Before and After

Nov 27

Photo editing is one of my favourite parts about photography. In this blog I am going to discuss the importance of post production, and provide some before and after examples. I will not be going through my detailed photo editing process, however, I will be posting an editing blog in the near future.

The editing process always begins during the photo shoot. Making sure you are shooting in RAW is the first step to creating beautiful before and after edits. A RAW image is an uncompressed version of an image, where the camera takes the image data from the sensor, and saves it as an unedited format on the memory card. This uncompressed version has all of the sensor data stored, like the highlights, shadows, white balance, tone, colours, etc. This data will allow you to manipulate your images on a much larger scale compared to a compressed JPEG image.

The next step in post production is deciding on what images to edit. I start my process by importing all of my files to Lightroom and I go through every image from the shoot. I make sure to go through these photos full screen, and I flag photos I would like to edit. Once I make it through all of my photos, I filter to flagged photos and start editing.

Image editing is a very important process of photography. This process has the ability to separate good photos from incredible photos. Editing can also help a photographer develop their style, allowing them to be able to differentiate themselves from other photographers. I personally enjoy editing because it is another step in the creative process that allows me to provide value through my images. Editing a RAW image is like fully redeveloping an image to look exactly how you would like it to. Sometimes it can be subtle, sometimes it may be more dramatic (i.e., the example above). Here are some of my favourite edits that make a huge difference in the composition of the image.