Post-Production: A Necessary Step (Second Update)

Post-Production-A Necessary Step (Second Update)

by William Lulow

Most commercial photographers use digital imaging for their assignments these days and post-production, meaning working on an image after it is actually digitally processed by a camera, has become a necessary step in the making of photographs. Not that it wasn’t in the days of film, a huge number of people found work doing photo-retouching and enhancing in those days and were paid a pretty penny for their efforts. But, I recently was watching a documentary on Ansel Adams, the great American photographer, famous for his stunning landscapes. It was talking about how his final prints really did not look like what he captured on his negatives. In fact, he manipulated his prints in the darkroom sometimes for days, before he arrived at the amazing images we see today. He knew how to “dodge” and “burn” his prints until he was able literally to extract an image that had all the nuances and shades of a scene he saw in his mind, but not necessarily that existed in nature. Most often, his “mental” images were a whole lot more interesting than what he actually saw with his camera. The interesting thing is that he expected that to be the case. He would go out on a photo safari with an idea in his mind but would not always capture that idea on film until he had worked on both the negative and the print for a long time.

The lesson here is that today, Photoshop and other imaging software make it much easier to do what Adams did. We just have to be more aware of what we are seeing and be able to imagine what the photograph “could be” with some additional work in post production. I have spent a great deal of time working in darkrooms and I can tell you that being on your feet making prints, in a darkened room with orange safelights and breathing sometimes toxic chemicals, was not an easy thing to do. I much prefer sitting down at my computer. But the skill and time involved is very similar to what I used to experience making Black&White prints in the darkroom.

Here’s an example. It’s a scanned image of a hiker in Bryce Canyon, Utah back in 1970:

This is what the scanned original looked like. It was from a 35mm Kodachrome slide which looked to me as if it was a bit underexposed. Here’s what I did to it:

First, I cropped the image. Then I lightened it about 1.5 f/stops. Next, I increased the luminescence of the whole shot a bit. Finally, I balanced the image to make it a bit less pink using the slider bars for Hue and Saturation. Bryce is a place that grabs your imagination because of all the actual colors there. It’s been fifty years since I was there, but I still remember the impression it made on me.

Here’s another example:

Again, the original slide looked a bit dark and didn’t have the light quality I originally saw. Here’s what the new image looked like:

Needless to say, with an old chrome, it’s always going to have some dust specks on it, so they were removed along with changing the hue, saturation and exposure.

The take away here is that as much as I have always believed in getting it right the first time in the camera, making successful images doesn’t always work that way. Any final image usually takes more post production work than people think. But, it is and should be part of the process of making great photographs. A final thought; I have always told my students that they need to make prints often from their images. We are so used to seeing things on screens these days and photographs were meant to be displayed in a large-enough format for people to see clearly, even from a distance. That’s why I usually make my prints at least 11″x14″ and often 16″x20″ for any kind of good display. You can then really admire your own work and have others see it that way as well.

Here is another example where post production makes a stronger image. I saw this couple on the beach a couple of winters ago in Florida, and asked it they would like me to take a picture of them toasting. I later found out they had just gotten engaged. The point was that I had imagined the shot of just the glasses and the sunset from the beginning. So I made the photograph KNOWING that I would work on it in post production:

On the left is the “before” shot, on the right the finished one. What I did, besides crop it, was to select the glasses and add a bit of color and shine to them while leaving the rest pretty much as it was. So, there wasn’t a ton of work to do, but the final was pretty much as I had imagined it.

Here is yet another example, one which I have used often:

Here’s how I enhanced this image. I saw the clouds to be a bit more dramatic and I eliminated some distracting elements as well to make it a much stronger image:

Making this image was fairly simple, but there are other techniques such as dropping in a blue sky or changing tones completely that are only limited by the photographer’s imagination.

And, here’s a kind of extreme example. An image of some trees on a hillside in Zermat, Switzerland. It took some work to bring out all the original colors, but the original image was anything but colorful as captured in my camera:

After some post-production retouching and color correction, this was the final result:

I could imagine this result when I made the initial image because I saw it in my mind. But it took some work to bring it out.

Here, a black&white image that needed some work:

So even after taking a great image, it can usually be improved by examining it a bit more, looking at all the elements carefully and deciding what you might do to make it even stronger. That’s what post-production is all about.

Post-production is almost a necessity these days. Most images can benefit from some tweaking once the initial picture is made. Pictures made in the camera and just left alone are really only snapshots which show what was actually in front of the camera. If you want to elevate the vision to something approaching an art form, you need to do some post-production work on it.