What does “honest photo editing” stand for ?
By “honest”, I mean doing an editing with the purpose of making one photo file closer to the vision you had of the moment the picture was taken. Any of these elements can be adjusted by a setting within your camera.
These settings are: brightness, color saturation and details sharpening.
By contrast, a “dishonest” editing would be about changing characteristics of a human model such as weight and shapes, or adding and removing elements.
It’s up to you what you intend to achieve with post-processing and the validity of it can only be a matter of subjective judgment. However, below I categorized three primary elements on which you can take action to take a photo closer to your vision.
Note that as we will see later on, all techniques can be applied in a selective way.
Core element n°1: light
First of all, let’s make it clear, a central concept that you must have in mind while taking a picture, is. Always. Light.
With light comes vision. Photography at its core is all about light.
Photography is the process of capturing light on a medium, to imprint it on a support, in a way that mimics our human vision. When you think about it, good lighting is also what makes a photo special :
-
Photographers doing portraits use all kinds of flashes, light sources and umbrellas to highlight facial and body elements.
-
Landscapes are best taken at special times of the day such as sunrise, sunset, the weather is taken into account and even seasons are making a difference.
-
Many photos could also be improved by raylights or highlights over their subject.
-
Our perception of colors is also affected by the amount and type of light objects are receiving.
Oftentimes, it is difficult to pinpoint the perfect exposure right away when you take a photo, especially if you had to capture an action quickly.
Thankfully, if your photo is too dark, you can often get a better version out of it, notably by using shadows and highlights, or the exposure tool..
If you never did it before, you will be amazed how much light can be retrieved from dark spots, have you ever tried levels and curved ?
Here is a selective list of tools for lighting adjustment that I will explain in this book:
Core element n°2: colors
Colors are derived from light, as a wavelength of visible light coming to our eyes.
As mentioned previously, our eyes cannot be trusted, and to a certain extent, colors are a relative matter, first and foremost with white balance in mind.
Depending on the lighting situation (light bulb, daylight sun, sunset …), your camera will try to detect and adjust the perceived color temperature, in fact, all cameras, including smartphones, are applying this specific setting called white balance (that is often on auto but you can tweak) before the file is saved.
The white balance relates to the color temperature, which will either be biased toward blueish (cold) or reddish (warm) and so gives a particular feel or tone to the whole image.
Other settings such as saturation relates to how intense and bright colors will be. It is also possible to alter tints, not only with white balance, but also with others dedicated tools such as color zones and split-toning.
Core element n°3: details
When I started photo editing, I never thought that as much detail could be recovered from a blurry or otherwise low quality photo. Well there are many techniques to balance the amount of perceived details.
On the one hand you may want to add or remove details to focus on elements and make them more visible comparable to bokeh, or as makeup you can artificially remove them.
Also every camera has its own grain depending on the sensor technology being used. Depending on the style you want to make, you could add some noise to achieve a rendition comparable to film, or on the contrary to reduce noise and details in order to make the picture look more pure / or plastic.