Photographer Lets 4 Professionals and 2,000 Amateurs Edit His Images

The flexibility of raw files is higher than it has ever been. This is great for recovering detail or balancing out the exposure, but it also gives you an enormous range for creativity in the edit.

As someone who doesn't shoot many landscapes (and when I do, I never edit them), I'm always fascinated to see how people edit their images and just what can be achieved. 

One aspect of landscape photography that put me off it in the early days was how little weight I put in the post-processing phase of the process. I was under the naive illusion that the landscape shots I loved were just tweaked in Lightroom to alter the white balance or sharpen. I truly didn't believe that heavy editing was common in landscapes. As a result, every image I took was wholly underwhelming to me. Part of that — a large part in fact — was my inexperience, but looking back, I could have achieved much more with a better understanding of how to edit.

In this video, Nigel Danson goes through edits of three of his images. Some are by professional photographers, and then the bulk is by some of the 2,000 amateurs he shared the image with. It's interesting to see the different directions people take the same image, and how creative visions can vary so dramatically. I found myself more drawn to edits which carefully applied dodging and burning to create a contouring effect on landscapes, as I enjoy the more dramatic feel.

What sort of edits do you like the most?

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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2 Comments

It goes to show you that many people see things so differently. The colors, shadows, or even the scene...I bet if Nigel would have shown more of the amateurs who edited the photos, that there would have been so many different takes on what they seen in the photos to what was actually taken. Even I when watching the video, I seen things that could have been pulled out and made into something different...

It was a good video. Keep it up...

Yes, Nigel Danson is very good - and probably even a better Youtouber than photographer.