Do you edit your photos?

Two things that I have heard variations of so many times are:

“Why don’t my photographs look like that? Maybe I need a better camera.”

“Why don’t my photographs look like yours? I wish I had the ability to take good shots.”

Well there may be good news for you. In many cases that I have seen, the answer is simply “You’re not finished yet. You need to do some editing to get the best from this image”. A surprising percentage of photographs do not look great straight from the camera, especially if you shoot raw, and nearly all pictures can benefit from some post processing.

Let me share a pretty extreme example of one of my favorite photos that I have ever taken. Lake Caldwell, near Chillicothe, Ohio, on a beautiful starry night. This was shot on a very dark night using a high ISO to allow a 15 second exposure to avoid the stars becoming trails.

Caldwell Lake straight from camera

The first image is straight from the camera. It’s simply the raw image exported as JPEG with zero post processing. As you will see this is pretty flat with not much contrast.

Caldwell Lake after editing

The second image is after some fairly simple editing using only Adobe Lightroom on a mobile device (an iPad in this case). The main edit was to increase the exposure slightly and add a lot of contrast and some dehaze and clarity. A mask was then made of the sky and the dehaze and clarity effects were pumped up even further, which bought the photo very close to the result in the second image.

If you’re regularly disappointed with the results from your photographs try editing them, see if it helps. It’s not cheating – it’s simply a development of the dodge and burn and other effects that we employed in film days. You don’t have to have lightroom to get great results – there are many great simple editors available for your phone or tablet. Let me know in the comments how you get along.