EDIT WILDLIFE IMAGES
Employ a light-touch approach to picture editing to keep your pictures looking natural
Given planning and a little bit of luck, wildlife photographers will often find themselves working with perfect lighting and cooperative subjects. In theory the resulting images should need little editing, apart from perhaps tweaking the levels and tinkering with the colour balance. The key with editing wildlife photographs is to keep it simple and the aim is to try to keep them looking natural – look out of the window at real life if in any doubt about colour accuracy. Working with a calibrated monitor and a well-lit image, the process should be to check that the colours are true to life and that the contrast is optimal, and then save the image as an archive TIFF file; resist the urge to reduce noise, sharpen or enhance the saturation at this stage.
More often than not, however, shooting conditions are less than ideal and the photographer has to work with what is available. This can mean using high ISO settings to achieve sufficient shutter speeds to capture movement in low light. Consequences of high ISO and poor light are the creation of ‘noise’ in the resulting image, a tendency for colours to appear undersaturated, and a reduction in detailed definition. Applied correctly, attempts to subtly and selectively remedy these drawbacks in the editing process can enhance the resulting image. But in the hands of the inexperienced the results can be catastrophic. Noise reduction, image sharpening and oversaturation of images are some of the most inappropriately used and misunderstood digital software techniques employed with images taken under less-thanideal conditions.
Noise is something that photographers agonise about, but for anyone who has scrutinised a digitised slide, you will appreciate that the effect is trivial and seldom visible when the image is printed. It is worth remembering that by reducing noise you will also be degrading definition in your image, and subsequent attempts to then sharpen images and increase saturation are only likely to simply exacerbate the problem further.
And it is also worth remembering that an image optimised for viewing on a computer screen will almost certainly not be optimised for printing. Perhaps the best advice when it comes to this conundrum is to ignore what others say and experiment for yourself to see what works, adjusting copies of an awkward image in various ways and then printing them for comparison.
The way you sort and file your archive images can have a significant bearing on the ease with which you can subsequently find and retrieve them. At the simplest level, some photographers use a system of folders based on the way wildlife is classified and named. But a more sophisticated approach is to use Lightroom to make the process efficient and help with organisation. Remember to caption your images consistently and employ useful keywords including scientific names; consider using the month, season, weather conditions and other factors as keywords.