How I Process My Photographs

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Like most photographers of the digital age, I process my images after I've taken them. In light of all the talk about AI image generation and all the modern post procession tools, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on this by telling the story of how I process my images. This should offer some transparency of what you're actually seeing when you look at my photographs, but also serve as a model of how I think we can all be more ethical photographers.

Disclaimer

It needs mentioning that my approach is nature-centric where I think we have a responsibility to represent nature as it is. Other disciplines of photography have different responsibilities and therefore some of these approaches don't apply.

One more thing - notice how I use the words Photograph and Image. To me they are distinct. A photograph captures a moment in time, and represents it truthfully. An image can be a jpeg of a cat, a gif of someone falling over or a svg of a company logo.

My Workflow

I'm a self-proclaimed prolific wildlife photographer, that is to say, I do a hell of a lot of wildlife photography. To put that into numbers, so far this year there have been 152 days (up until the 31st May). I have been out photographing wildlife for 37 of those days which equates to about 25% of the year so far. Now, this isn't full days but might be just a few hours after/before work, but regardless, it's a lot of time and a lot of photos! Naturally, I need an efficient workflow to get through all these images.

My workflow is pretty simple really:

Import photographs into a Capture One Catalogue for the location of the shoot.
Sort through the ok and the great photographs.
Edit the great photograph.
Export the photographs.
AirDrop the exported photographs to my iPhone where they are backed up to iCloud.
Done.

Despite this seeming straightforward, it is a workflow I've refined over the years which used to be far more convoluted, including manually copying images to hard drives, doing backups etc. Many people follow similar workflows, but they usually vary to what extent the images are edited.

My Philosophy Around Editing Photographs

When it comes to editing a photograph, again I take a fairly straight forward approach. I shoot photographs in RAW format so that I have more control over the exposure and colours after the fact to ensure I can recreate what I saw when I made the photographs. I'm generally of the opinion that editing should be kept to a minimum and follow some loosely defined rules:

Only edit photos that need editing to tell the story intended.
Never add anything into an image after the fact.
Only remove things which do not form a primary element of the image.
Don't spend more time editing photos than taking them!

In essence, editing should be done to ensure an photograph can tell the story you want it to tell. The Aurora Borealis is a great example of where this is totally fine in my opinion. If you've ever seen the Northern Lights, you will know that in real life they don't look anything like what they do in photograph. That might lead you to scorn photos which show a bright and vibrant dance of light in the sky. But wait, how do you FEEL when you see the Northern Lights? Well this is a different story. For many, this experience is significant. For many it's a bucket list item. For most, the experience is amazing and in their mind, the lights are so much brighter than in real life. A photograph cannot convey this meaning without using creative tools such as post processing to increase the brightness and saturation of the lights.

A photo from the recent solar storm we had which allowed people across the country to see the Northern Lights - Read more about it here.

When it comes to adding and removing elements of an photograph, I think this is clear cut. If you add something to an photograph, such as a beautiful sunset or a bird that wasn't there, the image is no longer a photograph. This would be a composite and essentially a form of digital art. Removing elements isn't as bad as long as it's not a crucial part of the photograph. If there is two birds and you wanted one, don't clone it out, wait a bit longer. Things like twigs or a bright street sign can be removed without issue.

Finally, I think it's important to remember what photography is. You should spend more time out taking photos than you do sitting behind a computer. Your views might vary.

How I Edit Photographs

Modern software is very powerful. I use CaptureOne to process my photos because it just works for me. In this software I can change the exposure, contrast, saturation, sharpness and more. That said, I like to keep it simple. Here is a brief rundown of what I do to an image:

Tweak exposure to match what I saw when I was out shooting.
Reduce contrast a little bit. Personal taste.
Increase saturation a tiny bit to give the photograph some punch.
Alter the white balance to make it match the feeling of the photograph.
Boost sharpness where needed.
Crop for composition.

This is about it. I can edit 20 photographs in 10 minutes. This is how I like it.

I should elaborate a bit on point 5. I tend to sharpen photographs only when they really need it. This can be due to distance of the subject, the noise profile of the photograph due to light conditions, or just to make the perceived quality a bit higher. Usually I do this with the old fashioned tools in CaptureOne (and Lightroom et al.).

Aside from this, where conditions are not conducive to sharp and clean photographs, I do use Topaz PhotoAI. I think there is an important distinction about this kind of AI and the kind of AI that creates images, and the like Samsung used in their moon processing. These tools use AI models to analyse the photograph and then tweak the pixel values to remove noise and increase sharpness. The photograph is only being tampered with in the same way that traditional, and widely accepted, software tools such as unsharp masks. Topaz isn't adding any predetermined material into your photograph it's just using what it's learned to know what is noise and what isn't and how to refine edges. There is a loads of info online about the processes Topaz is using such as deconvolution if you go looking for it.

Conclusion

This was a quick write up about what post processing of photographs means to me, and how I actually do it. There is a whole world of opinions and topics that can be discussed when considering post processing so I chose to keep it short and sweet. I've not touched on how we add our 'style' to a photograph, which is something that is subjective and personal, but still very much part of the photograph. Feel free to engage with me on this through the comments below or by email.

Below is a selection of before and after images. My web skills are not sufficient to make this slider work so you'll have to imagine it works!

Here I had warmed the photograph up and added a bit more colour to reflect the warm day.

This dipper was sat in lovely light but the trees shaded much of the bird. I boosted the shadows to balance the light. Not much changed here

This is a nice sunset photograph where the only changes were warming the photograph up and increasing the contrast slightly.

This final example shows how RAW files allow more control in the edit. The sky was bright so I had to balance exposure of the light sky and the dark shadows. These could be tweaks afterwards to make a pleasing photograph.

Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)