Editing is one of those things intrinsically linked with photography. Not every photographer does their own editing but many do. Either way, every photographer has their own style. Some have a dark, dramatic look to their images, others have a light, colorful vibe, and still others tend towards neutral tones. If you've been following me for a while you'll have noticed that my style is bright and colorful! In this post I'll step you through a bit of my editing process from loading images onto my computer to the final product!

Prep Work

The first step after moving the photos from my camera to my computer, is to load all the images I took during a session into Lightroom. Lightroom is an Adobe photo editing software that allows me to do almost everything I could need to with a photo! A couple of the specific jobs it allows me to do are adding metadata and rating photos into different categories.

Metadata is information included in an image file. Some of the metadata already included in a picture straight from the camera are camera settings, the date it was taken, and the file type. In Lightroom I can add info to the metadata like my name, contact, and copyright info! I have settings set up to automatically add these. That way if someone found and downloaded my image from the internet, they could see that I have it copyrighted.

After adding to the metadata, I sort through each of the photos and rate them according to the ones worth editing. In a perfect world, every photo would be a keeper but in the real world factors like camera shake, missed lighting, blinking, and other movement can get in the way. I also tend to shoot heavy (take more than less photos) which gives me options to choose from but also makes the culling process take a bit longer.

When I've weeded through the photos and decided on the ones to edit, I move on to the next stage: exposure.

Exposure

Exposure basically refers to the amount of light in an image. Fixing exposure is the first step in the actual editing process. Ideally, before this stage during the session I'll have exposed the image properly so there won't be too much to fix in editing. Unfortunately, his isn't always the case either because the lighting changed before I could fix the settings, a moment happened before I could change them, or because the light was just plain hard to expose for. More often than not I'll weed out poorly exposed photos during the culling process, but sometimes there will be a great moment with poor lighting that I want to save.

Lightroom has a couple different ways to edit exposure: levels and curves. Both of them do the same job in different ways. Levels has a slider for overall exposure, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. Curves is used by clicking and dragging different points on the line to edit the highlights, shadows, and mid-tones. (You can also edit color in the curves section but more on that later.) The goal of this stage is typically to set the exposure to how it looked outside the camera. However, some photographers will increase or decrease outside of this range to fit their style.

Fixing bad exposure typically comes down to adding or removing light. I usually use levels when editing so I'll start by adjusting the "exposure" slider so that most of the peaks on the histogram are in the middle. A histogram (pictured below) shows the tonal range a photo holds. The left side shows the darks in an image and the right side shows the lights. After creating a baseline, I'll adjust the other light and dark sliders so the histogram lines on both sides Just reach the edge. You can tell when the lines reach the edge by looking at the triangles in each of the top corners. The goal is to keep the triangle grey. When it changes to a different color you know you've gone to far.

From there I can adjust by eye to how the image should look! When it's exposed to my liking I'll move on to the color stage.

Coloring

Coloring largely comes down to the photographer's style. There really isn't a right or wrong answer here from an artistic standpoint. Although, to quote my college video professor, Tim Jackson, "If you're going to break the rules, you have to have a reason." He was talking about digital media rules within videography. Translated to this context, if you're going to get creative coloring an image, know why you're doing it!

Lightroom has several different panels available for editing color. These are HSL/Color, color grading, curves, and levels in the basic panel. I won't go through what each of these panels do in detail. Suffice to say, each panel adjust the colors of an image in different ways. Some affect a range a colors (like highlights or mid-tones) while others affect only one color at a time. When coloring a photo it's important to check how your adjustment affects the whole photo. For example, in the above photo it was easy to focus on lowering the red or yellow saturation while forgetting how that would affect my subject's skin tone.

Coloring is such a powerful tool because the way you color an image can totally change the it's tone! For example, picture below is edited to be warm, cool, and black & white. The first photo has a romantic, connected feel, the second a dramatic and timeless feel, and the third a natural, calm feel. The power of editing is in the message you want the photo to convey.

Extra Stuff

The final stages of editing are about touch ups and style. In this stage I'll edit the photo to add/remove objects, touch up skin, and finalize contrast and texture. Depending on what I want to do with the image I may finish editing in photoshop. Most often I'll do this when I want to remove or add something to the image. For example, in the picture below, I needed to remove a few people from the background and add more bubbles. I did this by using pieces of several different images!

This is a part of editing that I'm still learning quite a lot about. Photoshop is such a powerful software that I'm not sure there's anything you couldn't edit with it! Consequently, there's so much to learn in the program. It's one of those things that someone could be learning forever with all the new updates and techniques!

Editing is one of the many pieces of photography that defines a photographers style. It's like the icing on the cake! The finishing touch on a work of art.

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