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!
Moving to black and white I just remove the color, but the image is rendered a bit dull and flat again.
Bump up the contrast a lot and look at those eyes pop! Though I always adjust the contrast up to get some depth in black and white photos I don't usually keep it all the way up at 100%. I was more enthusiastic about the contrast on this photo than others because I felt this image could handle it. And be made more engaging and beautiful because of the deep contrast.
This became one of my two or three favorite photos from the fifteen minute session. I'm so glad it didn't end up in digital neverland! And I'm glad I am discovering the magic of digital editing at last. I'm not ready to say I enjoy processing the pictures more than actually taking them, but there is a calm quality to editing that is a nice complement to the excitement and adrenaline rush of shooting.
Finally, I still can't decide whether I like the black and white or color better. Thank goodness for the indulgence of a blog where I can post both as often as I want!
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