Post Processing – Friend or Foe?
Its pretty common place now and I’m sure you’ll have seen it at some point, that comment on a photograph that says “I prefer natural photos, not this Instagram filter stuff”
It can be a pretty frustrating read sometimes. Especially if the person who took the photo has invested in a lot of time, effort and equipment to get the shot right first time without having to process it to death. A combination of the correct use of filters/bracketing exposures and understanding how to use the camera settings are the best way to ensure you have a strong base image to work from. Everybody is entitled to their opinion on editing but this is just to show that post processing is not the devil, it won’t come after you at night to eat your soul and it won’t steal your lunch money then push you in a puddle. It’s an essential part of developing a digital file into a finished, polished, complete image.
Post processing has been around for years, it’s no new thing. Film photographers developed and processed their negatives in dark rooms, using things like dodge and burn techniques to bring out highlight and shadow detail that would otherwise not be seen. These techniques are the same ones that are applied to modern digital photographs, albeit in a slightly different way.
A digital camera works by capturing a spectrum of light onto a digital sensor made up of millions of little receptors called pixels, it cannot distinguish between shapes, it cannot see the scene in front of you, basically your camera can not see what you see the way you see it. Hence the need for using graduated filters and post processing techniques. There’s 2 ways that you can use the information it gathers. Shoot in JPEG or shoot in RAW – I’ll explain below.
- JPEG : most smartphones, compact point and shoot cameras and bridge cameras have this setting only, bar a few. Your camera processes the photo for you, giving you a finished image straight out of the camera by adhering to a set of generic profiles. There is nothing wrong with shooting JPEG, however you are limiting yourself to what you can do afterwards if you need to.
- RAW : DSLRs, most newer CSCs (compact system cameras) along with a lot of newer bridge cameras have this option. You process the file yourself using all of the available information, giving you a lot more flexibility to achieve the desired result.
A RAW file allows you to process your photo and “develop” it into a finished product whereas a JPEG is essentially a stripped down version that the camera has made from the original information. Other than for speed and smaller file sizes I can’t see any real benefit to shooting JPEG over RAW in the real world, not for landscapes anyway.
I was out at St Mary’s Lighthouse a few weeks ago and I took 2 shots to demonstrate the difference between using no filters and doing no processing to using graduated filters and doing some moderate post processing afterwards. The first photo is taken with no filters, and has no post processing applied at all. The second image was taken immediately after with exactly the same camera settings, however I used a graduated ND filter and I have processed the image to make the most of the available information.
For the finished image this is the process I followed.
- Open the RAW file in Adobe Lightroom.
- Apply lens corrections (to rectify wide angle distortion and remove any vignetting).
- Straighen the horizon.
- Remove any chromatic abberations (purple fringing on high contrast edges)
- Apply sharpening at 10%
- Reduce highlights and lift shadows.
- increase saturation and vibrance.
- Export as a TIFF file to the desktop.
- Open in Adobe Photoshop CS5.5
- Duplicate Layer.
- Remove any sensor dust spots.
- Apply a brightness/contrast mask and adjust to suit. (I prefer this way over increasing the contrast in lightroom)
- Flatten image.
- Save a high resolution Tiff file (for printing) and a smaller resolution file with watermark for web use.
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Hopefully this short behind the scenes look will show that post processing isn’t the evil sorcery many folk believe it to be. There will always be people who won’t accept it and see it as cheating, but unless they understand that every single photograph that comes out of a digital camera has some sort of processing you’re never going to convince them otherwise.
Nick