Editing and Adjustment a.k.a Post-Processing (as part of a Digital Workflow)

This is the meat of the work that goes into each image. Its interesting that more photographers want to know about your post-processing that any other phase in your workflow. Lets face it, file management is not as interesting. Post-processing is one of the most fun and difficult parts of your workflow. It can turn your image into a piece of art, or pixel junk. But it takes a lot of experience to know what you are doing.



There are tons of tools that can be used, but none as widely used or known as Adobe Photoshop. In fact, the word photoshop is been made a verb and its synonymous with the editing and processing of a image. There are even times when photographers already know how they are going to Photoshop an image at the moment they are shooting it... (essentially fixing it) There are tons of books, articles and web sites teaching, instructing, guiding and showing how to add, change and construct your workflow. The thing is that each discipline requires a different workflow, and each file is edited in a different way. In the case of photojournalist, there are a code of ethics that even prevents them from the manipulation of the material they are to submit - (keeping certain image tuning practices still at the table).

But what is involved? Well, a good resource to start is this Tutorials For Photoshop CS3.COM.. but an example could be something like the article written by Roman Zolin.

But if I were to take my workflow as an example - what would it look like? In general terms - like this:

• I do the retouching first - that is a layer where by using the liquify, clone, heal and other tools I re-shape, re-skin and clean surfaces and distractions that the image might present. In the above image, the amount of changes were rather small and almost no adjustments were done with the exception of some light re-touching of the skin.
• My second step is the mask creation for the isolation of layers - in this case there are only two (the model with the tree and the background). This is so I can process them separately.
• Tonality and colour changes are the last step that I tackle - These include level, curves, shift, contrast, saturation adjustments etc. This image does not show it, but skin colour correction also occurs (and typically before and isolated to the rest of the image components, by reducing some red shifts that happens by the DRLSs). These can some times be done at a specific area.

Other photographers do things differently. When smarts and budget allows, a photographer reaches out to a professional re-toucher. It has to be said that plenty of patience, time, knowledge and skills go into a post-processing phase and when you are looking for quality, a professional retoucher would be a smart way to address it. The following sample is from a skilled retoucher by the name of Bianca Carosio. This is a great before/after sample of what can be done when you have the skills.



(Before/After post-processing sample - Photographer: Quavondo | Retoucher Bianca Carosio)


My sample image was a simple image to post-process as I had achieved what I wanted when I shot the image. At the end of the process, and this is key for the rest of the workflow, each version has to go back into the library. I make use of a feature in Aperture to "stack" images, this way I keep track of the original RAW, the developed version and the final PSD, which is then used used to generate all the final versions.




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