“I Don’t Like My Pictures!”

There are exceptions, but why do images generally not look very good straight out of camera?  The simplest metaphor is to analog film photography, when the camera captures a negative, then an image was produced in the darkroom.  The common and simple case was to drop off film at a drug store, and a machine would spit out prints, and maybe one or two per roll turned out pretty well.  But once you’ve actively managed a negative’s transition to print in a darkroom with adjustment of the result via dodging and burning, it was difficult to accept machine-produced results, and your rate of successfully-produced nice images in print went up 5X or 10X.

Simply put, for anyone who cares about their photography, the camera doesn’t make the result, and what comes out of the camera is only partway to the finished result.  Since there are two obvious steps, image capture and post-processing, it’s tempting to conclude that post-processing is responsible for half of the outcome.  Given that you’d have maybe one or two relatively accidental successes from a shoot without intervention, and can regularly get a 5X higher rate as your post-processing skill goes up, a better estimate for the importance of post-processing on the result is that it is responsible for 80% of the outcome, the vast majority of your success through the process.

As Ansel Adams put it, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

This isn’t advocacy for super dramatic, over-processed results.  I have no investment in what tool you use or what style result you produce.  My point is entirely independent of personal choice, your vision and decisions on how you want them to look in the end.  Make them subtle and realistic, or make them colorful to the point of being gaudy, or make them realistic but contrasty and dramatic, there are endless paths for you to take for each photo, and for your photography.  But do MAKE them.  Look at each image you took and envision what it should be, what it was in your experience, and what it can become.

I’m not advocating “for” post-processing over Straight Out Of Camera (“SOOC”) results, as is sometimes argued to be the pinnacle of achievement to aim for.  I will offer the simple fact-supported observation that straight-out-of-camera results are fairly irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong, I value the fidelity of what the camera captures.  I optimize exposure.  I use graduated neutral density filters, when appropriate, to optimize the exposure across the frame.  I anticipate the hours for the best light, and the seasons for the best conditions.  I use circular polarizers when cutting glare and haze will help bring out the full color of the scene.  The camera simply does not see what we see, and it certainly can’t record what we perceive.

Our eyes don’t “see” a scene like a camera does, with a single exposure.  Our eyes are drawn to areas of brightness and high contrast.  Eye-tracking studies show us that we are attracted to shapes and follow lines.  And as our eyes are flitting around the scene taking point samples, our pupils dilate or contract, effectively taking multiple exposures across the scene.  The image isn’t done after those bits of the scene is projected onto our retinas.  Our brains then reassemble the scene, correcting for the different exposures, applying the concept of contrast where appropriate (in spite of those different exposures), and give us a mental model of what we just saw.  Major portions of the scene may not be sampled at all.  They’re filled in via peripheral vision, a vague, blurry impression of what might have been there.

No wonder the camera’s representation often looks “flat” compared to what we know we experienced.  It never saw, or had any opportunity to record, the mental picture that we perceived in the first place!

Store that mental image in memory, recall it later, and the mental impression gets even less “accurate” from the standpoint of what a machine could have recorded.  Although we can discern millions or perhaps billions of shades of color from one another, cognitive studies have measured our ability to remember and discern between colors recalled from memory as being as little as a little over 100 colors.  Yet we have a lot of confidence in our memory, and its accuracy.  It turns out that our confidence is misplaced.

Rather than have photographers throwing up their arms in frustration at lack of tools to record what we perceive, and at our near total lack of ability to recall color accurately later, I view what cognitive science tells us about our perception and memory as being utterly freeing news.

Fine tune your camera technique to have the best possible RAW file to start with, but also feel free to produce whatever you recall that experience to have been.  Or produce your own creative interpretation.  It’s not like someone else’s result is going to be “more right”.

Personally, I like realistic results.  Over-processed images can be distracting, and I don’t want my images to say more about the processing then they do about the subjects, or about the overall experience.  But to each his/her own.  Blaze your own trail.  People will appreciate your personal approach and statement.  If they don’t, they’re simply not your audience.  You can’t please everyone, so don’t waste time and effort trying.  Make your work.

How to Get There

Fully acknowledging that your “there” may be different then mine, I believe nevertheless that a few simple steps can be common to everyone’s workflow, and at a high level, they probably seem pretty obvious to most readers here:

– Optimize what hits the sensor.  Learn and understand what filters to use when.

– Use insurance.  Not the purchased, financial kind… bracket exposures!  Sure, you can get 90-something percent of your shots in one exposure, but you can drive your success rate up closer to 99.99%.  Do you want to stroke your ego about “getting everything in one shot”, or be more successful?  As sunset turned to twilight and exposures lengthen, do you ever have unintentionally moving foreground grass, leaves, or flowers?  Having a 2-stop underexposed image, with 14/ the shutter speed of your 0EV image, will often save your envisioned result.  There are many scenarios requiring multiple exposures, so I’d go so far as to say that in high contrast scenes, not capturing bracketed exposures is unjustifiably smug and damaging to your odds of capturing useful results.  A little humility wins over pride when it comes to photographic technique.

