Processing & Cropping Your Images

Processing & Cropping Your Images

by  William Lulow

The previous article talked about using the right lens for certain kinds of jobs. Using Adobe Photoshop in conjunction with Adobe Bridge and Lightroom almost makes using the right lens an obsolete practice. If you are careful with your shooting techniques and have a clear idea in mind of the kind of photograph you wish to make, different lenses can actually perform several jobs. Here is an example of what I mean:

I was visiting Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania one day a couple of years ago and I was walking around making some images of flowers. I didn’t want to carry a lot of gear with me and I didn’t even have my tripod with me, so I knew if I wanted to make some really clear and sharp images I would have to shoot at a higher shutter speed and be able to stop my lens down enough to get the depth-of-field I wanted or, if I wanted to throw the background out of focus, I could do that as well. I was shooting with my Canon 20mm f/2.8 lens which, on my crop-sensor Canon 90D acts more like a 32mm lens. It’s still a wide angle just not so much. So here is one shot I did with this setup:

The settings for this image were: ISO 1000, f/11 @ 125th of a second. The lens here was acting almost like a “macro” even though it was my 20mm. And, even though this was made with the lens stopped down a fair amount, the grass on the right was far back enough to be rendered out of focus and drawing more attention to the flowers themselves. The image was cropped a bit in post production and some vibrance was added as well to bring out the purple color more. The crop added to the strength of the photo. 

Here’s another picture that could have been made with my 60mm macro lens, but again, I only had the 20mm with me:

In this shot, I knew there wouldn’t be any leaves or flowers moving and that I was going to make a monochrome image. So, the settings were: ISO 125, f/5.6 @ 1/125th of a second. The depth-of-field was not an issue either. The crop was tight in post-production because I saw the image this way even before I made the exposure. 

And then another example:

The original contained more of the scene, but I wanted to focus on these couple of flowers with the white highlights on them in post production. The specs for this exposure: ISO 1000, f/13 @ 1/125th of a second. Here, I really examined the image on the screen and decided to crop it closer that I did in the camera. 

So, the idea here is that if you have some idea of the kind of image you want to make, you can use the lens you have with you at the moment, knowing that you will crop the photo later in post-production. You can also make images that weren’t there in real life. This is an image I saw near Zermatt, Switzerland a few years ago:

This is what I saw. The trees were there on a mountainside and were amazingly backlit. I made the picture, knowing that I would edit it in post-production. Here is the result:

So, there are times when you can actually “see” a photograph in your mind’s eye, even though it may not exist in nature. And, by the way, Ansel Adams did this all the time. He printed and re-printed his images adding to them with darkroom techniques that are today, made simpler and much easier to do with Photoshop. The art is created in the mind of the photographer and then translated to print form using whatever techniques are available.