Photography and Photoshop Editing

© 2011 Wazari Wazir | Putrajaya Botanical Garden

© 2011 Wazari Wazir | (Left) RAW Unedited | (Right) Edited in Photoshop

To be honest with you, I hate to write about this topic and I hate it when someone say that a photograph look great because if editing and they tend to forget the photography factor to get the shot, to get it right in the camera. I will write based on my personal experience. Whether you want to edit or not, it’s up o you, it’s your photograph, it’s your work and it’s your masterpiece, you can be purist and stick with a traditional photographic approach or embrace new technology and grow.

I came form photojournalist background, and like most photojournalist, editing is not really an important factor, what matter most to us is to get the right picture in the camera. Our main task is to captured a moment, to captured a photograph that can tell a story as it is. We don’t need to make our photograph look like HDR or Dave Hill style, or we don’t even need to boost the saturation of our photograph beyond belief, we try to get is as close as possible to the actual scene, if the person wearing a blue color, let it blue and if the situation or the place that we photograph is messy, cluttered with rubbish, let it be, we have no time to clean them up in Photoshop. We just captured as it is.

As a Photojournalist we are always on the run, always rushing to get the story or the picture to the editors desk or to send them to the person in charge as fast as possible, we have no time to play around with the unnecessary editing and furthermore most news agency have graphic department that will deal with the colors of the photograph and some photo editor will crop certain pictures to their liking to suit their story, so there is no point for us to do the editing. Just get the right pictures with appropriate captions and send them to the person in charge as soon as possible and we are done.

Some photographers are very good at photography and lack photo editing know how and some others are good at photo editing and lacking in photography and they are people who are  very good at both. Personally I would say that Photography skills and Photoshop Skills or photo editing skills are two different set of skills. It will take time to master each skills.

My hobby and my career as a photographer are two different things. When it comes to my “Hobby” taking picture for personal work like my  family pictures, I like to edit my photograph, the reason is simple, nobody will do it for me and I want my photograph to look better in my flickr and in my blog. It is not necessary or mandatory to edit a picture for me but it is an optional that I like to do it wholeheartedly.

I believe that as a photographer, it is better for us to have a multiple skills and not just photography skills. It is good to know how to take a better photograph and also a plus if we know how to edit it to make it better and we must know where to draw the lines. Once we know how to edit a picture, it is better for us to learn how to write, so that we can share our experience or few photography tips with those who might be interested with our work and writing is different set of skills also.

In this post I share with you RAW file, so you can see a different before and after editing. The RAW file is usable in term of story telling but a little bit dull in term of colors to my eyes and I want to do few editing just to boost the colors a bit and to draw more attention towards the face of my son. The final picture (top photograph) where I crop some unwanted area and clean up some distractions. You may like or dislike about my editing, but this is how I want it to be presented as a final image.

*If you want to know my editing technique to get the result, you may want to check my Master of Colors eBook, just hit the banner below…