The digital darkroom isn’t the natural environment of eager wildlife professional photographers.
We’d rather remain in the fresh air than in front of a computer system screen, dealing with a cam instead of a keyboard.
Yet post-processing is an important part of the innovative procedure, whether you’re an old-school supporter of wildlife photography as documentary, or choose a more interpretative, meaningful method to your nature images.
Clever modifying can actually make your subject sing while keeping the necessary truthfulness of what you observed. And with a bit more creative licence you can deepen the drama and amplify the state of mind, to make your work stick out from the crowd.
We think in getting our images right in video camera, instead of depending on post-processing to restore errors. It conserves time, protects credibility, and increases image quality. For us, the mantra ‘less is more’ is the essential to modifying, and we share a pet-hate of over-processed images.
Excessive saturation, over-sharpening, abnormal colours; these all are excellent methods to eliminate an image, to make nature abnormal. Our post-processing is primarily about image correction and subtle improvement, our objective to attain the vision we had at the point of capture.
We usage Lightroom Classic for the bulk of our post-processing, Photoshop for dust-spotting and for some more advanced deal with layers when needed.
Every professional photographer has their own post-processing workflow and we’re not declaring ours is best, simply explaining what works for us. Post-processing is part science, part art. There’s constantly room to freestyle, to experiment and have a good time.
Import and modify: the very first cut is the inmost
Fresh from a shoot and excited to start deal with those unique shots you hope you’ve caught, it’s appealing to dive directly in, cherry choice a couple of strong ones, and start processing. But mishaps take place, so prior to we do any image control, making back-ups is an essential initial step.
Our uncut RAW files are copied to 2 different gadgets prior to we import them to Lightroom: one set to the PC where they will be processed, and a back-up to an external disk drive.
When importing files into Lightroom we constantly pick the choice in File Handling to build 1:1 sneak peeks. This takes a bit more time at first, however implies we then have the greatest quality sneak peeks available for decision-making.
Once imported, we’ll relabel the folder in Navigator (ideal click it > Rename) to something that implies something to us (‘Zimanga game drive 1’, for instance). If we’ve had an efficient shoot and have a great deal of images in the folder, we’ll typically develop sub-folders (ideal click > Create Folders Inside…), possibly for various types, name these folders appropriately, and drag in the pertinent images from the master folder.
We discover it’s simpler to then pick keepers and erase things when comparing like with like.
Now it’s time to arrange the wheat from the chaff. We’ll initially go through a folder, in the Library module, with big thumbnails, erasing any apparent no-hopers (Backspace > Delete from disk).
These are images that are essentially and irreversibly flawed, technically or visually – out-of-focus, terribly exposed, animals blinking or with rubbish expressions or uncomfortable positions, and so on. There are typically great deals of these!
Then on a 2nd pass we’ll spend more time comparing and choosing from similars, searching for the little distinctions that can make or break an image, such as pricked ears, alert expressions or a vibrant body or wing shape.
Some professional photographers like to utilize rankings to partition their keepers, for instance on a scale of 1 to 5, however we’re more binary in our choice – an image is either sufficient or it’s not.
It’s essential at this phase to keep in mind that even the very best images can look flat and boring as RAW files. You require to see the capacity in the image, something that gets simpler with experience.
Now we’re down to a workable choice it’s time to start processing. We’ll most likely still have a couple of similars, making a decision on which one to keep as soon as we’ve ‘Lightroomed’ them.
And we’ll most likely have some keepers we’ll erase after coping with them for a couple of days – it’s not constantly simple being unbiased about an image you had high expect, however didn’t rather work.
Developing the image
One of the charms of Lightroom is that you can sweep back and forward in between sliders in the Develop module, the order in which you do things doesn’t impact the result. We normally stay with the following regimen, however we’ll typically leap back and forwards, tweaking sliders that we’ve already changed.
Bear in mind not all images need a boots-and-all method. We’ll typically use just a portion of the tools at our disposal to a specific shot where that’s all it requires.
Lens profile
Before we start with sliders we go to Lens Corrections, click the Profiles tab, and ensure that Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections are ticked. This is particularly essential with images shot with large angle lenses, where colour fringing is typically seen in the corners, for instance, on tree branches.
Profile correction will mainly eliminate barrel and pincushion distortion. Occasionally we’ll deselect it if we like the distorted result of an ultra-wide close-up, state for a looming elephant bull.
Lens Correction likewise handles undesirable vignetting on large angle shots, however if you like the vignetting you can click the manual tab and include it to taste.
Cropping
We like to crop early while doing so, so the pie chart info relates to the last image material. An extremely brilliant sky, for instance, will highly impact the pie chart curve, so if we prepare to crop it out, it’s finest to do so initially.
With high megapixel sensing units it’s possible to crop greatly and still have a useable image, particularly if it’s just going to be utilized on a websites or social networks. It all depends upon completion usage, for instance, image companies and competitors require restraint: decreasing an initial image by more than 20 percent is most likely to be inappropriate.
If you desire a premium image, heavy cropping is no replacement for not getting close enough to your topic, or not having e huge sufficient lens. We crop gently, simply to finesse the structure. Make sure you leave enough space around your topic, so it doesn’t look compressed into the frame, and if it’s moving has space to move into.
Not every animal picture looks good filling the frame: with a small topic such as a fairy wren, for instance, it’s typically much better to keep it rather little in the frame, to stress its small size.
Look out for sequel next week, where we dig even more into our workflow.
About the authors: Ann & Steve Toon are a UK-based, couple group of acclaimed, expert photographers with a professional interest in the wildlife and wild locations of southern Africa where they spend numerous months each year photographing and running photographic safaris.
Their work is released in a wide variety of publications and nationwide papers, both in the UK and abroad, and they are represented by numerous leading photographic libraries. They’ve likewise composed 3 books, 2 on wildlife photography and one on rhinos. You can see more of their deal with their website at toonwildlife.com.
