Post-Production, it is essential?

Daniel Matthews

Daniel Matthews

Active Member
As part of a Uni assignment, I conducted an email with a professional photographer. One of the questions was "Do you find Post Production essential?" and boy did he let me have an earful. Saying post-production was like "the paint on a car, it is finishing the photo".

Is it just me, or is post-production not that important? The majority of photos I take are straight from the camera, and I am perfectly happy with them. There are that select few that may need tweeking but nothing major.

What are your views?


EDIT: I just noticed there was a thread very similar to this already. I should have checked before hand, sorry!
 
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No worries .. On the thread repetition, it happens on forums ... I'll look at merging them tomorrow ...

You have probably read all out comments anyway ..
But yeah, I think the pro you contacted understated it saying its the paint on the car, I'd go as far to say as it's half the job ... It is for me anyway... I spend as much time after the job processing as I did time on the job I'd say!

To be fair though, if your happy with them out of the camera then good going ... There is nothin wrong as such with that approach, but my personal feeling is that your missing out on potential potential
 
I agree with Hamish. The screen on the back of my camera is not as good as the view I get on my computer monitor OR as nice as the final print. So I find it difficult to know just how good a photo will be by looking at that screen. Because of that I have some basic settings made on my camera that relate to a picture style, sharpening and color saturation. I continually tweak shutter speed, f stop and sometimes ISO. I try a variety of angles and views for my landscapes. Given all that I rarely get a photo right out of the box that really sends me. They may be sharp, composed well and look reasonably good but after a little post processing they can really shine.

I think using a photo right out of the camera is like the old film days. You took photos, took them to be developed and lived with what you got. Nowadays one can go much farther and I find photography so much more satisfying when I have all this control over my final image.
 
Very interesting responses, thank you. Maybe I am living in the old films days by living with what the camera initially captured, I do agree though you can take a photo beyond with post-production.
 
Gotta realize that when you dropped the film off at the lab, the operator of the print machine "photoshopped" each and every image. Printing negatives provides an amazingly large range of corrections for exposure and white balance. The only accurate way to evaluated "out of the camera" results was a contact sheet, and even from the best and most skilled of photographers, there is an amazing amount of variation.

Henry Fox Talbot made the first negative/positive print in 1836. Since then there have been bazillion prints made—and all have been processed. It would be lovely to have a God camera that can read your mind and soul, and set itself so the result matched what you saw and felt. No algorithm that I know of can quite do that, just as there is not "Auto Timeless Masterpiece" setting yet.

Dear ol' Ansel—who contemplated a career as a concert pianist—said in musical terms "The exposure is the score, but the print is the performance." On the shoot, concentrate on capturing the most significant moments, with the highest possible image quality for a starting point. Then at leisure contemplate each image and fine tune each image to match what you feel about the image. Photoshop is not about saving your butt, though it can do so to some degree. The better the out-of-camera RAW, the better the final image will be. It is all about having the time to contemplate and transfer from mind and soul to the image—interpretation. You transform a snapshot into a photograph.

This takes skill and taste, which will continue to develop for the rest of your life. If you are happy to go with the settings a programmer in Tokyo set without seeing the image, please give him equal credit. To learn to interpret your exposures will take time, not only acquiring image processing skills, but also the taste to understand what the photograph needs. As Hamish pointed out, an out of camera exposure is only half-way there.
 
I think many don't make the parallel that what software PP does on the computer is pretty much the same as what used to be done with your bare hands so to speak. Just its a lot more immediate and convenient on the computer. However what you do lose is the ability to make elements of your pictorial image part of tactile reality. By this I mean things like physical collage and other tasks performed by hand and not made to look like they have not been. It depends to much of a degree what your end result is supposed to be. Do you want art, a nice photo, purism, product etc etc.

Its "that old chestnut" bought out again and quite often the discussion is not sustained because it's like opening cans of worms of dropping crates of monkeys and them trying to round them all up.
 
