Why Editing is so important in Photography… ?
Post edition !!! That was almost a banned thing for me before I discovered deeper photography…
THE PICTURE
But before entering in the deep process of edition let me share about this picture : here you can see kids going to school… but for me it represent a big part of Japanese culture which is captured there…
SAFETY FIRST 👮♀️: there as the kids wear a yellow hat and yellow bag to be highly distinguishable while walking in the street👍
UNIFORMITY and HARMONY 🙏: in Japan everything is done to trigger harmony and uniformity between people, that’s why it is still the norm to wear uniform for kids
TRANSGENERATION RESPECT 👨🏻🦳🧑🏻🦳: you have in Japan a huge respect of the older generation and at the same time they take a big responsibility in transmitting traditions. So it’s very common to see 80+ people still working and in particular for this type of role where they guide kids after school…
LET’S COME BACK TO EDITION
As I said just before for me editing my pictures was cheating, it was twisting the reality or lying on my photographer talent…
And then talking with photographer I understood all the power of it but most importantly that editing is totally part of the creation process.
To sum it up one sentence works pretty well :
👉 you don’t take photography but you make photography.👈
Starting from your creative vision or the story you want to tell the post edition is the continuity of the shooting.
You think / shoot / edit / share.
I indeed also put the sharing moment as part of the creation process. The way you gonna share your picture might as well impact a lot the way the viewer perceive your creation (ie. do you write a text ? is it on instagram ? is it a print ? do you send it through a physical mail ?)
Now that you are not shy anymore to edit your pictures let’s talk a bit about the how ❓…
I’ll for sure dedicate some other articles to the editing process but let’s start by the 3 most important things in the edition :
WHERE SHOULD I EDIT :
Many many options are available to edit your pictures and you can basically do it everywhere ( phone, tablet, computer…). You can simply do it from your photo app on your phone but if you want to go further and move to the next level I would really advice to go for Lightroom ( CC or Classic). Another option is also Luminar that makes things a bit easier and sometimes more epic or dramatic but you’ll have to be careful as it can twist a lot things ( but as we just said before… as long as it follows your creative vision…🤷 )
2. THE CROPPING TOOL :
This will usually be used at the very end of your edition work. Again many beliefs on the fact that we should get it right from the beginning. No no🧏♂️ it’s ok to not be perfect in your framing and by the way it is always better to shoot a little bit wider than what you think you will need. always possible to crop but very difficult to recreate things if you missed it …. your crop will help you to :
focus only on what’s important for you
Position your subject where it needs to be ( see article on rule of third, center, etc…)
Adapt your picture to the social media you want to post in ( ie 5x4 for instagram)
3. THE COLOR MIXER :
The color mixer is certainly the tool that impacted the most my photography style. It has a huge impact on the global vision and it’s a powerful to help to guide the attention of the viewer. it basically dissociate all the colors you see above on three parameters :
HUE : it’s actually impacting directly the color so you can twist partially the color ( ie from a red to a violet or orange
SATURATION : It is the quantity of grey you put in the color ( super strong color = high saturation )
LUMINANCE : It is the quantity of white ( or Black) you integrate in the color
But honestly the only way to really understand the power of this tool is to try on your pictures. You can really put more focus on a cold and extinguish other to try to minimise the number of information you want to give.
Let’s look at this picture above in before after :
Here the crop and the biggest focus made on the yellow/ orange in the pictures helps to make it stand out and catch more immediately the point of this scene.
To be honest not yet 100% satisfied with this picture 😊… but that’s also the risk with editing… as you always want to go further 😅.
And you how would you edit this picture ?? let me know in comments 🙏
Lets talk tech :
First you can see here that I invested in another super lens (RF 70-200mm f2,8) 😍😍
By far my favourite lens as it is super versatile, give an amazing bokeh thanks to the big opening and long focal ( and also give a great compression for street photography ). I’ll share about compression in a next article 😏.
Here the main challenge was to freeze the very moving scene with a shutter speed at 1/8000s. That said it’s probably a bit too much and by going slower I could have keep ISO at 100 👍