Here are the results of an year long poll which we conduct here on APN. It’s no surprise that 80% of the users chose to add finishing touches to their photographs. About 20% of the voters do not to retouch their photos and essentially are purists. This reises some new questions — what settings do you alter? What software do you use? Do you retouch every photo or just the selected ones? As far as I’m concerned, I classify my photographs into several categories, one being “Need Adjustments”. And then I go through each of these photos one at a time doing the post-processing and adding the final finishing touches. Sharpness, color, and contrast are high on my mind. What factors do you consider when post processing? Comment.
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I do a few tweaks to my images. Check levels, crop, touch up the sharpness, sometimes the saturation and/or contrast. I try to keep these changes to a minimum.
I may come back from a shoot with 50, 80 or even a hundred images. I will cull them down to a handful and work on them. This is often a matter of time as I don’t want to spend more time behind a keyboard than the camera. I’m behind a keyboard all week at work and thats more than enough for me! However I do archive them all. The good, the bad and the ugly.
On the odd ocasion I may play with an image to see what I can do with. I have used an IR plugin to see how it may look as an IR image and that can be fun to play with. Or I may experiment with other effects to learn a bit more about Photoshop.
Paul: That’s an interesting and effective approach to post-production. At times I’ve seen myself get carried away by Photoshop into experiments. I believe the more you pay attention to these things while shooting the less you have to mess with Photoshop other than the basics like sharpness etc.