I Don’t Think Post-Processing of Images Gets Enough Credit.
Another rant on the myth of “Get It Right in the Camera.”
I don’t think we give enough credit to post-processing. I just now saw a picture in an email from PictureCorrect of a Toronto streetcar at night in a blizzard. It is an awesome image, yet nowhere does the copy say that it was post-processed. C’mon, man, Mike Sidofsky is a pro. I assert with some confidence that he shoots raw in his full-frame Nikon and, by default, must post-process it. You simply do not get results like this from the JPEG engine in the camera, and raw shooters know that raw files are just strings of ones and zeroes without processing. They must be processed.
Sidofsky took this image with his Nikon D750, and his Nikon 24–70mm lens at f/2.8, 1/200s, and ISO 6400.
What’s quite interesting about this shot is the way the streetcar stands out from the rest of the scene. While everything else appears pale, covered in snow, the red of the streetcar dominates the image making it stand out. Thanks to the snow, there’s almost a halo around the vehicle caused by the diffused lights. This adds further interest to the image. — (Emphasis added cgh)
The second paragraph above waxes poetic about how the streetcar stands out with its red dominating and an angelic halo, et cetera. No mention of processing, whether it was processed, whether the original was a raw capture, but even if it was a JPEG (which I doubt), no in-camera algorithm produced that stunning result. Mike Sidofsky or someone created that picture in post.
It is a beautiful, fantastic picture! But it seems to me it is at least implied that this level of perfection was perfectly captured at exposure and reproduced Straight Out Of Camera.
I’m 99% sure it was not.
Maybe I am misreading the copy, but I am a raw-shooting photographer, and I know from personal experience that I could not make this terrific picture as a SOOC JPEG, beautifully finished by the camera’s precisely engineered algorithm (/s). The algorithms are just not that good.
I cannot imagine any modern professional not shooting raw and processing it to a fare-thee-well. I shot JPEG for too long, but I also reprocessed every image I ever showed. I couldn't bear to show anything SOOC because it wasn’t “right” straight from the camera. Depending on the camera, its sensor, or its algorithm, it might be pretty darn good (or not), but for me, it wasn’t finished until I finished it.
C’mon, man. I’ve written at least two pieces arguing that I think “Get It Right In The (Digital) Camera” is a pernicious myth. The only analogous situation I can think of is analog slide film. You must get that exposure perfect because transparencies are direct positive instead of a negative/positive process. You got one shot. Nowadays, you can scan the slides to digital and process them, but back in the day, you had to get it right in the camera or it was toast. There was no second chance, as with a negative-to-positive. Best practice was to slightly underexpose so as not to blow out essential highlights, but the slide/transparency was finished, good or not, which is why slide guys bracketed.
The differences when reworking SOOC JPEGs are usually subtle since the algorithm has preprocessed them for you, plus discarded up to 2/3 of the original sensor data, plus compressed the remainder, leaving you with far less to work with. That’s why I tend to assume that pros shoot raw and process everything. They may shoot raw+JPEG for quick-and-dirty proofs and fast turnaround, but I bet that, like me, they deliver fully finished images from raw captures. I’d consider it irresponsible if I didn’t.
Raw shouldn’t be capitalized because it is not an acronym; it is what it says, all the raw data from the sensor, untouched and uncompressed. That is why your raw files are so much bigger than JPEGs, but having all that raw data gives you total control over the final image. The challenge is that you have to know what to do and how to do it.
My tools of choice are Adobe’s. Some six years ago, I subscribed to the Creative Cloud — photography bundle — and never looked back. I struggled with both at first, but I had a leg up from having used Photoshop Elements for years. I was all at sea with Lightroom, and I am still climbing the curve, but I’ve had excellent luck with YouTube mentors. I am very comfortable now with Lightroom. Photoshop is, for me, really tough, but I am old and don’t learn as fast as I once did, plus I have retention problems. I keep hammering away at it because it is so incredibly powerful; not intuitive at all, but if you can imagine it, Photoshop can do it, and it gets better, like, monthly.
Capturing the sunrise over the lake in the cold dawn was tricky, but I know my Sony A6300/6400s can handle an extensive dynamic range. My goal in processing is usually to bring the scene to what I saw and felt when I made the exposure. I don’t care for plastic-y HDR. I think my perhaps-unorthodox method looks more natural, but what has astonished me about digital photography is that you can do things in post that you really couldn’t do in analog. I only worked in B&W, but I knew there was a distinct limit to how far you could go dodging up a shadow before the contrast was muddy and the manipulation obvious. In analog color, my understanding was that you sometimes made dodging paddles out of scraps of printing filters because you had to try to be true to the original color.
I like shooting events. This one was a rededication of a neighborhood park, so there was speechifying. I carry a flash, but I prefer my mox nix method: I expose down the middle, or sometimes a little to the right, and “develop for the shadow. For a shot like this, full sun, deep shadow under the cap peak, I pull the highlight slider all the way down and push the shadow slider all the way up. If that’s not enough (it almost always is with my cameras and sensors), I can further “dodge up” the shadow — that I didn’t need to here.
This raw shot was pretty good SOOC, but I wanted to emphasize the backlit elephant-ear leaf. I used a radial filter to “burn in” everything else so the leaf would pop. While I was at it, I cloned out the white ropes that I found distracting.
My adult “Kidz” made these decorative lanterns in an art class. I placed and lit them in my tabletop white set. The SOOC raw capture on the left looks not too bad, so the difference between the unfinished and finished shots is subtle, but it goes to my contention that no picture is finished until it is finished.
I grok it. Some folks can’t stand sweating over a computer for tedious hours. It doesn’t bother me, maybe because I sweated in literal dark rooms for more tedious hours than I can recall. I enjoy post-processing, especially for the results. Lucky me. 😊
Thanks for reading.
