{"id":4985,"date":"2014-01-30T23:30:56","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T22:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=4985"},"modified":"2014-01-30T23:30:56","modified_gmt":"2014-01-30T22:30:56","slug":"editing_photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2014\/01\/30\/editing_photos\/","title":{"rendered":"Editing photos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Before photography became a serious hobby for me, I kind of thought that editing photos was just for the pros and mostly meant &#8220;photoshopping&#8221;: removing birthmarks and making models look unrealistically slim and smooth, etc.<\/p>\n<p>When I took photos, I got whatever came out of the camera.<\/p>\n<p>At some point I started using Picasa to organize my photos. Picasa makes basic touch-ups very easy: adding some fill light, fixing wonky white balance issues (when people look yellow in the face, or the snow is purple). So I did that. I still had no idea how much editing can go into making a normal photo look good.<\/p>\n<p>Learning more about photography pulls me in two directions at once. On the one hand, the more I learn about taking photos, the better results I get straight out of camera, so there is less need for editing. On the other hand, the more I learn about editing, the more editing I do, because I see more possibilities &#8211; and also because I now notice issues that I would not even have seen before.<\/p>\n<p>For a photo that just goes into my archives, not to the blog or any other kind of public place, I just fix the basics to a &#8220;good enough&#8221; level. Often I do this in batch mode, fixing several photos at a time. This basic fixing generally includes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\nWhite balance. I make sure that whites look white and skin look skin-coloured. This is one of the things that I can no longer unsee: when I look at a photo and the white balance is off, it really bothers me.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nExposure. Despite all my practice I often still underexpose a bit, meaning my photos are a bit too dark. But one good thing about having a &#8220;big camera&#8221; is that moderate underexposure is easy to fix.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nStraighten. Another thing that my eyes just cannot ignore: tilted horizons and slanting lamp posts. It turns out that the human eye is amazingly sensitive to this: a line that is 1&deg; off vertical is glaringly wrong; even as little as 0.2&deg; is visible.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For the more important photos in the archive, or for a photo I intend to publish, I definitely add:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\nCropping. After taking that composition workshop, this is another thing I just have to give some thought to. Sometimes I crop a lot; sometimes I am happy with what I have; sometimes I realize that I should have composed differently when taking the photo and there is no way to fix it now.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Finally there are the extras that I only do for photos I really care about, whether it&#8217;s for the blog or for a workshop assignment. These steps are fiddly and non-routine, and can easily take me 15 minutes or more per photo: I don&#8217;t do it often enough to have an efficient workflow. This might include any of the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\nAdjusting contrast or saturation\n<\/li>\n<li>\nSelectively brightening or darkening parts of the photo\n<\/li>\n<li>\nFixing colour casts in specific parts of the photo\n<\/li>\n<li>\nEditing out small stuff that bothers me &#8211; some small bright spot, or a speck of dust in the sky\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All this might for example let me take this photo:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Adrian_at_computer_original.jpg\" class=\"x6y4\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&#8230; and turn it into this:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Adrian_at_computer.jpg\" class=\"x6y4\" \/><\/p>\n<p>And then there are the tools that I don&#8217;t yet have a good grip on and therefore mostly ignore&#8230; sharpening is one that I really want to learn about, and good black and white conversions is another.<\/p>\n<p>For photos that end up here on the blog, I finish off the process by resizing the photo. Because I have a retina display on my MacBook Pro, I resize the photo to twice its intended final size and then scale it down using CSS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before photography became a serious hobby for me, I kind of thought that editing photos was just for the pros and mostly meant &#8220;photoshopping&#8221;: removing birthmarks and making models look unrealistically slim and smooth, etc. When I took photos, I got whatever came out of the camera. At some point I started using Picasa to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4985"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4995,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4985\/revisions\/4995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}