PERFORM SELECTIVE EDITS
Editing our files enables us to make changes that are not possible in-camera – take advantage of this to maximise impact!
Few photographs are taken where the tonality throughout the image is perfect. Usually a photograph will look ‘better’ if some areas are darkened down from the original exposure, and other areas are lightened.
In the darkroom, we called this burning-in and dodging. Today, some describe it as ‘tonal mapping’, meaning you take certain tones and ‘remap’ them to new values. In other words, we lighten and darken the image selectively, one subject, object or area at a time.
A photograph with great impact may have just one or two selective adjustments, others may have dozens and you’d be surprised just how often ‘amazing photographs’ have been selectively edited and interpreted by the photographer. It is an essential technique and one that can be mastered in Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture One and so on.
However, we don’t need to restrict ourselves to tonal mapping. Selective adjustments can be made to colour balance, colour saturation, contrast, sharpening, blurring, noise and so on. The most difficult skill to learn isn’t the actual post-production techniques, rather it’s deciding what selective adjustments need to be made. This comes with practice, but also with critically analysing other photographs, asking yourself what makes them so successful and why they have impact.
Then, when you’re looking at your own work, ask yourself what changes would make the image simpler, clearer and purer? How can you get the subject to stand out against its background so that it has more compositional impact?
In the accompanying image of the boab tree in Northern Australia, the desire was to emphasise the tree in a field of long grasses. To achieve this, the sky needed to be desaturated, the grasses lightened and the tree given more contrast – and from here it was just a matter of using appropriate adjustment layers to selectively edit the file to maximise impact.