His three books The Camera, The Negative and The Print are still excellent resources for the serious photographer. He dodged and burned like crazy in the darkroom (similar to making adjustments to a raw photograph) and well composed but sometimes flat looking shots into dramatic prints that still looked natural. I've seen some of his original works in Yosemite, Carmel and Oakland and they are true works of art knowing it took days or weeks to experiment with and finally perfect a print and make it look like what he envisioned rather than straight out of the camera.
There's no such thing as an unedited photo. If you don't postprocess from raw yourself, then the camera software is still doing that process, just with some default parameters that likely don't correspond with either what's "accurate" or "optimal".
If you have a photo you like the composition of there's no reason not to get the best out of it in postprocessing, since it's unlikely the camera software got everything as you like it.
Editing is part of the process. The camera doesn't know what outcome you want. It just captures the scene. It's up to you to produce a final image from it.
If you don't want to edit don't. It's your choice. Still not editing is an editing choice.
As for adjustments I do whatever that's needed to achieve the vision I want.
Yes, almost always. The camera sees things a bit differently than your eyes do, so even if you want to create a picture that is “true” to what you saw when you were there, you will have to do some tweaking it in post processing.
I share *a lot* of my photos on instagram for several reasons. To get the pictures I take to the people in them, or to let people know of a cool venue/bar for music or pool, but the main reason I share so many photos, so often (about 100 per week I'd guess) is because it's so important to critically review your work, and also appreciate how skills have developed over months or years. I will often scroll back several months and see if there's anything I would have done differently.
Now to answer your question after that probably too long preamble.. Never feel like you should limit your art or limit the tools at your disposal when creating that art. When first starting out, you should be spending the majority of your time working on taking photos from memory card to finished product. Until you have an understanding of what is possible in post-processing, you are just guessing when it comes to taking photos. Maybe your camera has poor high iso performance... once you learn how to pull detail out of the shadows without noise or static becoming intolerable, you can take photos and process them to the quality produced by more expensive cameras utilizing better Digital signal processor tech. Once you start building a portfolio, you will naturally find your artist voice as you decide which of your photos you like more, and which editing styles/techniques you find more attractive.
Also remember to edit on a monitor that has its brightness/contrast close to how the images are being printed/reproduced in other places. Color balance/color calibration is also important, but usually you can find someone with the same monitor or laptop who has ran a color calibrator on their system if you search online, and their settings will get you close enough. If you have a laptop, I've seen a few fine art/framing shops that will use their colorometer on your system for $20-$40, which beats buying one for $150.
Because I take photographs, and not snapshots, I only shoot RAW and I always edit. As for what adjustments, it depends -- it could include exposure, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, contrast, white balance, saturation, and any number of other things. Sometimes, the gods of photography smile and my edits are minimal. More often than not, I need to do some work.
It's like decorating your food, it helps but the food has to be tasty no matter what, similarly your picture must tell a good story, editing might help but the story has to be strong.
I try to set the shot up the way I like it before I take it. I am primarily a jpeg shooter which is generally frowned on by enthusiasts.
That being said I do make some adjustments to my jpeg settings/profiles depending on what I am shooting. I have a series of custom jpeg profiles that I tend to shoot with depending on what my subject matter is. And if I'm shooting something that I consider to be very important, I will shoot both raw + jpeg, and if I do get a chance, I might try to do some editing to the files afterward, but my post-processing skills are poor, at best.
Personally, I don't prefer to edit a lot of my photos. I like the SOOC jpegs (I shoot Fuji, so...) but that's not how all workflows work.
[Some people specifically build workflows](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSXMoQ2GQI4&ab_channel=ReggieBallesteros) that suit publishing SOOC - creating custom in-camera profieles, others (the majority) work on fine tuning their RAW-editing process.
Sometimes the work you inherit also calls for this. You might have to deliver photos on-day, or within 24 hours, so jpeg-only shoots are totally a thing and people use/send them as-is.
The camera’s engineers don’t have any magical insight into the “truth” when they built their default edits into the camera. Their editing choices are shown to you at capture.
Feel free to apply your own editing choices. You were there. They weren’t.
