This is where global and selective editing comes into play. Now you aren’t limited to what edits you can make, but also where you can apply them. Modern photo-editing software is so powerful and keeps getting better, faster and more capable as time goes on. Which segues us to one last point that I’d like to make. The bottom line is that making even some mild tonal, white balance and color adjustments to the straight-out-of-camera image can pay back with massive dividends, and it’s as applicable to portrait photos as it is to landscape, nature and urban ones. You may be asking what all this talk about camera sensors and RAW file formats has to do with faithfully representing your image. If you aren’t, then I highly suggest you reconsider, because you’re leaving a lot of critical tonal data on the table. I’m assuming, of course, that you’re shooting in RAW. However, as you climb up the camera market ladder, you gain access to all of the tonal data captured in the image. The major downside is the lack of fine-tuned control. In a lot of cases, this is an elegant and accessible solution for a wide variety of picture takers. Modern mobile phones employ software tricks where the onboard camera fires off a high burst of photos at varying exposures and merges them together to present an evenly exposed final result. Today’s sensors are still somewhat limited in how much of the tonal range (or “dynamic range”)-the shift from the darkest parts of the scene to the very brightest-it can capture in a single frame. Despite the herculean efforts of camera engineers, cameras haven’t reached the point of batting 1.000 when it comes to nailing the correct exposure, white balance and color settings, and that’s why there’s still a clear need to correct and edit your photos. When I refer to the hardware limitations of today’s digital imaging sensor, I’m typically referring to its capability of capturing the tonal range of the scene on the business side of the lens. It may come across a bit extreme to refer to today’s ridiculously powerful cameras as having hardware limitations, but it’s true nonetheless. In other words, the first part of my post-processing deals with addressing some of the hardware limitations of today’s cameras-typically, around tonality and color-followed by making smaller global and selective changes to match the photo to my creative vision. As I alluded to just before, the photographer I’ve evolved into chooses to share my photos as a faithful representation of what I originally placed in my frame while subtly infusing them with various creative elements. It’s your decision as to how you choose to represent it to your viewers. The creative life cycle of a photo rests on your shoulders as the photographer. Before this evolutionary renaissance, it was clear that the bold stylization choices I made were driving the narrative of my photo, instead of the actual content of it. It was a wild and crazy time, and I’m so thankful for experiencing it because it has allowed me to evolve my sense of style to appreciate subtlety and edit my photos so that the natural beauty of the scene speaks for itself. However, as more powerful photo editing tools came onto the scene, the novelty of one-click stylization presets had me smitten. When I first picked up the camera with serious intent back in 1996, virtually all of the tools we take for granted today weren’t even close to coming to fruition, so post-processing wasn’t a big deal to me. Subtle would not necessarily be the first adjective that you’d likely use to describe my earlier works, because I was fascinated with the wild and creative opportunities of digital post-processing. If a slider went to 10, I’d push it to 11. Admittedly, in my early days as a budding photographer, I considered myself a slider junkie.
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