Processing a picture, enhancing features, giving it a certain style is part of a creative process. I use photo editing regularly to give my pictures the feeling, the expression that I want them to exude.
In the beginning of my photography revival about six years ago I did not process my pictures at all. I took them the way they were and posted them to Flickr. I prided myself of not “manipulating” my pictures. So as if they were speaking a bigger truth by being virgin pictures.
I have to admit that I now believe that I was wrong. First of all you can’t or should not pride yourself of leaving away something that you don’t understand. I did not know how to process pictures. That’s the simple truth. And I thought that editing them, enhancing them would conceal or falsify their “real truth”. Only, the question is what the real truth is in artistic work.
Shooting photos can have many purposes. And if you shoot reportage you want to document what you find. You want to give a true recall of the facts that you encountered. So manipulating your pictures will not be an option. However if you seek artistic expression, if you want to show a truth behind the obvious facts of a picture then the question is why you should not add features and alter the pictures in order to achieve your ultimate goal.
So consequently when changing my attitude I also changed my practice. And now I do enhance my pictures and I use many different ways to do so. And these ways I would like to describe a little.
One way is what I would call the “straight forward way” of processing. You transfer the pictures to Lightroom, do some basic development steps and then pass the picture on to Photoshop where the fine tuning happens.
I do this a lot with my black and white portraits and now also motion blur nudes. In Photoshop I have a good b&w conversion workflow that preserves tonality and gives me many ways of making very fine adjustments. In Silver Efex I can add some grain to my liking (Silver Efex has the nicest grain of all development apps that I know) and then transfer the picture back to Lightroom.
This is my preferred workflow because it gives me full control over the results because I take every single development step “manually”. The processing takes some time but I love the results. And I like the workflow because I am still a black and white photographer at heart, even after discovering and using colour a little more.
Picture edited in Photoshop
A second completely different workflow I discovered some months ago. This is the use of textures. I have already written about this. I use textures on my iPhone and my iPad. Originally I started doing this because I had been (and still am) traveling a lot which deprives me of the opportunity of using my desktop computer for photo editing. In addition my 11 year old MacBook had died a gradual death and became so slow that for the last half a year I could not use it for editing at all. I fixed that problem by buying me a new MacBook now (and gosh!! are these things expensive!!).
Picture edited with Mextures textures in iPhone
So working with textures was born out of the predicament that I could not do any Lightroom and Photoshop processing during my travels and when being in New Zealand. And I discovered that using textures is a nice way of creating emotions in my pictures. Because textures and particularly stacked textures that compile their effects on top of each other have a big impact on how the light in a picture behaves and radiates. I still enjoy using textures and I often combine them with some editing steps I take in Snapseed or the iPhone photo editing software which has improved a lot recently.
The third processing workflow happens in Snapseed only. It’s a quick way of enhancing and altering pictures without the use of any sophisticated textures. Snapseed provides some texture layering too but these options are limited and not as good as the Mextures software that I use for my texture work. I have recently tried to use Snapseed instead of my usual Photoshop processing workflow.The results are not bad but they don’t reach the quality in Photoshop.
Picture edited in Snapseed with additional grain and sepia in Silver Efex
And the last workflow that I use is that of the genuine Apple photo software on iPhones and iPads. As written before it has been improved a lot and I use it mainly to enhance colors and add some structure to pictures that I processed in Mextures or Snapseed. I rarely use this software on its own because it has some clear limitations. It has no local enhancement tool. It has no independently usable textures at all. And in contrast to Snapseed it does not contain any grain. So its options as a mono-application are limited. But with colors it does some nice work.
I still have the whole Nik software palette on my computer that I sometimes use. And of course Lightroom gives you many options for straight forward processing too. No layers are available but particularly the local adjustment tools in LR are very good.
I completely abandoned the use of Capture One. My main reason was the disappointment about the fact that Capture One changed to a subscription model the way Adobe has it for LR and Photoshop. Capture One started with the promise not to choke their customers with subscriptions but now they do it as Adobe does. Then you can as well use Adobe software that has some clear advantages (for example a history tool) but also disadvantages (colors are not as nice as in Capture One). My second reason to abandon Capture One was that they don’t provide any processing options for Leica’s RAW files which is for me a deal breaker as I still use and love my M Monochrom.
I would certainly not pride myself of being an expert in processing and I am miles away from being a Photoshop “wizard”. But I find it interesting to edit and enhance pictures and to give them the flavor that I envisage.