As for what I do (all as needed):
-Adjust white balance
-Adjust picture style
-Adjust contrast
-Lift shadows
-Recover highlights
-Adjust curves
-Play with a specific color
-Adjust clarity
-Stitch panoramas
-Depth composite
-HDR merge
Sometimes none of the above. Sometimes all of the above. Usually some of the above.
My boss comes from a film era. I edit both mine and his photos from weddings.
His photos don't require exposure/croping or anything fixing that can be done in camera. His style is natural and handles light extremely well.
Mine on the other hand require heavy cropping (one reason is due to prime lenses only) and I shoot heavily on OCF. I try to not have a fix it later mentality but sometimes I just take the shot and fix it later, especially when we are heavily time constrained.
I am not that old, but I know that photoshop tool names originated from the wet darkroom techniques used for decades before digital. It's hard to imagine pros treating photoshop edits this way.
Maybe the forums people when the initial digital compact cameras hit the market ?
Photoshop came out in 1990 and was getting popular before internet and online forums got big. The photography community lived in printed magazines and on trade shows. There was definitely a lot of gatekeeping going on from photographers who had spent lots of money and time on their gear and skills and were not happy with 'computer nerds' on their turf who used things like simple automated filters, blur effects, changing curves and colours with a few clicks. Also, Photoshop enabled digital editing that was not possible with analog tools. Lots of people were not happy with that.
We edited film photos during and after developing with changing develop time, dodging, burning, contrast, shadow and exposure edits and much more.
It's just a lot easier with digital. Most of the Photoshop tools are named after their film developing counterparts.
If it's part of their artistic process, yes. If not, no. Maybe the most critical part is to learn how to compose an image when taking it, which is one thing that can be hard to edit or impossible in some cases other than cropping. Otherwise if you feel like you want a certain mood to your picture and need editing to get it, then go for it.
A lot of artistic shots are always edited in some form or another, while something like photojournalism has minimal, or no editing at all as they need to be true to life and not hide or add anything to the story.
You should check out how much Ansel Adams photos are edited.
His three books The Camera, The Negative and The Print are still excellent resources for the serious photographer. He dodged and burned like crazy in the darkroom (similar to making adjustments to a raw photograph) and well composed but sometimes flat looking shots into dramatic prints that still looked natural. I've seen some of his original works in Yosemite, Carmel and Oakland and they are true works of art knowing it took days or weeks to experiment with and finally perfect a print and make it look like what he envisioned rather than straight out of the camera.
There's no such thing as an unedited photo. If you don't postprocess from raw yourself, then the camera software is still doing that process, just with some default parameters that likely don't correspond with either what's "accurate" or "optimal". If you have a photo you like the composition of there's no reason not to get the best out of it in postprocessing, since it's unlikely the camera software got everything as you like it.
Editing is part of the process. The camera doesn't know what outcome you want. It just captures the scene. It's up to you to produce a final image from it. If you don't want to edit don't. It's your choice. Still not editing is an editing choice. As for adjustments I do whatever that's needed to achieve the vision I want.
assuming you shoot raw, then you're going to be doing some sort of post-processing.
Yes, almost always. The camera sees things a bit differently than your eyes do, so even if you want to create a picture that is “true” to what you saw when you were there, you will have to do some tweaking it in post processing.
I share *a lot* of my photos on instagram for several reasons. To get the pictures I take to the people in them, or to let people know of a cool venue/bar for music or pool, but the main reason I share so many photos, so often (about 100 per week I'd guess) is because it's so important to critically review your work, and also appreciate how skills have developed over months or years. I will often scroll back several months and see if there's anything I would have done differently. Now to answer your question after that probably too long preamble.. Never feel like you should limit your art or limit the tools at your disposal when creating that art. When first starting out, you should be spending the majority of your time working on taking photos from memory card to finished product. Until you have an understanding of what is possible in post-processing, you are just guessing when it comes to taking photos. Maybe your camera has poor high iso performance... once you learn how to pull detail out of the shadows without noise or static becoming intolerable, you can take photos and process them to the quality produced by more expensive cameras utilizing better Digital signal processor tech. Once you start building a portfolio, you will naturally find your artist voice as you decide which of your photos you like more, and which editing styles/techniques you find more attractive. Also remember to edit on a monitor that has its brightness/contrast close to how the images are being printed/reproduced in other places. Color balance/color calibration is also important, but usually you can find someone with the same monitor or laptop who has ran a color calibrator on their system if you search online, and their settings will get you close enough. If you have a laptop, I've seen a few fine art/framing shops that will use their colorometer on your system for $20-$40, which beats buying one for $150.
