From the Photo Editor’s desk :: What kind of editing gets done to photos?

Any photograph straight out of our digital cameras needs some editing. I’m not talking about major Photoshop work - that wouldn’t be right for a number of reasons, first and foremost being the fact that most photographs don’t need it.

The only editing that I do to a photograph is to color correct it, adjust the tones, slight dodging and burning, and maybe a crop. That’s it. The clone brush - that magical tool in Photoshop that can make people disappear - never even gets a glance.

Below are some examples of the editing that is done to a photo before it gets to The Uniter‘s pages.

Photograph by Dylan Hewlett

In the photograph above we can see that I’ve changed the exposure slightly to be a little darker. I’ve also warmed up the color balance and adjusted the contrast.

Photograph by Dunja Kovacevic

This one was taken with an iPhone. All in all, it turned out great. I had to bump up the exposure and slightly correct the white balance, but that was it.

What I would have loved to do was up the light on the woman standing in the bottom left of the photo. If I had, we would have lost quite a bit of image quality in that one area because of the initial quality of the photograph with it coming from a cell phone.

My thoughts on cell phone photography are for another blog post though.

Photograph by Daniel Crump

In this example it was just a matter of bringing up the exposure and again adding contrast. I always put more contrast into the photographs because of the way they’re printed in the paper. Newsprint tends to flatten out an image and mute the colors. Heading that off at the pass is what a little bump in contrast helps with.

That’s about it when it comes to editing photos. I really don’t do much. Mostly I try and give the photo that extra little pop that pulls the reader in and gets them reading the article. If you have any questions please feel free to send me an email (photo (at) uniter.ca) or leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading,
Dylan

My personal blog can be found at [url=http://blog.hewlettphotography.ca]blog.hewlettphotography.ca[/url]