No matter what photo editing software you use, Photoshop, Gimp, PS Essentials, etc, post production in digital photography is pretty much essential if you want control of your images. But how much is too much?
The simple answer is when it starts to show. When someone can see the editing almost before they begin to take in the image. But the long answer is a lot more complex. There are times when effect and impact is everything and therefore an image can be ‘shopped to within and inch of it’s life and still look stunning. Do but do it well.
The minimum an image usually needs is a light crop, and a levels adjustment. (I use Adobe Photoshop™ so will refer to this throughout my articles, please replace the wording with your photo editor of choice). The reason I use levels is because I shoot my images with a neutral setting on my Canon 40D, and straight from camera the images are pretty flat. A little levels tweaking and they start to zing. Also my habit when shooting is to allow space around the subject when composing my shot as you can crop it out – but you can’t put it back in if you miss it.
I class colour correction as a fairly mild sort of photoshopping also. It is important to get the colour balanced correctly and in critical shoots I use a grey card to get my settings right.
The next level of photoshopping is when there are bright patches in the corner or bits and pieces that distract or draw the eye. I always use a fresh layer and edit onto that with the clone tool or the patch tool or whatever. In that way if I need to go back I can. I use various cloning techniques, but more of that in later articles.
The next, more serious level is ‘comping’ or making a composite image. Cutting bits out and putting them elsewhere. This takes a high degree of skill to keep the cut out looking natural. Images that have had this level of interference cannot be used in photo-journalism and there are some competitions that expressly forbid this level of manipulation.
I plan to write some more articles going into the techniques I use, with examples. There are a great many resources on the internet for tutorials and sometimes it’s hard separating the good from the bad. More on that later also.
