Those who use the raw image format of their camera do so in the knowledge that the images will have to be post-processed. After all, raw images are not finished photos. But how should you process the images? After all, there are a thousand possibilities.
There are no recipes
In our image editing courses we are always asked, “How do you have to edit an image?”. But above all, people then want recipes. It’s like baking: Take 10% slider 1, 30% slider 2 and 5% slider 3…. But unfortunately, those recipes don’t exist. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that most photos require only subtle editing. That’s why, on average, one of our photos takes less than two minutes to edit. The photo of the salmon steak was edited in Lightroom with the following parameters:
All in all, only 5 sliders were ” tweaked “. The S-shift in the curve is almost the most time-consuming part of the editing. An estimated 70 percent of our photos do not need more editing. For some photos, the camera’s automatic white balance is also corrected, and for a few photos, a slight exposure correction is also applied. All raw files need a subtle sharpening. But we do that via a Lightroom preset that is assigned directly when we import the images, so it doesn’t require any additional work.
This looks simple. The real problem is not the number of sliders, but the question of how far one should go in editing. Unfortunately, this question cannot be answered in general.
What is the purpose of the editing?
In the vast majority of cases, a photo is only intended to be technically optimized. This means
- no blown out highlights
- no black shadows
- no color tint
- balanced tonal distribution
For the optimization of highlights and shadows, the necessary values are derived from the histogram. The assessment of colors is somewhat more subjective. Personal taste inevitably comes into play here. This also applies to the tonal value distribution, which can be specifically influenced with the curves. With these settings, you have to rely on your feeling and a hopefully calibrated monitor.
However, one essential goal of image processing has not necessarily been achieved with the points mentioned above. Normally, we want our photos to look like we perceive reality (we’ll just leave artistic aspects out of it here). But our perception is anything but objective. Even if we limit ourselves to the perception of brightness and contrast, we will often find that the sensor of a camera represents these parameters quite differently than our eye/brain. The following example is intended to illustrate this.
On a sunny day, the contrast between the buildings in the sun and the shaded areas is so great that the sensor reaches its limits. Our eye, in cooperation with the brain, can handle these contrasts without any problems. We do not perceive the very dark shadows in the photo in such a way on site. Our brain is able to recognize all the details even in the dark areas of the scene. This image is an example where relatively strong editing should be applied so that the photo corresponds to our perception of the scene. In this case, it means, first of all, a significant brightening of the shadows:
In this way, the image gets much closer to our perception. But in this case, the processing was much more elaborate than with the image of the salmon steak.
So you have to decide what image processing is necessary on a case-by-case basis. There is no patent remedy.
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