No so long ago — aka back in the days of film — you popped a roll of film in your camera, took 12, 24, or 36 images, rolled it back up & popped it out, dropped it off at the local photo lab and waited about a week for your snapshots to arrive. And — if you shot in auto mode, your camera did all the thinking for you. That can sometimes be bad, especially if you used the wrong ISO film! Anyway, there were always shots you wish could be fixed — or as I like to think of it, prettified.
With digital, that is so much easier (sure, film can be scanned so you can edit the images). And clients wonder with digital why their images aren’t available for viewing almost immediately after the session (I’m right, admit it … its okay).
Well — because many of us photographers shoot in an image format known as RAW. And you just can’t download the images and upload them to an online gallery when they are in RAW format. That takes some conversion to a format that is probably a bit more familiar to you — JPEG/JPG. That’s the format your point and shoot uses …
Even still — you’ve hired me (or another photographer) to not only capture you but to make you look awesome. And if we just downloaded the images from our cameras, converted the images from RAW to JPG and uploaded them, we wouldn’t have begun to do the job you hired us for. That’s where lots of nitty gritty time is spent in what is dubbed the *digital darkroom.*
In my case, I use a couple photo editing programs – one to do basic edits and convert images to a recognizable format (aka JPG) and another to prettify them. And that takes a bit of time … I always provide a basic color edit for all images in your gallery. Then — with full length sessions – I convert everything to b/w, then pick my favorite five images or so and do at least one artistic edit to them. When I have an image that really inspires me, there may be more than one artistic edit of it available.
To give you an example of what I (and other photographers) do behind the scenes, I pulled one of the SOOC (straight out of camera) images from Hannah’s session that I still had on my computer and edited it five different ways: basic color, basic black & white, two artistic edits, and one black & white artistic edit. For that one image — no retouching, just an exposure tweak and my other post processing for each version — I spent about 15 minutes (with a couple interruptions). Now times that by 15 to 40 (depending on your session type) and now you’ll understand why we photographers tell you its anywhere from a week up to three weeks before you see your galleries!
Now for the edits themselves …
For the fellow photo geeks out there, on this particular image — shot as the sun dipped below the horizon — I shot it at 1600 ISO, f/4, 1/250 at 50 mm. I was in a hurry to wrap up the session before all the light was gone, so I cranked up the ISO but forgot to bump down my aperture or shutter speed. It was a great image of Hannah, so I didn’t want to trash it. So … first step was to fix the underexposure, then I enhanced the colors and so on. And yes, the artistic b/w edit is a different style than the basic version.
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by christina
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