– Capture the image in RAW format for greatest fidelity and flexibility.

– Post-process nearly all of your images.  I read all of my files into my Lightroom catalog, letting Lightroom copy the files from the card into a folder on the computer. I mand the folder “Year Month Number Description”, like 2018 07 01 Mono Lake sunset”, so they sort in date taken order on my computer, but I also have a text description.  I don’t shoot in RAW + JPEG (an unedited JPEG is worthless to me, so that’s just wasted space).

A lot of photographers stop here, with some cursory adjustments to single images.  They may not fully appreciate the impact, but single exposures with global adjustments to the file limits their success.

– Post-process the more challenging scenarios even more. In landscape photography the most compelling opportunities are often in the most difficult light, with super-bright highlights and dark shadows.  You may need to go to greater lengths, use all of your multiple exposures (sometimes more than three, such as five or even seven exposures), to recover detail in the highlights and shadows.  Techniques as simple as exposure averaging can help, and High Dynamic Range “HDR” processing is another common remedy to help with challenging situations (and it’s NOT just useful for low dynamic range sensors, it’s useful for double-processing to master shadows and highlights).  This applies whether your goal is a natural image or a more enhanced looking one.  I don’t process all of my scenes with multiple images, I don’t need to with most of them, but in a significant number of cases, I can get more out of the opportunity when I do.

– Post-process the most compelling ones more, and multiple times. Post-processing is not just about making things look dramatic, or about creating a style (like Instagram filters for example).  Once you get past the basic learning curve of developing a post-processing workflow and developing some talent at it, a lot of what you can focus on can be more subtle.  Ansel Adams would often work a dozen hours in the darkroom, to get just the right relationship of tones to make a certain subject stand out in the scene.  Don’t underestimate the importance of dodging and burning, darkening and lightening, on where your viewers will focus their attention in the scene!  I use the ‘radial cursor” and software graduated neutral density filter in Lightroom a lot. Some people use brushes in Lightroom or Photoshop.  Find which tools work best for you, but if you want your successes to be more than coincidental, do use them.

And over the long run…

– Diversify your toolset. Hammers are great, but sometimes you do better with a screwdriver or wrench.  Once you get your basic workflow down in a tool like Lightroom, there are a lot of software vendors offering plug-ins that you might find useful.  And all of them seem to be available on a free trial basis.  I frequently use the PhotomatixPro software from HDRsoft.  I’ve used software from OnOne, I’ve tried the Nik Software suite (now offered by DXO)and I frequently use their Sliver Efex2.  I need to try the latest from Topaz Labs.  Photographic software continues to advance, and sometimes specific cases can be difficult for your camera and main editing suite to process.  I often find the orange of California poppies to be difficult to render well, sometimes the reddish color of sequoia bark.  When you run into cases like these where you’re not quite getting the result you want with your normal process, that’s a great time to do a free trial or two.  If you find a tool that you like, the companies in this space often offer discounts around holidays so you don’t have to break the bank buying them.

Winemakers are terrible judges of the quality of their own wine.  They’ve simply tasted it too much as they’re selecting the barrels to go into their final blend.  Palate fatigue affects their ability to judge it.  Similarly, editing one batch of files too long in one sitting can affect your ability to produce your best visual work.  Time of day and ambient lighting, the ratio of artificial light to the quantity of outdoor coming in at different times of day, can affect your perception.  So…

– Edit early, then edit often.  I like to edit and select and work on a few favorites as soon as possible.  It’s when I have the most recent impression of the scenes that I captured.  It’s also positive reinforcement: “Whew, I got a good one or two”.  Even if I have some pressure or deadline to get a dozen or two photos out, I know that when I see the same images a week later, I’ll both see new ones to post-process and look at some of the earlier ones I did produce and my reaction will be “Yuck, what was I thinking?”

I do best not getting too many images out too early, or if I must, it’s best to put them on Flickr, where I can easily replace the edits.  Ideally I’ll have a week or two to return to a folder at different times, and make iterative improvements to my treatment of the opportunities.

It’s even better when i return to a folder a year or more later, as the images I skipped over suddenly look fresh to me, and I’m looking at them with more experience, and probably approaching them with improved tools.

At this point I could probably spend weeks simply harvesting new images old folders, but my love of photography is weighted towards the process of capturing the images.  The post-processing is critically important so I do the best I can with the tools I have, but the more efficient I can be with it, the sooner I can get back out shooting.

My Bodie night photography workshops started in 2012, priced as inexpensively as possible to enable more people to access the park at night.  But not everyone had the post-processing experience to make the most of the images they captured.  So we’ve been trying a new format over the past year, with multiple days and nights shooting in the area, with one to three guided hands-on post-processing sessions to lead folks through the common adjustments we use in Lightroom, for both day and night shots.  We’ll continue to fine tune the format to suit the wide range of customers we see coming through the program.

Hopefully this description of my process and these day and night image examples provide some insight into my own process, and give you some examples of things you can try to extend your own process.

If you have any questions, ask me below, and I’ll try to get to them ASAP, as my schedule permits.  Or if you found the information interesting and useful, share the post with a friend!