You've definitely heard the terms "post-production," "post-pr ocessing," or simply "post" in reference to movies, but they are just as important in photography. Let's unpack what they mean.
Short of Hollywood movies, the terms, post-processing, and post are essentially equivalent. "Production" is what happens on set; it's what you do when you're roaming around with your camera in your hand, taking images or video. Post-production is everything that occurs after you complete shooting, post-processing refers to everything that happens after you finish shooting, and "post" is a simple term for both.
So, we've established that post-production is everything that occurs after a shoot, but what exactly does that entail? Most of the time, it involves some (or all) of the following:
● Importing and backing up all of the footage you've shot ● Going through all of the footage you've captured and selecting the best of it ● For videos, combining all of the separate clips into a single movie ● Adding music to videos and correcting any sound difficulties ● Correcting color, contrast, brightness, and other basic exposure parameters ● Correcting any flaws such as skewed horizons, distortion, dust stains, or blemishes ● Applying any color tone or other stylistic changes ● Preparing photographs for export, printing, sharing, or uploading to the internet The amount and duration of post-processing is entirely dependent on the project. A professionally produced short film will spend a long time in post-production, with each step repeated several times; on the other hand, I can edit a few dozen images in an hour—as long as no heavy retouching is required.
Post-production is just as vital as production itself. It's an important aspect of creating amazing work for several reasons.
Post is a chance to remedy minor mistakes, improve color and exposure, and ensure that your work appears beautiful and professional overall. Digital cameras aren't flawless, and they make a lot of predictions about the world that you can change in post.
You can personalize your work in post, as well. It's your opportunity to make your photograph of the same tourist attraction that everyone else visits stand out. You can create a consistent look for this work of art.
Post-production also enables you to prepare your work for several platforms. Any photograph you upload to Facebook is butchered, but there are methods you can take to reduce the quality loss. If, on the other hand, you intend to print your work, you must take completely different steps.
In short, here is why post-production is so important:
This will help you improve the efficiency of your post-processing workflow. To begin, you must identify all of the photographs that need to be edited. Once you've finished culling, you may tag and identify each photo so you can come back to them later. As a result, you will save significant time that you would have otherwise spent searching for photographs on your PC.
When you have a bunch of photographs shot in manual control at the same time, you can simply apply the same edits to all of them because they had the same exposure. Aside from photographing in manual mode, we recommend shooting in RAW so that you have more flexibility and freedom when processing the photographs. Furthermore, RAW photos contain far more details than JPEGs.
This is an excellent method for streamlining your editing and retouching. After covering an event, a photographer typically has thousands of photographs. We all know that working toward quality instead of quantity is preferable. As a result, after completing a session, you should look through all of the photographs and rate them from one to five, with one being worthless and five being filled with promise. After you have finished ranking your photographs, you may begin the post-processing process with the pictures you rated the highest, as these are the photographs that bring in the most business.
All of your efforts in editing a photograph are rendered useless if your monitor is not precisely calibrated. As a result, a monitoring calibration tool will ensure the accuracy of your adjustments.
As you may have observed, successful photographers have their own distinct style of editing and retouching, which we recommend you emulate. This will gain you followers who love your style while also assisting you in streamlining your process. Develop a style not only in editing but also in production. This way, you may save time by applying the same regular adjustment to all of the photos.
This allows you to save some of your favorite modifications and use them on any image you like. You can also take a photograph that you previously changed and duplicate its settings, placing them on the photograph you're working on. This is a very useful trick if you have a distinct style that you adhere to.
This is one of the most effective and widely used methods for increasing the efficiency of your photo editing. You may create presets from your favorite photographs' edits and adjustments. Most of the time, photographers must repeat the same modifications to all their photographs. Presets can help you with this. You may simply apply the desired preset to all of the photographs at once, and the majority of your editing is complete.
Contrast and color have a significant impact on the overall appearance of your photographs. As a result, you must pay careful attention to color correction in your photographs. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Most of the time, simply adjusting the white balance can make the colors more accurate and pleasing. However, you must frequently pay close attention to the photos. This includes selective editing. In this case, you modify the color of a specific area while leaving the rest of the shot alone.
Highlights and shadows play a vital role in images. The details are frequently lost in these two parts of the image, which is why you must pay extra attention to them. To truly make your photographs stand out, you must retouch them, adjusting the contrast, brightness, color, and dark and light areas.
This is a crucial tip to remember if you want your photographs to look more professional. When you shoot, you almost always acquire a lot of undesirable components in the frame, and the best approach to deal with them is to remove them with the healing tool. It could be a tree branch or a corporation photo, but in order to utilize your photographs for commercial purposes, you must erase all faults from the photo.
Unless you're looking for something altogether different, the idea is to make your photographs look natural. Especially in travel and event photography, your main goal should be to make your photographs look as close to what you saw in real life as possible.
You should always analyze your photo at 100% to detect even the smallest errors. Comb through your entire photo and ensure that you have repaired every flaw, blemish, lens defect, and so on. When you view your image closely, you can find small problems that you would have missed if you hadn't zoomed in to verify the image. The more precise you can make the image, the better.
Take some time to go over your workflow. Investing effort in your post-production process might save you a lot of time in the long run. It's not just about speeding up the process; it's also about making it more effective and efficient. As a result, you must review each phase of your process to see whether you can accomplish the same outcomes with a different technique. The energy you save here can be used for fine-tuning and other key parts of image post-production.
You'll find it easier to search through vast amounts of photographs if you conduct the fundamental keywording directly when you sit down at your computer. Keep everything organized. Before I begin editing, I name and tag every shot. That way, I can always find specific photographs when I need them.
Want to save time editing? Let your software know about the lenses you used, and let it compensate for some of the errors that might arise.
If you wish to license your images for commercial use, you must remove trademarked or branded components such as logos or tags. This takes some time, so do it after you've applied more basic tweaks to your group of photographs during the retouching step.
Avoid using a lot of filters or effects on your stock photographs. Maintaining a natural-looking editing style boosts the commercial viability of your work, especially when clients can add their own filters after downloading the photographs.
Keep these ideas in mind as you work in post:
1) Know your desired outcome. 2) Understand your location choices, indoor vs. outdoor. 3) Know your equipment. 4) Know your camera settings 5) Use the light as best you can. 6) Use contrast effectively. 7) Consider your composition. 8) Where's your focus? 9) Take your time. 10) Consider your subjects. 11) Use flash and light modifiers. 12) Use lens filters. 13) Try a camera’s creative modes. How can you generate a stunning image from the start that does not require much post-production? In the next section of this chapter, I intend to give some suggestions to do exactly that!