Why Post-processing Is Important in Photography?

Discover the significance of post-processing in photography and how it can elevate your images to the next level.

1. Enhance your Photographs

These enhancements constitute simple adjustments like contrast, saturation, brightness and sharpening, or extensive photo-editing, depending on your desired goal. Your picture can almost always benefit from these improvements, even when you don’t have a particular result in mind. Anyhow, it's not a good idea to wait until the editing process to take a great photograph.

The curves tool in Photoshop and Lightroom is, perhaps, the primary appliance you will benefit from knowing deeply. With it, you can adjust tones in an image - change contrast, brighten, darken, or adjust colors in one single tool.

A first for beginners diving into these programs is going too far with certain effects, but it is still an important process to understand the limits of the tools you are using. For example, if you play too much with the skin tone of your bother in a family picture, people will wonder if he ever recovered from the sunburn, or they might even start questioning who his real father is…

2. Develop your Vision

There are times when you want your photograph to look a certain way (maybe like if some other photographer took it...). But sometimes we have a good starting point that we mess up in the post-processing. You might even have special love for your picture and you won’t want to settle for anything less than "perfect"... Most times someone trapped in such predicaments doesn't even see the glaring mistakes within their own work, anyways.

Maybe you saw a black and white landscape image online (probably by Ansel Adams) and wanted to recreate its look in a landscape photo you captured. In this case if you achieve "perfection" your picture will be so similar to that you are recreating that there won't be any reason for yours to exist in the first place. Are you also going to change your name to Ansel?

Photography is about what you see, particularly, and how it can show something else other than the technical picture itself to the viewers of your work. But it can also be taking a shot of a donut falling into coffee so what do I even know?

3. Limitations

Every camera can capture only a limited dynamic range (the span between the brightest and the darkest tones of an image). By shooting in raw and post-processing the picture, you can expand the dynamic range and reveal more details playing with highlights and shadows. You can also use "masking" in the software of your choice if you'd like your editing to affect only part of the image.

But as always these tricks can make your photograph look too artificial and it might end up distracting your viewers from your desired goal. It's always good to balance out the realness and rawness of an image with the post-processing enhancements that could make your image look almost like a 3D model. For an example of this issue in action, there's the image above which could've been generated by AI or a game developer, I could never tell!

4. Fix Imperfections

Do you fancy looking like a plastic doll, sometimes? The answer is always, yes! When it comes to giant billboards it might help to smooth out the pimples and grease of the model's face since they could get to be the size of a building and the pimple with a hair sticking out could start resembling a bold headed construction worker that's popping out of a window.

But when it comes to issues like dust spots, noise from high ISO, chromatic aberration, barrel distortion, and vignetting, depending on the severity of the issue, it could give it an interesting aesthetic or it could be a problem to fix... It all depends, I guess! Is that the suggestion you were looking for in this article?

5. Creative Boundaries

Post-processing offers a great avenue to get creative and make images that reflect your creative style, and help you tell the story you want to tell in a better way (a story without pimples...!). Of course there are creative boundaries that you will respect and others that you will demolish (consciously or by mistake), but that is up to you! How many pimples do you want in your picture?

And finally, if you don’t know how to best approach this "post-processing" after all, because you just read a long article that thought you nothing of much value, our Domestika photography courses could come to your aid.

And if you want us to choose for you, because you are that wounded after reading for so long, here are even more examples picked just for you (all readers get the same options, it's just an illusion):

- Digital Cameras for Beginners

- Composition and Exposure in Photography And article by Denise Tempone