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The Art Of Editing Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

26 October 2016

We're always pointing out that half the fun of digital photography is in post processing the images you captured. But we have to confess that the capture itself is a bit less than half the fun.

It's often unconscious, in fact. We keep some reliable camera setups in our head that we rely on when we don't have time to think it over. A few are even Manual setups but we often fall back on our Aperture Priority configurations. That lets us concentrate just on what will be in focus and how the scene will be cropped.

Sometimes, after a blizzard of shots, we wonder what we were thinking using one or another setup. That's even before we look at them to confirm we weren't thinking at all.

Half the fun is editing -- but in this case it was more than half.

Which detracts from half the fun.

But we never feel that way when we're editing an image. We take our time, we try alternatives, we scrap everything and start over.

And we don't call a halt to the whole thing until we're happy.

Take today's image. We were walking down the hill and saw a recent edit of this magnificent tree that blocks views of the ocean. The new stump was glistening with sap in the morning sunlight.

We kept walking then stopped and asked ourselves if that wasn't worth a few megabytes after all. Of course. So we walked back, took out the camera and framed the shot.

Unedited. A little inelegant.

Back at the bunker, we found our composition a little inelegant. It was more or less centered side to side but top to bottom it was too low. We'd done that to include those blurred image of the branches in the background. They echoed what had been trimmed off as if they were a memory.

So we changed the aspect ratio to 16:9 to get the image you see up top. And, of course, we applied our usual edits for that lens to the Raw data.

When we were happy with the image we wrote up a little story about trees and stumps to publish here yesterday when we were otherwise occupied with the health care system.

But you didn't see it yesterday because we didn't like the story well enough to publish it. So we scrapped the thing, started over and this is what you get instead.

The art of editing, in a nutshell.


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