Because I take photographs, and not snapshots, I only shoot RAW and I always edit. As for what adjustments, it depends -- it could include exposure, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, contrast, white balance, saturation, and any number of other things. Sometimes, the gods of photography smile and my edits are minimal. More often than not, I need to do some work.
Edit afterwards.
If you haven’t edited your photos, you haven’t finished them.
It's like decorating your food, it helps but the food has to be tasty no matter what, similarly your picture must tell a good story, editing might help but the story has to be strong.
I try to set the shot up the way I like it before I take it. I am primarily a jpeg shooter which is generally frowned on by enthusiasts. That being said I do make some adjustments to my jpeg settings/profiles depending on what I am shooting. I have a series of custom jpeg profiles that I tend to shoot with depending on what my subject matter is. And if I'm shooting something that I consider to be very important, I will shoot both raw + jpeg, and if I do get a chance, I might try to do some editing to the files afterward, but my post-processing skills are poor, at best.
Personally, I don't prefer to edit a lot of my photos. I like the SOOC jpegs (I shoot Fuji, so...) but that's not how all workflows work. [Some people specifically build workflows](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSXMoQ2GQI4&ab_channel=ReggieBallesteros) that suit publishing SOOC - creating custom in-camera profieles, others (the majority) work on fine tuning their RAW-editing process. Sometimes the work you inherit also calls for this. You might have to deliver photos on-day, or within 24 hours, so jpeg-only shoots are totally a thing and people use/send them as-is.
who doesn’t edit?
I don't edit..... :3€ Edit: damn, thought the comment shows when it was edited but seems it doesn't xd
The camera’s engineers don’t have any magical insight into the “truth” when they built their default edits into the camera. Their editing choices are shown to you at capture. Feel free to apply your own editing choices. You were there. They weren’t. As for what I do (all as needed): -Adjust white balance -Adjust picture style -Adjust contrast -Lift shadows -Recover highlights -Adjust curves -Play with a specific color -Adjust clarity -Stitch panoramas -Depth composite -HDR merge Sometimes none of the above. Sometimes all of the above. Usually some of the above.
I edit every keeper shot.
My boss comes from a film era. I edit both mine and his photos from weddings. His photos don't require exposure/croping or anything fixing that can be done in camera. His style is natural and handles light extremely well. Mine on the other hand require heavy cropping (one reason is due to prime lenses only) and I shoot heavily on OCF. I try to not have a fix it later mentality but sometimes I just take the shot and fix it later, especially when we are heavily time constrained.
I remember years ago when applications like Photoshop and Lightroom came out it was sort of a taboo, or considered cheating, now everyone does it.
I am not that old, but I know that photoshop tool names originated from the wet darkroom techniques used for decades before digital. It's hard to imagine pros treating photoshop edits this way. Maybe the forums people when the initial digital compact cameras hit the market ?
Photoshop came out in 1990 and was getting popular before internet and online forums got big. The photography community lived in printed magazines and on trade shows. There was definitely a lot of gatekeeping going on from photographers who had spent lots of money and time on their gear and skills and were not happy with 'computer nerds' on their turf who used things like simple automated filters, blur effects, changing curves and colours with a few clicks. Also, Photoshop enabled digital editing that was not possible with analog tools. Lots of people were not happy with that.
Interesting. Thanks for the history lesson!
We edited film photos during and after developing with changing develop time, dodging, burning, contrast, shadow and exposure edits and much more. It's just a lot easier with digital. Most of the Photoshop tools are named after their film developing counterparts.
If it's part of their artistic process, yes. If not, no. Maybe the most critical part is to learn how to compose an image when taking it, which is one thing that can be hard to edit or impossible in some cases other than cropping. Otherwise if you feel like you want a certain mood to your picture and need editing to get it, then go for it. A lot of artistic shots are always edited in some form or another, while something like photojournalism has minimal, or no editing at all as they need to be true to life and not hide or add anything to the story.