When I was a teenager my mom encouraged me to take a darkroom film developing class from the continuing education community classes. For one evening a week for six weeks or so I was engrossed in the magic of developing pictures. I loved the process and the tactile experience of revealing an image. The chemical baths, tweaking the exposure, waiting for the photograph to dry: I loved it all. Getting into digital editing has been a long road full of frustration and a lot less of the magic feeling I had when working with film. I had my DSLR camera for about a year and a half before I was brave enough to move to using RAW files. Now, of course, I wish I'd started out with this format. With a lot of practice and trial and error finally some of the magic quality of editing photos is back. I love the control of the RAW file. Even a picture that perhaps would have ended up in the garbage before (though honestly it wouldn't have because I was too afraid to throw anything away in case I never got anything better) can be redeemed with a little swipe of the mouse here and a bit of digital tweaking there. I leave most of my photos relatively lightly edited. I don't have the time or confidence to go deep into the editing of a single photo. I think that's for the better. Also, in case you're interested, I mostly use the little editing software in iPhoto. Every now and then I'll pull a special photo into Photoshop to play around with the options there. I have yet to fully tackle the learning curve that is Photoshop . . .
So here is a photo I was this close to deleting off my camera when I first took it and saw it on the little playback screen. Luckily I've mostly trained myself to pause and wait a minute. I can just as well delete it later so why not just keep shooting and worry about removing images later. I'd been shooting from a different angle with different light and had not adjusted my settings at all. This was kind of my test run photo (which usually I do delete right away) but the expression was sweet enough to hold off on deleting immediately. The image is a little under exposed for my liking, making it muddy and dark.
Pull up the histogram and let's get editing!
click through to see the magic transformation!
