More About Post-Production Work

More About Post Production Work

by William Lulow

I have mentioned previously that Ansel Adams and many others would often pre-visualize an image that they wanted to make even though it didn’t exist in nature when they first saw it. Here is an instance when I saw a scene, loved the lighting, but knew that I could make it substantially better with just a bit of adjustment in Photoshop. Here is the original shot:

When I looked at the scene I loved the sunset and the lights of the restaurant and the silhouette of two figures by the water. When I examined the image, I thought it lacked the vibrance and intensity that I knew it could have. I brought the image into Photoshop and immediately knew what I had to do. I increased the vibrance and then reset the saturation using Photoshop’s sliders with the tool until I achieved the level of contrast and intensity that I wanted. It was a fairly simple manipulation. Here is the result:

These kinds of post production moves are consistent with producing art because almost every artist goes through them. The vibrance, color of the sky and the intensity of the sunset here makes for a much more powerful image. These are changes that are well within the province of making images that have an impact. Most landscape photographers go through this same sort of procedure in fabricating their images.

Here is another example:

Here, the exposure was changed, the sky and clouds enhanced to provide more separation and the overall contrast was adjusted. These changes make for a much better image.

This image, made in Hawaii, was mediocre when I first shot it, but I was able to see some possibilities if some changes were made to the vibrance and contrast. Here is the image after some post production:

The editing or retouching I do is mostly to enhance the image not to change its basic composition or nature. I like to deepen the tones and make them a bit more vibrant. Sometimes, as I am going about the process, I see things that I didn’t see when I initially made the image, other times, I know in advance, what I want to do to an image. Here is an example:

This is an image I saw in Zermatt, Switzerland of some trees. They were lit from behind by the sun and this is pretty much what I saw. I knew I could make the colors more vibrant in Photoshop but the initial lighting was what grabbed me about the scene. Here is the retouched version:

So the moral of the story is that images can and should be edited, retouched and re-cropped if the resulting ones would be stronger and exist as dynamic photographs. I should note that in the days before the advent of image editing software, photographers regularly edited prints and/or negatives with the use of chemicals, dodging, burning, etc., until they arrived at more pleasing images. The good news is that once you edit your digital files, you can save both the original as well as the post-production versions.