I agree with all of the comments above about post-production. Like many of the folks here, I learned photography before the digital age, and always spent more time in the darkroom than out shooting (much to my chagrin). As already stated, even in the days of film, I did a lot of tweaking to develop the negatives and to create a print, including cross processing, burning, dodging, etc. Any photographer did the same.

There's a very well known photograph by Julius Shulman of a house in the hills above Los Angeles at night taken in 1959, where the house is seemingly suspended over the city. In his original shot, you can clearly see the hillside underneath the house. So he burned that area so that the hill was no longer visible and the house appeared to be cantilevered dramatically over the hillside. That's the image that everyone knows today.

Occasionally, I do get a photo straight out of the camera that I don't have to do anything to - no sharpening, no adjusting white balance or tones - nothing. But that is a very rare occurrence. There always seems to be something that can be done to improve the picture a bit. I think the key is on mastering a light touch so it doesn't look like you've done anything to the photo. When the photo looks obviously post-processed to death, that's a fail, in my view. Of course, sometimes you want over-the-top effects of some sort. And some people really like that sort of thing. I look at most HDR pictures and want to vomit. But you know, i see the same pictures on flickr with a million views and thousands of compliments, so go figure. And most cameras today are sold with the saturation pumped up because most people only look at photos on their computers and they tend to look better that way.

But in my opinion, moderation is key. My wife often repeats Coco Chanel's idiom about how, before leaving the house, take a look in the mirror and remove one item. I generally take a similar approach to photography.
 
At the end of the day Daniel (Dan?) it's your hobby, and as such your choice how to produce images ...
Don't feel pressured into moving in to the world of digital pp, but if you do want to walk that path there are loads of people here with stacks of experience between us that can advise on which sort of software might work best for you and how to approach it ... In Worcester we have got at least 3 members of this forum into using lightroom who all find it excellent .. Including Barry, who last time I spoke to him was doing some kind of lecture at a uni on it's use... I personally pride my self on being able to teach people lightroom basics in half and hour and am looking at offering tutorials... So if you need help or want to get into it... Just ask!

To clarify this point on film ...
In the days of film the people who liked "to get it right out of camera" were people who didn't have access to their own lab ... Be it for reasons of cost ... The fact if you don't use it the chemicals go out of date... The space it takes up ... Over time the reasons have been lost but the "get it right out of camera" idea has remained ... But yet a digital lab can be part of something most people already have ... A home pc... Somthing that already occupies space, has already been paid for and the chemicals (in this case the software) only goes out of date when a new version comes out and only need to be paid for once (updates are usually about 1/3rd of the new price) ... :)
 
Darren Bradley said:
I agree with all of the comments above about post-production. Like many of the folks here, I learned photography before the digital age, and always spent more time in the darkroom than out shooting (much to my chagrin). As already stated, even in the days of film, I did a lot of tweaking to develop the negatives and to create a print, including cross processing, burning, dodging, etc. Any photographer did the same.

There's a very well known photograph by Julius Shulman of a house in the hills above Los Angeles at night taken in 1959, where the house is seemingly suspended over the city. In his original shot, you can clearly see the hillside underneath the house. So he burned that area so that the hill was no longer visible and the house appeared to be cantilevered dramatically over the hillside. That's the image that everyone knows today.

Occasionally, I do get a photo straight out of the camera that I don't have to do anything to - no sharpening, no adjusting white balance or tones - nothing. But that is a very rare occurrence. There always seems to be something that can be done to improve the picture a bit. I think the key is on mastering a light touch so it doesn't look like you've done anything to the photo. When the photo looks obviously post-processed to death, that's a fail, in my view. Of course, sometimes you want over-the-top effects of some sort. And some people really like that sort of thing. I look at most HDR pictures and want to vomit. But you know, i see the same pictures on flickr with a million views and thousands of compliments, so go figure. And most cameras today are sold with the saturation pumped up because most people only look at photos on their computers and they tend to look better that way.

But in my opinion, moderation is key. My wife often repeats Coco Chanel's idiom about how, before leaving the house, take a look in the mirror and remove one item. I generally take a similar approach to photography.
Click to expand...

