So, anything after the shutter release…

is cheating you say!? I say not! There are those who say that the way a picture comes out of a camera is the only way it should be displayed.

There was a time when only those with enough money to invest could hope to display rich, elegant photographs in their personal collection. Not today. It’s a whole lot easier today than it was with film.

With digital photography anybody can do post editing and achieve professional results. Pictures have never come out of a camera “finished.” There has always been post editing done. Do you thing Ansel Adams displayed raw pictures?

As a matter of fact every professional photographer from the very beginning of the industry realized they had to work on their pictures after the fact. Take a look at the next two pairs of pictures.

Before

After

Before

After

The first pair is the before and after of a shot taken with an expensive DSLR. The second pair is the before and after of a shot taken with a $100 Point & Shoot camera. In both cases the before picture is relatively flat and lifeless. Simple post editing more than made up for it.

All the settings were right for each picture. Also, things change moment by moment and the lighting will seldom be consistent between two shots. What all this means to you as the photographer is don’t ever expect to get museum quality photographs straight out of the camera.

Costly or cheap camera, some shots will look great straight out of the gate. More will look lousy. Granted, the more knowledgeable you are and the better you prepare the more phenomenal the results you can expect. But claiming, as some do, that any post editing is “cheating” is just absurd.

You will shoot great shots all day long. Then you’ll get home, excitedly load them into your computer only to find that the best shot of the entire day is either over exposed, under exposed, or it looks flat. If you have no way to edit the shot, it is junk!

If one shoots enough pictures...

one will feel fortunate to get one or two phenomenal shots in a day! Then those purists would not be so quick to 86 images that can be fixed with a little post editing. Also, how can one be creative without it? That, my friend, is impossible.

One thing I have learned is that nobody cares how you achieved the photographs you have. All they know is whether or not they like them.

Here are two more examples of pictures taken with an expensive camera yet both required post editing.

This is a local, historical carousel.

I wanted one shot of the entire carousel. I had to be close to it and use a 28mm lens. It is not even a wide angle lens, yet it somewhat distorts the outer edges of a picture. As luck would have it, the bars holding the horses also slant inward exaggerating the distortion.

Good thing for me I am an advocate of post editing my pictures. After a quick trip through Photoshop I am proud to display this photograph on my wall.

The carousel is all straightened up nice. It no longer looks as though it is in the middle of caving in during the big one out here on the left coast!

Then there’s the city in the clouds.

The contrast of this little hill in real life was phenomenal. I took the shot and was sorely disappointed when I saw it in my computer.

Another quick trip to Photoshop and voila! Once again the phenomenal contrast has returned. It appears to be all but floating in the sky. The great contrast is back. Oh, by the way, this too was shot using a $3,000 rig! So much for “Best Camera” huh!?

Nope, I always have been, am now, and always will be a fierce proponent of post editing my photographs. That is, at least until they threaten to pull all my fingernails unless I renounce it! Maybe I will just let ‘em pull my nails. I don’t know. I’ll have to decide when that time rolls around.

For great post editing information start here.

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