When I realised how much I enjoyed photography as a hobby, I purchased a subscription to Adobe Lightroom. Now I know paying for Adobe products in this economy is an absolute joke, but the truth is I was already familiar with the company and their products. It was the go-to software for my classes in secondary school, so it felt like a no-brainer for me.
As with any design/editing software, the vast number of buttons and dials are comparable to those you’d find in the cabin of a Boeing 747 cockpit. Due to this, people may be deterred from ever really learning the ins outs of the software.
Another reason that I fully understand is that it simply takes too long. For the most part, I agree! Sitting down and meticulously sifting through 1000+ pictures to find the best ones is time consuming enough. Then add the time for editing the chosen few? Honestly you could be looking at over a days work.
However, I believe sometimes the results completely justify the time spent. Take the below photo for example. 32mm focal length at F/11 with an ISO of 200. In hindsight, I should’ve increased the f stop a little more or brought the ISO down to 100 to preserve the highlights. Lucky for me, I was shooting RAW1.
Once in Lightroom, I set to work reclaiming the detail from the over exposed areas. Reducing the highlights brought the biggest change. When reduced by 65-, the colour of the sky was clear and the clouds were visible again. After that, it was only minor edits: I increased the saturation and vibrance, increased the picture temperature and set the highlights to a warm orange colour. The results? A vibrant bed of flowers looking out towards a sky in golden hour. If I’d left that image as is, it wouldn’t be nearly as impressive!
On the other side of the coin, some images need very little editing, just little tweaks here and there to polish it off. For example, this image from one my recent shoots with a lens ball. This one was taken with a 56mm prime lens at f/6.4 with an ISO of 500. So most detail had already been preserved, there really wasn’t much that needed doing.
Reducing the Highlights and increasing the shadows let more of the orange sunset appear through the trees at the back. I lowered the temperate of the image to give it that cold snow feeling, and placed a small mask over the lens ball to reduce the shadows further and bring back the whites.
That’s why I think a little effort with post-processing goes a long way. Even if you only edit a handful of pictures per shoot, I’d urge you to mess around and see what you like. Everyone’s preferences are different, so don’t strive for perfection. Just aim for something you can look at and be proud of.
- For the non-photography literate among you, RAW images contain the uncompressed image data. It stores exactly what was captured by the camera’s sensor. ↩︎
