Post-processing is, in many ways, deeper and more complex than taking the photograph itself. While that provides greater creative control and room to maneuver, it also creates more pitfalls. Here are some crucial tips for post processing your images.
I made a whole host of mistakes with my post processing when I first started photography. I lurched from one horrendous fad to the next and persistently missed my errors in judgement. Perhaps it's part of the learning process — nuking images with radioactive HDR — but there are lesser demons that can survive your growth.
In this video, travel photographer Mitchell Kanashkevich goes through some of what he considers to be the most important tips and mistakes to avoid across several editing suites. One that Kanashkevich points out that bothers me too when I see photographers' work is overusing the highlights and shadows sliders to "fix" underexposed and overexposed areas of an image. It's not only heavy-handed, it cane leave a flat, unappealing final image that looks neither natural nor stylized.
What editing tips would you say are the most important to learn as someone new to post processing of images?
I take a photo. I hope it looks close to what I saw. I 'enhance' it a bit to bring out a more dynamic look, but I don't "alter" a photo so it is NOT what I saw. On the other hand.....there are tomes when I want to 'make' surreal or other fantasy-type photos. Then I go inside my head and heart.
I prefer to keep my edits as simple as I can and I certainly don’t like the HDR unnatural flat look that seems to be quite popular. Selective editing is quite possibly one of the most important tools in post processing to give photos tonal depth.