Photo Editing – photography part 3

Apr 21, 2010 by Spencer

So I have written about some general photography tips and equipment, now its time for the digital darkroom.  It is a good rule of thumb to take a photo that requires the least amount of editing in post production (aka the digital darkroom).  But the reality is that you will need to do some retouching, color correction, cropping, etc.  As a hobbyist you will not always have the camera set to the perfect settings or be able to think fast enough to switch in the middle of shooting.  This is where a computer and some good software comes into play.  Remember this post is for beginners, not professional photographers, so the tips I give may or may not be recommended by The PPA (Professional Photographers of America) or other such groups.

First a few camera settings:

When I shoot I always leave the camera in Auto White Balance mode, I’m not going to carry around a White Balance Card with me, that just isn’t going to happen, so auto is my friend.  Plus it is pretty easy to correct on the computer.

I also shoot in Automatic mode for most settings.  I will turn to some presets, like Action/Sports, if I am shoots fast action.  I will switch to No Flash mode when I don’t want the camera to fire the flash.

As mentioned in my last post I shoot in Aperture Priority mode when using my 35mm prime lens so i can control my f-stop.  It also allows me to adjust my the strength of my flash.  I have used this when I have been forced to use a forward facing flash and don’t want the harsh lighting of a full-strength flash.  This gets a little more complicated but once you are comfortable with your camera in Automatic mode it is a setting worth exploring.

On to the computer

The first thing you need to do is decide how you want to organize your photos.  I have done many, many hours of training on photo programs and trust me, the worst thing you can do is start without an organizational plan.  You will have pictures all over your computer and never be able to find them.  Personally I use Aperture 3, a professional photo editing and management app.  If you are using a Mac you already have a great app to get started with, iPhoto.  Another good consumer level app is Picasa available for both Mac and PC.  Also Adobe make s a pro app, like Aperture, called Lightroom that will work on Mac or PC.

I am going to share a little bit about iPhoto and Aperture because these are the apps I use.  I like these apps because they organize your photos in a library file.  The library is essentially 1 file that stores all your photos and all the files need for organizing albums, events, slideshows, etc.  Many professionals don’t like this because its to restricting, while this a valid argument for professional photographers with vast photo libraries, for the home user and hobbyist, it makes photo management easier.  Plus, both have for manual management options but I do not recommend it for most people. With my consulting and  support background I have seen countless people erase entire photo libraries from their pictures folder because they think their photos are safe in their favorite photo app like Picasa or even older versions of iPhoto.  Only to find out later they erased the photos with no backup.

These apps only show you what is in a folder on your computer, as a reference.  When you delete the photo form the folder and then launch Picasa, etc you will find a lot of missing photos.  If you have emptied your trash the only way to recover your missing photos is if you have a backup.  You should ALWAY have a good backup!  Maybe that can be a future post.  If you use and app like Picasa, DO NOT delete the photos in your Pictures folder, or whatever folder you store your photos in.  All 17,000 photos on my computer are represented by 2 icons, my iPhoto library (old photos) and Aperture Library.  If I double click the icon it opens the respective application, no harm no foul.

I’m not going to get into organizational methods now but take advantage of the albums, keywords, ratings, face recognition, whatever organizational options you have.

Personally I used iPhoto for years but have upgraded to Aperture when I bought my Nikon D40.  If you are working with JPGs iPhoto or Picasa is fine but they aren’t going to handle RAW files as easily as Aperture or Lightroom.  For example, when you edit a RAW file in iPhoto it will preserve the original by duplicating the file and saving it as a JPG or TIF, depending on your preferences.  This is important because it increases storage requirements.  For example my test photo was 6MB then when I made an edit iPhoto automatically made a duplicate JPG that was 2.7MB.  So if I make 2 versions of the photos, say one cropped as a 3×6 and one 5×7, I would be using approximately 12MB of space for one photos.  This doubles my hard drive requirements for every photo.  Multiply this by 1,000′s and of photos and you can see the downside.  If you have 5,000 photos, a modest photo library these days, and edit (crop, color adjust, red-eye reduction, etc) two-thirds of them your storage needs would increase.  Based on my example above my requirements would go from 30GBs to 40GBs.  Now imagine if you have a 12MP camera you can double these numbers.

On the other hand Aperture handles your edits a little different.  For every version of the photo you have Aperture only saves the instructions.  You can make 7 different versions of 100% of your photos and take up virtually no more hard drive space.

Now to the Editing, almost

Before editing I rate my photos, this way I can weed out the ok photos and only edit my favorites quickly.

Ok now the editing

When I find a photo I like i start with adjusting  white balance.  Personally I tend to like warm photos, meaning that the white balance is shifted more towards yellow.  While this is technically incorrect, visually I like it.  While I like it warm, I would still rather have the original correct (or at least close) so I have a good starting point incase I use the photo for a different purpose than my typical photo album or slideshow.

Next on my list: adjust exposure, typically I will bump it up.  Then enhance saturation, and shadows and highlights.  These are the easiest tools to get started with.  There are great tools like curves in pro applications like Aperture or Photoshop that add a lot of power to color adjustments but take a 4 year degree in photo editing to figure out.  Generally I don’t use them because they are more complicated.  Then on many photos I add a very subtle vignette.  If I am going to crop a photo I do this before making adjustments so that way I am making my adjustments only on the part of the photo i am using.  Depending on the photo is can make a difference in how you adjust exposure, saturation, etc. Click on the photo to see everything a little larger.

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I included a video showing a few editing tips.  I know the audio isn’t great but hopefully it’s still helpful.

Another thing I love about Aperture is that I can copy all the changes I made for one image and paste them to another image or a series of images.  This allows me to adjust white balance, saturation, etc to one photo then instantly apply it to others, saving a repetitive process that no one likes.  It is also very easy to use for a newbie.  In contrast to using actions in Photoshop which isn’t as newbie friendly, but what in Photoshop is?

Speaking of Photoshop…

Photoshop is the industry standard for photo manipulation and I don’t see that changing any time soon.  However I find myself using it less and less for my photo enhancing.  I find other apps, such as the ones mentioned above, easier to use for that purpose.  If I have that special photo that I need to do advanced re-touching or manipulation I fire up Photoshop, if not I stick to Aperture.  If you don’t want to pump an additional $600 into your photo hobby but need more advanced tools, Photoshop Elements is a great alternative for most home/hobby users, for only $100.  I find that I use Photoshop on about 1-5% of my photos.  Now if I am designing a greeting card or web graphics, or anything that is more than just a photo, I almost always use Photoshop.  Photoshop has its place, but its not always the best or easiest photo editor.

Summary

The cliff notes version of this post:  Get ORGANIZED, use an app to help you get organized, use the editing tools of that app for 90% of your photo editing, get Photoshop/Photoshop Elements for the other 10%, enjoy!  Oh yeah don’t forget to reserve some time to do this.  You didn’t take all your photos in a day and chances are your photo library won’t be organized in a day either.  Also learning Photoshop or Photoshop Elements will take countless hours to master.  For my final tip, review new photos every six months and weed out the ones you don’t need.  In a digital world we take way to many photos of the same thing, but when they are new you want to keep all of them.  Waiting helps reduce the emotion tied to your photos and makes it easier to throw some away.

I’ll probably have one more post in this series with some odds and ends that didn’t make it into any of the other posts.  If you have any questions just let me know and I will try to answer them in a post.