In this article on photography post processing you will learn the steps that most advanced and professional photographers take to perfect their work.
A major benefit of digital photography is the ability to tweak and change your work. Whereas analog film restricts you to the image that you capture, programs such as Photoshop allow you to fix issues within your digital work that might have been unavoidable.
Understandably, countless individuals feel intimidated when faced with the world of post-processing.
Adobe software seems too complicated, IOS applications lack important features, and it’s nearly impossible to know where to start.
Lucky for you, I’ve laid out the five steps any photographer should cycle through when faced with a digital image.
Although many programs will facilitate your needs, and you could could any of those programs for the sake of this article, I recommend Adobe Photoshop for your post- processing needs.
Once you learn the ropes, these steps will be easy and you will navigate Photoshop with the confidence of a professional.
1. Straighten it out
Luckily, this step is the easiest to avoid. If you compose the image properly before you take it, you can fix these sorts of issues before they happen.
First, find your horizon. Most crooked images beg to be straightened along the horizon, which makes your job a little easier.
Most programs include a ruler tool that allows the user to draw a line over the picture, thus establishing the part of the image that should be straight.
Use the ruler tool to draw a line over your horizon. If your software lacks the ruler tool, simply straighten the picture and use grid guides if you can.
Most photographers prefer to straighten their work before they crop. The process of straightening trims part of the image already, which might change how the user crops the given picture.
Generally, you want to keep the rule of thirds in mind when you crop your pictures. If you separate the image into thirds, the horizon and major subjects should either run along those lines or be located at the intersections of those lines.
Once you find yourself with a decently composed piece, move on to step 2!
2. Brightness and contrast
The way to avoid problems here is to shoot the photo with the right exposure. Most images will have issues with brightness or contrast, however, and personal taste also plays a role here.
Your style will determine how bright, dark, unified, or stark you want your colors to be.
Every program has “contrast” and “brightness” sliders, but there are advanced ways to perform the same tasks for more specific results. In Photoshop, the “curves” and “levels” adjustments allow you to decide “how dark” the dark areas should be and “how bright” the bright areas should be. Experiment with different options until you find yourself with the ideal shot.
3. White balance
Your camera decides the color temperature of your image based on the hue your camera treats as “neutral grey.”
After your camera selects a particular neutral grey, the other colors in the shot are affected.
In the shooting process, you can avoid white balance issues in two ways.
First, you can use a special grey card (found here on Amazon) to “remind” your camera what the shade looks like. More practically, you can choose the correct white balance setting on your camera.
Now, for the post-processing side of things. Make sure your white balance is correct by finding a grey object within the frame and comparing it to the
“grey” in the values of the red, green, and blue colors that produce the colors in your screen.
Programs like Photoshop also have color temperature sliders that allow you to manually balance the shot.
4. Saturation
First, let’s make sure you understand the difference between “saturation” and “vibrance.” Saturation is how intense the colors appear within the image.
Washed-out images might beg for a bump in saturation, whereas certain styles might prefer a muted look.
Vibrance adjustments, on the other hand, will saturate the muted colors while leaving the colors with natural intensity. The advantage of tweaking the vibrance of an image is that you can better balance the colors within the image.
Overall, be careful with saturation. You don’t want your grassy field to turn into neon soup, and you don’t want the sky to look like something out of Avatar.
Although it might require more Photoshop experience, many programs allow for selective color adjustment.
In other words, you can decide how saturated or muted any specific color should be. Experiment with your software and see what you like.
5. Sharpness and blur
Now we can focus on the texture of the shot. Surprisingly, sharpness is just the contrast between each pixel.
Even if the photo has perfect focus, this pixel optimization may still need to be adjusted.
Most programs have a simple “sharpness” slider that allows you to make nice fixes, but Photoshop in particular contains several different ways to sharpen the image using various algorithms.
Blur, like sharpness, will be distributed throughout the shot depending on optic laws and the focus settings on your camera. Be careful with artificial blur effects; they often appear fake and tacky.
Quite honestly, the best way to achieve artistic blur is with your lens. Try the website borrowlenses.com to learn more about setups that will work for you. As the name implies, you can even borrow them and try them for yourself!