OVERCOME COMMON CHALLENGES

Identify and address the potential mistakes and sidestep predictable difficulties during style development

Arguably the biggest problem with attempting to develop a personal editing style is that every digital photographer is using the same types of software, plugins and apps to create their processing recipe. As enormous as photoshop is as an editing suite, there are only a limited range of tools that are commonly used to produce certain effects. This means that, while we can try to adapt these features around our images, there will always be a point where we experience a plateau of ideas for creating something new. When this occurs, the best strategy is to think outside the box and devise novel ways of employing the wellused functions.

Due to these difficulties, it is important that we also turn our attention to avoiding any additional mistakes and challenges that we may be failing to recognise, in order to simplify our editing workflows and create a baseline image from which to build a creative masterpiece.

YOUR RECIPE DOESN’T WORK ON ALL IMAGES A well-established process may fail to produce the effect you expected. This may be due to the differing range of tones in your shot.

SOLUTION: create a shadow, midtone and highlight version of your ‘normal’ editing recipe, with adjustments made to compensate for the native brightness and contrast of a file. if one preset fails, try another variant.

YOU CAN’T EXACTLY RE-CREATE YOUR STYLE Frustratingly it is possible to find that no matter what you try, you can’t precisely introduce the same effect on two images.

SOLUTION: check the embedded camera profile in your rAW file has not been changed and that all photoshop defaults are the same. ensure all sliders are set to zero or their default positions.

YOU REGULARLY LOSE IMAGE DATA if your chosen processing technique pushes shadows and highlights to their extremes, you may find that one or more colour channels become clipped, causing printing problems later on with areas of missing detail.

SOLUTION: capture more tones than you need by shooting bracketed exposures. By shooting over and underexposed files you have extra image data to work with.

YOU EXPERIENCE BACK-COMPATIBILITY ISSUES you may find that after opening an image in an older or newer version of software, that your ‘look’ is not accurately represented, necessitating complex adjustments.

SOLUTION: save files in the most universal format, such as TiFF, to future-proof images. if using photoshop, opt for this over psD as the latter arguably has more limited longevity.