Post-Processing And How It Works

Post-Processing And How It Works

by William Lulow

These days, most photographers are working digitally. They use digital cameras and several computer programs to assist with uploading, editing and the tweaking of their images. Using these applications has become an important part of the entire digital photographic process. In the film days, you would nearly always have to get everything correct in the camera and then if any changes or tweaks in the images had to be made, they had to go out to a retoucher to make sure they were complete. Today, most retouching plus normal changes in exposure, contrast, hue, and saturation can be taken care of with the aid of the computer.

Adobe has come up with the basic photo editing software known as Photoshop. But there are other applications that usually are offered when you lease the Adobe Creative Cloud package. One is Adobe Bridge, and another is Adobe Lightroom. Bridge is a fairly basic program that uploads your images from the camera to the computer and lays them out so that you can do a number of things with them. Lightroom is a bit more complicated, in my opinion, but can accomplish the same things. I like to use Bridge for clients when they are in the studio editing their own shoots because I can enlarge and label each frame, copy all the labelled ones into a separate folder I call “SELECTS” and then, by one click, import them to Photoshop for retouching. Then all SELECTS are then copied to a flash drive that I can give the client as they are leaving the studio. All of the retouching and post-processing is built in to my fee for the portrait. I only charge extra for it if the client is a corporation because there are usually multiple sets of images that need processing. So, with all of this being said, the following constitutes my basic workflow including post processing:

First, you should put all images from a single shoot whether it’s for yourself or a client, in a folder and label it clearly. The program allows you to give a name to the entire folder as well as to the images themselves. You will then have access to all of them and know exactly where they reside on your hard drive.  Lightroom does, however have an easy way to add your metadata on each frame (Bridge can do this too), and will also let you put a watermark on each image once it is imported into your collections and then exported to a new file folder.

So, you have three programs that really must work together to help you produce the kinds of images that really shine. You would begin by uploading images from the camera, name them all in Bridge and store them in folders that you can put on your hard drive. Then you would edit them in Photoshop, make any changes in exposure, etc. and save them to another folder I like to call “Edits” or “Selects.” From there, you can import them into Lightroom to add your watermarks for uploading to a website or deliver to a client.  I have all three programs open and running at the same time on the task bar of my computer. These applications work seamlessly with each other so that you can go back and forth between them adding editing details and saving them any way you like. In order to take full advantage of the latest digital processes, these steps have become essential steps in your overall photographic efforts.

Here is an example of an image that needed a bit of work:

An image of some chairs that I photographed down in Miami. I liked the overall composition and concept of the shot, but it needed a bit of tweaking. First, the sky portion of the shot (in the sunlight) was a bit overexposed and the chairs themselves were a bit too dark. I saw the shot in my collection in Adobe Bridge and selected it. Double-clicking the image immediately brought it into Photoshop where I made the necessary changes:

Here, I brought the portion of the image in direct sunlight down in exposure a bit by first masking that portion of the shot with the magnetic lasso tool and then bringing the exposure more like the shadow portion of the shot. Then, I switched over to Lightroom to add my watermark so that I could upload it to my website:

programs open and running at the same time on the task bar of my computer. These applications work seamlessly with each other so that you can go back and forth between them adding editing details and saving them any way you like. In order to take full advantage of the latest digital processes, these steps have become essential steps in your overall photographic efforts.

The three programs all worked quickly together to allow me to finish the image and put it in a usable form.