eye can, so contrast masking is used to tone down the amount of contrast to a usable level while ensuring that the image still "looks right." This can be an extremely useful technique, but it does take a while to learn to do really well. And of course, how much of the effect you want/need will depend upon the individual photo (and personal taste). Some images will need more adjusting than others, and the individual settings will usually need to be varied according to each specific image.

I used selective color adjustments because even after getting the color balance as good as I could, some of the colors were still a bit off. This was most likely caused by the contrast range of the scene and the differences in color temperature of full sunlight versus part or full shadow color temperature; if you have ever seen a blue tint in the shadow area of one of your photographs, you have seen the color temperature effect that I am talking about. The selective color adjustment involves adjusting the colors that actually make up an individual color, and can also be used to lighten or darken individual colors, such as the blue of the sky and/or water.

Hope that helps, if you have any questions you can email me:

BlindOwlPhoto@Yahoo.com