Photo Editing in 3 Steps

At our recent calls we have been try­ing to crys­tal­lize a smart way to quickly edit dig­i­tal pho­tos. This post will resume the 3 steps we are following.

The cam­era cal­i­bra­tion serves to cor­rect sys­tem­atic devi­a­tions inher­ent to the type and model of the cam­era. If you cam­era returns images which are too yel­low or green, this can be cor­rected; the same applies to other lens cor­rec­tions, like sharp­ness or dis­tor­tions as the case may be. The cor­rec­tions are saved as a Cal­i­bra­tion Pre­set in Lightroom.

All pho­tos you import from your cam­era can be auto­mat­i­cally fil­tered with this cal­i­bra­tion preset.

Astir Beach Snorkel­ers on Sep­tem­ber 2, 2010

This steps pur­pose is to recover a max­i­mum of avail­able data from your image. The image is brought down to a bal­anced close to ‘what you saw’ state whereas we try to recover data namely in the over exposed areas as well as in the shadow areas.

Most of the cor­rec­tions are stan­dard cor­rec­tions by type of image (low-light, bright-light, sun-set and so on). These cor­rec­tions can be saved as per­sonal pre­sets in Light­room and you may then apply them to the cor­re­spond­ing type of cal­i­brated image imported.

The cor­rec­tions under this step do not yet tell the story or max-out the expres­sion of the pic­ture. They pre­pare the pic­ture for best post-editing.

A good photo tells a story. If you shoot a land­scape just before a thun­der­storm, you may empha­size the the dra­matic clouds with your edit­ing tools for exam­ple. It’s about mak­ing the photo more expres­sive. When you shot the photo, you took it because nature was telling you a story; you ban that story in a photo and you try to express what trig­gered in you the emo­tion when look­ing at nature. If your pic­ture can trig­ger that kind of emo­tion in a third per­son, then you have prob­a­bly a good picture.

Seag­ull at Astir Beach

Don’t for­get: the pic­ture works only with visu­als while in nature you are also expe­ri­enc­ing sounds, tem­per­a­ture, humid­ity, smells and so on. Your visual image must there­fore com­pen­sate for the absence of these addi­tional sen­sa­tions. Visual enhance­ments help to trig­ger a max­i­mum degree of emo­tion or impres­sion with­out exag­ger­at­ing the effects. If you overdo effects, your image loses in cred­i­bil­ity and you shift from pho­tog­ra­phy to “art”, or “illus­tra­tion” or what ever peo­ple often call  their messed up production.

Also: keep in mind that edit­ing for print­ing requires good den­sity and sat­u­ra­tion lev­els. The use online at 72 dpi means auto­mat­i­cally a loss of 50% to 75% of points per inch; there­fore, if you start out with a “thin” pic­ture, it will only get thin­ner and flat­ter when pub­lish­ing for the web.

• edit photo
• Sun­set Presets
• photo edit­ing steps
• smart edit photo
• smart photo editing
• steps to edit­ing a good photo
• steps to edit­ing photo in lightroom
• Steps to edit­ing sports photos
• steps to photo edit in Light­room 3
• the 3 steps to dig­i­tal photography

Related posts:

1. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy and Photo Edit­ing II
2. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy and Photo Editing
3. Photo Edit­ing 2
4. Image Edit­ing and Post Editing
5. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 8

Tags: Photo Editing, Photo Editing with Lightroom

This entry was posted on September 3, 2010 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Digital Photography, Media, Photo Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.