Blimey ... This is were the convo deviates in to what pp is good pp ... A dangerous subject to bring up ;)
Darrens point is valid... Definately an opinion!
Look through his photos and you will see little sign of pp... Not because he doesn't use it, but because as he says, he uses it subtly ...
Look through my photos ... And you will see stuff from this ...
Subtle but very very extensive pp

_DSC5386sharp.jpg


This, almost zero pp

_DSC5112-1.jpg


To this, extensive and very obvious pp ... All photos I am very happy with yet were achieved with a very different approach

_DSC4840-3.jpg


There is no rules to it ... You create what you like!
And if you get into it, I can pretty much guarantee your imagination for such things will go through the roof!
 
Oh no, I don't want to open that can of worms! Sorry. Again, it's just my own personal preference. There's no right or wrong answer here! (oh, and nice pics, Hamish! Love the mood in that sunset shot).
 
Another point ... I'm getting carried away now ... That 7d of yours ... Put it in black and White mode (for eg) and it's doing a massive chunk of pp ...
In fact, in simple terms, put it in black and White mode and some chap in japan is doing pp for you ;)
As Ralph pointed out in the other thread ... Digital cameras do a great deal of pp on board now ... They are after all just little computers!
It's very easy to take that job away from the camera (to a point) by shooting and editing RAW!
But that is perhaps for another thread :)
 
OK, here's a quick example of where I DIDN'T follow my own advice, and ended up post=processing the hell out of a photo just to have a little fun...

So the other day, I was standing in the front garden of a friend's house, watching our kids play. I had my camera out and was showing it to my friend, when I turned around and took a quick snap of his house. I was using a tilt-shift lens, but with no tripod and didn't even line it up correctly before taking the shot. It was a throw-away, really. But when I got home, I decided to play with the image and see what I could come up with in lightroom.

Here's the original shot, literally straight out of the camera (Canon 5D2, TS-E 17mm, f7.1, 1/125 sec, ISO 200):


And here's the same image after a minimum of tweaks to straighten the verticals, lighten the shadows, etc...


And once I'd done all that, I still thought the image was fairly blah and uninteresting. I really liked the reflections of the palm trees on the windows and wanted to increase contrast to bring those out. I also wanted the colors to pop more and create a grittier feel, almost like a Lomo or something. So I adjusted the curves and added some heavy vignetting to frame it. Here's the result:


In architecture photography, a lot of this would generally be considered a no-no. But since I was just doing it for myself, I didn't care if I broke the rules a bit to create a moodier tone. But it is funny to think that Canon has invested millions in creating state of the art cameras, sensors, and lenses, and then I come along and make it look like it came out of a plastic toy film camera.
 
Dan - you shooting JPEG or RAW with your 7D?

JPEG does the PP for you in camera - with some presets that Canon provide - you can choose menu options to change the look

RAW - leaves everything up to you - more flexibility - more quality - you use Photoshop or Lightroom to get to the final image

Most folks here shoot RAW, hence the focus on post processing
 
The thing with me is, I do have the software to use for "post-production" on my Macbook (Adobe Photoshop CS5). I usually find myself opening and just using it resize images, I am experienced in post-production but I find myself missing this part out of photography entirely and uploading straight from camera.

After reading these responses, it almost feels like a bad habit that I can't shake off!


Chris Dodkin said:
Dan - you shooting JPEG or RAW with your 7D?

JPEG does the PP for you in camera - with some presets that Canon provide - you can choose menu options to change the look

RAW - leaves everything up to you - more flexibility - more quality - you use Photoshop or Lightroom to get to the final image

Most folks here shoot RAW, hence the focus on post processing
Click to expand...

I shoot in JPG+RAW, I do try pp my images but end up happier with the default result instead!
 
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why dont you download a trail of lightroom
you would prob get it cheap as a student anyway ... cant hurt to try it out ...
its a lot more photo centric and much easier to use ... no doubting your skills in photoshop... ... .... well you will see what i mean if you try it ...
 
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