Post Production

This is a (very) short intro to the rather enormous range of post production tool and methods.

Workflow

There are probably one million different work flows out there and there isn't one that meets everyone's needs. I am sharing mine for the sake of giving you ideas. It works for me. There may be quicker solutions, better backup processes or easier file management set ups, but this one just does the trick for me.

My main workflow categories are:

• Capture type
• Data transfer 
• Mobile /field editing
• Advanced editing
• Storage & backup
• Sharing
• Printing

Capture types

The below process pretty much works for all different camera types, be it my iphone or any other pro digital camera. There is a slight variation to film photography, but once digitalized, the remaining process is the same. 

Data transfer

Since I mostly shoot raw, transfering files via Wifi doesn't really work on my gear. I thus use the Apple SD to lightning adapter and transfer my images from SD card to the iPad, where I import them into the default photo library before editing them in the various apps (see next chapter). For film negatives I use an Epson V600 scanner and as tedious as the whole process is, I do get some kind of Zen moment with cutting, cleaning and scanning the film strips (all while wearing white cotton gloves)> 

Mobile editing

I have an iPad pro and the Adobe CC collection installed on it. Go to apps are Lightroom mobile and Photoshop healing. I've played around with other apps such as Polarr and the likes, but I find the whole process of editing and transferring files between different mobile apps to cumbersome, hence I am sticking mostly to LR mobile. Having said that, after playing around with mobile edits for a couple of months now, I am still not fully convinced about integrating LR mobile into my workflow for 'serious' editing. The features on LR mobile are still restricted and my biggest critique would be the data transfer between LR mobile to the cloud. I shoot exclusively raw and uploading DNG files to the cloud so that I can edit them later on my desktop LR version is just completely useless. It would take a week for a set of around 100 images to upload and that's not working for me. It would be great if Adobe could figure out a way to transfer the iPad edited files via USB-Lighting adapter to the Mac. Then this would be a serious upgrade to the entire workflow. 

Advanced Editing

I use a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop with various 3rd party plug ins such as Google's NIK collection (e.g. Silver Fx), Noiseless CK, etc. My physical tools consist of a WACOM Intuuos Pro tablet, a 27' Thunderbolt display and a magic mouse. On my wishlist is the beautiful Palette controller line up. 

Lightroom is the main app where everything happens. Whatever adjustment I do in other programs, it all starts and ends in Lightroom and I like that. 

Typical LR edits:

• Basic adjustments, such as cropping, contrast, highlights, shadows, blacks, whites, clarity, etc. 
• Local adjustment brush
• Selective adjustments, such as vignetting and the likes
• I very rarely use Presets since I rather rely on finetuning adjustments myself. I've overused LR presets at the beginning, but now I am becoming more and more selective about using any sort of filter (both on mobile and desktop)
• 3rd party external editors:
  • Silver FX for black and white conversions
  • Noiseless CK, for advanced noise reduction 

Typical PS edits:

• Advanced healing brush edits
• Dodging and burning
• Background removal or editing with clone stamp or general brushes
• For portrait adjustments I use a lot of downloaded actions, such as skin blur or matt filters, which allow very fine adjustments for various skin types. Again, the trick here is to keep it as basic as possible and not overdo it. 

Once I am happy with the results, I then export the files to various destinations (see chapter 'Storage & backup') and depending on whether it is a private audience or a public one, I also use watermarks.

The trick for me is to really be careful with the level of re-touching in order not to overdo it. Just like a Chef once said that the guy in charge of the salad dressings needs to be the most stingy guy, the same applies to filters and re-touching in general. Overdo it and you risk making the pictures look like unnatural and just outright ugly. 

Things to avoid

Moving sliders left and right is fun. Crank up the clarity to make it pop more? Sure! Add some solid saturation to make the colours more vivid? Yes Sir! As with many things in life, the key is moderation. A typical beginners mistake that I did when I first started out editing pictures, is to overdo everything. I maxed out some of the settings and the result often looked like the North Korean propaganda department had their hands in it.

One thing I learned the hard way, is that you can't save a poor picture with editing. You can definitely improve a good picture, but if you completely underexposed a scene for example, then cranking up exposure or shadows is not gonna safe the shot (even if you have dedicated noise reduction software and the likes). 

Less is more is the mantra here.  Click on the link below to see a couple of sample images that illustrate the power of editing. 

Storage & backup

We all live in a digital world and pretty much every photo taking solution out there comes with its own backup and sharing feature. I am a bit paranoid when it comes to protecting my pictures and thus I have adopted a 3 + x digital backup and storage set up. 3 + x because I use a 3 fold local backup and an x-fold cloud backup. 

Pictures taken on the digital camera, are stored on both the SD card itself (I never overwrite them), a small, mobile LACIE SATA harddrive and a larger LACIE Thunderbolt RAID hard drive (adding a 4th physical backup layer). I then back up the edited, high res versions on Amazon cloud and the lower res versions that I import into Apple's Photo app, are backed up through my icloud plan and I also use Google's cloud backup service for every image on my phone. 

Apple's and Google's backup are automatic once the images are on my phone so I don't have to worry about that much. 

The workflow for my local and cloud storage is the following:

1. Import the files form the SD card using my MacBook's SD card reader to a DNG folder that I create on my small, mobile Lacie hardrive
2. Import into Lightroom
3. Edit (using the above described tools)
4. Export to my small LACIE hard drive into a different folder for the edited versions
5. Copy both the raw files and the edited versions to dedicated folders on the bigger LACIE hard drive (in the RAID setup the local backup is done automatically)
6. Copy the edited high res versions to the cloud (any cloud provider of your liking)
7. Import the edited versions into your go to photo app (it used to be Apple photos in my case before moving to Google Photos)

I am aware that there are tons of apps that can automate the backup between my various hard drives (instead of manually copying them across), but I made some bad experiences in the past (data lost) and I thus like to keep it simple, with me in full control of the process. 

Sharing

There are hundred and one different social media sites for sharing your images online and all have different audiences and purposes in mind. 

I share mainly on the following pages:

• Instagram
• My own website here

I used to push them out to various other sites like Flickr, Behance and Twenty20, but I found that I got no real value out of those sites and focusing only on such a powerful media like Instagram is more than enough to get your reach and social media cred. 

Printing

I find the below charts very useful for determining print sizes based on file resolution and viewing distance. Purple and dark blue indicate excellent resolution. Light blue and green moderate. Orange is suboptimal. The sizes are in inches (check out this link for conversion rates to cm: http://gulfphotoplus.com/printing). The table on the right is also useful since it indicates perceived quality depending on the viewing distance. 

Getting your photographs print ready is another topic deserving its own chapter. Lightroom has some powerful settings and presets to ease the process. Keywords 'Output sharpening, file type export' etc

Previous chapter: Digital vs Film

Next chapter: How to start