Making Photographs Better

Making Photographs Better

by William Lulow

I have written a lot about post-production and the value of examining your images to see how they can be made into stronger compositions and exposures to reinforce the visual ideas you intend to communicate. In this regard, I picked an image I made recently on a vacation and I will describe what was done to it. Here is the initial picture:

When you do any kind of post production on an existing image, you should have an idea in mind of what you might want it to look like. Here I envisioned a vertical image, not a horizontal one, that captured the feeling of the waves, the sunset and the beach chairs into a statement about the eternity of sunsets themselves and how the deserted chairs conveyed a feeling of solitude and loneliness. The picture that I took originally didn’t do this, but I was able to see, in my mind, how it might be made stronger.

First, I thought that the sunset itself needed to be more pronounced in order to call more attention to it. Then, the exposure itself needed to come up a bit more so that more of the detail of the chairs was visible. When I looked at this picture, I could tell it was possible to do this. Sometimes, when an image is too underexposed or even too overexposed, when you try to correct it, the contrast becomes too great, especially if the exposure is off by more than two stops to begin with. This one was only off by maybe 1.5 stops. Once I made those changes, I then decided to increase the contrast on the chairs to make them compete a bit with the sunset. I also adjusted the hue and saturation of the sunset. Normally, light colored objects tend to attract the eye while dark ones recede. When you shoot in color, however, a bright red or orange attracts just about as much attention as white does. So, I wanted to increase the contrast just to be able to see all the elements better. This is what I got:

Notice how the water glistens now! The shore line reflects the color of the sunset itself. The chairs now complete the composition because detail can be readily seen. The vertical composition and the tight crop make the largest wave more visible and makes the point that ocean elements continue their age-old progression.

In order to achieve these effects, I began by masking off the sunset portion of the image using the quick-select tool. It can be manipulated to include just the rectangle from the top of the frame to the horizon. Once I selected that part, I used the INVERSE tool to select the rest of the image and increased the exposure about 1.5 to 2 stops. This brought out more of the detail in the waves as well as the chairs. I then went back and changed the hue and saturation of the sunset portion until I obtained colors that I wanted. Next, I selected the part of the image from the bottom to the part where the water hits the shoreline and increased the brightness/contrast with the sliders until I got just the right effect.

There weren’t that many steps in post production here, but the photograph is much stronger both in composition and color. I even caught a pelican in mid flight. The image was transformed from an average, underexposed shot of a sunset at the beach into one that has all the elements of a really good picture.

I sometimes underexpose an image purposely in order to increase saturation of colors. Over the years, I have found that there is a huge difference in photographing a scene in color and in Black&White. Rendering a scene in Black&White calls for filtering to enhance contrast and separate the elements within the image. Converting an image digitally from color to B&W also is not always an effective plan. I tend to see some scenes in B&W and others in color, so you need to be really discerning about how you want to depict any particular scene.

If you look at your pictures really carefully, I am sure there are things you could do to make them better.