A common question I often get asked from photographers who look at my images is "do you process your photos?". In most cases, I lie and and explain that I’ve never even used Photoshop… ok, I’m joking. But back to the point – this question comes up a lot and I find it interesting. What you may be surprised to know is that I actually find the question a compliment too.

You see, someone whose studied, practiced or worked with photography for a while is usually pretty good at telling when a picture has been post processed – and can even sometimes give an idea of the degree to which it’s been enhanced (or even how it was done). So when someone is unsure of whether I’ve even used Photoshop – I take this to be a good sign that I’ve done it right, as it satisfies pretty much my only rule for processing. And this all encompassing rule my processing pretty much lives by is that when looking at a photoshopped image, it should not be possible to tell where the original picture ended and where the processing started. Or to put it another, less cryptic way – an experienced photographer looking at it should not be able to clearly define the steps which were taken to get to that final image (and as a result, know that the original was some way off).

Basically, the finished product should somehow be "believable". You see, sometimes processing is required to rescue an image – and I’ve certainly been thankful on those occasions – but for the most part, I believe that processing should extend the natural qualities of an image to simply make it "more" of what it already is. I have no higher moral code with changing the picture completely – far from it – it’s just that it’s very rare for an image to be altered heavily and for it to not be obvious. It’s why during workshops / teaching that I emphasise good "judgment" of processing as much or if not more than the processing techniques themselves.

To give a few examples, some rather obvious (i.e. bad) tell tale signs of processing include:
- Oversharpening from too much unsharp mask
- Plastic looking skin from too much noise ninja / neat image
- "Halos" around people and objects which show where someone has burnt the sky but left an area around a person
- Too much dodging on an object (usually a person’s face) which brings out too much noise or distorts colour
- Unnatural lighting from too over ambitious dodge / burn
- All in one filters which apply dramatic changes to the image in a uniform way. An example would be some (but certainly not all) NIK filters (email me if you’re interested in knowing more abt these)

And how does this play out in my own pictures? Well, without going into what I actually do in processing them (the second most frequent question I get asked with regards to processing and a topic for another day), below are three few examples of images which satisfy my criteria. All are photos where the processing played an important part in the final image:

And what about ones that didn’t make it? Well, I’ll go back to an image I took and processed last year that still makes me cringe to this day. While it’s an interesting shot potentially, I now see such obvious haloing, heavy handed addition of contrast and so forth that I actually have kept it like this to remind me of what not to do. That image is here: