Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive

Workflow

Today I want to return to the subject of post-processing. It’s something i’ve been quite vocal about in the past and in photography terms it’s about as controversial as it gets. It’s up there with Canon v Nikon, Intel v AMD, Mac v Windows, or any of the many other great trolls internet debates that come to mind.

My own position is that an image should be as correct in camera as it’s possible to make it. Any adjustments should be cosmetic in the sense of levels, saturation, etc and cloning bits out is a bit of a no-no unless it’s dust spots and the like. Shaving inches off a waistline so young kids end up starving themselves in an attempt to match up, is right out and “They must be naive, they should realise it’s been photoshopped!” is no excuse. Having said that, image manipulation has gone on as long as there’ve been cameras and I think if you consider photography as an art form then inherently that comes with a certain acceptance of artistic license. Nothing should ever be considered to be written in stone if it is to progress.

Perhaps i’m making excuses there for my own artistic license with images but there’s something else to consider as well and that’s the limitations of the camera. Camera limitations and ‘recreating what we felt and saw when we took the image’ are the two main reasons I think post-processing and an ability to post-process is an absolutely essential skill for any photographer. To give an example; here’s an image I took yesterday shown in Lightroom.

In essence it look a pretty standard landscape shot. Slightly warmed, there’s a nice sunset and some trees reflected in the water. That’s not the whole story of course or it’d be a pretty boring post. Here’s the original in all its glory.

As you can see, it’s a completely different image and feel in the original to how it’s ended up, but in reality very little has changed. The histogram is the big tell-tale on what’s been done to the processed image, as is the boost in vibrance and saturation. For more on the histogram and how that affects your photography David duChemin gives a much better explanation than i’d manage, here.

No camera i’m aware of can take a perfect image right off the bat. If you want an image to look the same as it did to your eyes then you’re going to need to process it. Chosing white balance is what I start with and I have a tendency to look towards ‘Cloudy’ to begin with as I always feel that gives an image the nice warm feel to it that i’m usually looking for. Using the histogram as described in David’s article I set my black & white points, and from there i’m right down to the bottom of the Lightroom palettes to adjust the camera profile. This is something I usually set to Landscape for more vibrant colours but of course, use your own preference.

By this stage the image should be looking something like how I want it to and there’ll be very little to do after that. Some tweaks to the tone curve to get the contrast right and perhaps a slight vignette to focus things. Again though, the way a camera reproduces a scene especially if you’re shooting raw, means there are sure to be one or two colours that may need an extra tweak and once you’ve got the general appearance of the image right, that’s the time for that. There’s not much point getting into fine tuning when the rest of the image is an octave out. You’ll only end up doing it all again.

And that’s pretty much it, my workflow. Even images that have been changed in appearance as much as the above one has will only take ten minutes. All that is left to do is a bit of sharpening to tighten it all up. That’s quite a natural final appearance so how about something that looks a little more ‘out there’. As a further comparison i’ve included a couple of different versions of the first image I posted yesterday. Again the difference in appearance is quite substantial but the approach has been the same and it goes to show that if you can nail your exposure correctly, the potential to reproduce or enhance an image in line with what you felt at the time is quite extensive, without the need to resort to killing off the natural look through excessive manipulation. The second of the three images nails it closest for me and evokes something of a mystical fairy tale scene. Quite different to how the camera saw it in the third image but the only difference between the first two is the white balance.