How much post processing?

I've only been a member of NPN for a short while but I have already learned a lot.
In particular I have realised just how much post processing and tinkering is needed to get an image just right.

I know that there are plenty of you out there who began with film cameras when you had to get it right first time.
That's my background and when I moved over to digital I still wanted to get it right first time; right exposure, right composition, because I had no idea how to use Photoshop. I saw myself as a photographer not a technician and, if I'm honest, I thought that if you needed to use Photoshop it meant you hadn't taken the photo correctly in the first place.

After noting the critiques of photos that I (and others) have posted I'm coming to appreciate that almost every shot can be tweaked.

I think a good way to summarize it is that you do want to get the best you can in camera so you have a properly executed raw digital file to take to post production so you can finish the image. Ansel Adams took his best negatives to the dark room and that's where the fun continued: he push-processed, did 4-corner burns, dodging, you name it, in an effort to create the goal, which is the art. Today's sensors, by their very nature, cause us to lose sharpness and saturation and depending on the resolving power of your lenses, contrast. That has to be restored in post, no option. And there's no "I just shoot and get it right on my digital camera and do no post work". That's like inviting friends over for steak dinner and serving everything uncooked. There ARE people who swear that they just shoot and do no post, and in nearly 100% of the time I've seen that, they are shooting JPEGs, lol! So they are essentially shooting a raw image that the camera then sharpens and saturates before compressing out precious data and then writing it to a memory card. Then their inkjet printer applies its magic that's built into the drivers when it prints. But, no, they do no post work. No manual post work, anyway.

OK! Rant over! Happy processing!

Truthfully, I think it's about a 50/50 ratio of taking the picture and post processing today just as it was years ago when we did it in the traditional darkroom. I worked for a newspaper photolab and I would say (except for color E6 processing) at least 50% of the work was darkroom related if you really wanted a nice image. I would say the same today. Just my .02 of course.

"The negative is the score. The print is the performance" Ansel Adams.

In today's digital world, your RAW file is your 'negative'. Taking this, converting it to a TIFF or PSD file and then making adjustments in an image editor is good practice and results in images that can reveal the heart and soul of the photograph. In my humble opinion, to do otherwise results in simply a documentary image that says only, 'I was here'.

I still use film, 4x5, and so I must carefully expose it, carefully scan it and then use Photo Shop and apply my technical and creative skill to create a print that says something about the world, and perhaps something about me. If I did otherwise, I wouild not be true to my vision.

Just a quick note: Ansel was a master printer, as we all know, but some of his negatives were less than optimal in terms of exposure and/or development. He was able to extract useable tonal values and detail with tools and techniques that, to many in today's digital world, would seem arcane. I have seen many of his orginal prints over the years that I still stand in awe of.

So, don't just process to make a useable image: Create the performance!

--P

I'm a believer in minimal post processing, but as has already been noted every raw image needs to be processed to some extend. My background is 30+ years of film (B&W and color slide) before going 100% digital, and I did all my B&W work in a real darkroom.

But my primary goal with my photography is observing and recording natural things as naturally as possible, and not creating some artistic interpretation of a Disneyfied "Ideal Nature."

I've got an example of Raw to Jpeg processing on my web site that shows the typical steps I take.

To catalog my post processing:

- white balance and exposure fine tuning in raw conversion in ACR
- photoshop for dust removal (clone or healing brush)
- PS layer for more tonal adjustments via levels
- PS layer for contrast via Curves
- PS layer to bump up saturation a little
- selective exposure adjustments in PS with another layer (usually for highlights when needed)
- rarely, noise reduction to the background on a separate layer in PS
- crop in PS after flattening
- resize in PS
- selectively apply Smart Sharpen at output size

What I try to avoid:

- Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation sliders in ACR/raw conversion
- Shadow/Highlight adjustments in PS (Rarely, I will use this selectively to recover detail in white plumage)
- High Dynamic Range
- removing extraneous objects from the image (branches, parts of birds, etc.) I will sometimes clean up flotsam from the water surface or a stray twig in a corner of the image
- adding anything from another image (a clipped wingtip, another bird, a better sky, etc.)

I have one question Richard - what's the rationale behind avoiding the Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation sliders? Used judiciously, I don't think they do anything objectionable - certainly no more than some modest changes to your other, allowable steps can do. Just curious about what you don't like about them.

I believe in minimal processing. Funny thing is, many of the darkroom techniques that people refer to, like burning the corners, were not aesthetic choices, we burnt corners because large format enlargers had really bad light fall off, you had to burn the edges or they would be lighter than the rest of the print. It only be came cool later!

I completely agree that digital files need some, even a lot of work. But I also believe in the power of the subject and the importance of being as honest as possible in our interpretation. I am not a part of the growing school whom believes that it is okay to add our own input to nature photographs in the name of art. The beauty of nature is enough for me, I simply can't add anything better to it, nor should I try. If that means I am not an artist, who cares.

Grab yourself a drink and sit back with one of Eliot Porter's books. His work is a reminder of the power of minimal processing and honesty in nature photography.

I have one question Richard - what's the rationale behind avoiding the Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation sliders? Used judiciously, I don't think they do anything objectionable - certainly no more than some modest changes to your other, allowable steps can do. Just curious about what you don't like about them.

- David

I've tried all these sliders in ACR at times but have never liked the results as much as when I don't use them at this point in processing. Clarity,I think, adds contrast in an unusual way. Vibrance can introduce a color cast, or emphasize an existing subtle color cast.

By saving saturation and other tweaks to Photoshop I can revisit each adjustment layer and make small changes that I can see working with the other adjustment layers, rather than finding out I pushed saturation too far in ACR and can't fine tune as well in the later stages of processing.

Wow! It's obvious that even the guys whole 'believe in minimal processing' do a whole lot more than I do to their images in Photoshop. But then this is all new to me.
At the moment all I am doing is tackling any blown highlights, tightening the histogram, maybe adding some warmth (although that is entirely monitor dependent) and finally a minimal UnSharp Mask.
I know I could do a lot more but it is important to me that the final image reflects what I saw, not an ideal version of how I would like it to have been.

If you follow the link to Richard's blog, you'll see that although there are several steps in his workflow, the results are quite subtle, perhaps even comparable in some ways to film choice back in the 'old days' - Kodachrome vs Velvia vs Provia, etc.

I had exactly the same question for Richard as David did. My default workflow in ACR includes Clarity=50, Vibrance=8, Saturation=8, usually before making any other adjustments to exposure or white balance. Then I may come back and tweak those first sliders. I'm not sure how the results compare to Richard's way, but it comes from long habit and I'm generally not dissatisfied with the results. I seldom make other adjustments in ACR. In PS my steps are fairly similar to Richard's. I only occasionally apply a Levels layer and I usually apply a Curves layers. Plus some dodging and burning, if needed.

I'm far from being a post-processing expert but this is what works for me. My limited post-processing skills make it all that much more important to get it as right as possible in camera.

A lot of folks swear by Lightroom for post-processing. I tried Lightroom for a while, but was unable to get comfortable with it (its file handling just isn't intuitive for me) so I went back to using ACR.

Note that there are some differences to how ACR or other RAW processors render files from various cameras. It's possible, for instance, that Richard would find Buck's clarity setting to be fine for Buck's camera. But overall, it really is up to individual to make that call - there's no "right" way.

Martin - Are you processing RAW files? Or talking about changes to JPG/TIFF? Because that can make a big difference too, in what you do with them. And though the steps above seem like a lot, if they become a pretty standard work flow, they can go very quickly - like a few minutes per image.

David,
the workflow I described above is what I do with my RAW file before I save it as a TIFF.