Photographers, what’s your editing style?

[Wazza]

Saw interesting and heated debate between two professional photographers.

One was arguing that a photo is a true representation of what you see with minimal editing and basically anything else is a lie.

The second said it’s ok to change or edit anything in a picture as photography is art and an extension of the creators imagination.

For me, I do very little editing, corrections, slight enhancement of colours etc. For me photos are a reflection of what I’ve done and where I’ve been and they reflect that. But I have no problem with seeing photos that are heavily edited. For me photography, and that includes editing, is about finding your own style that makes you happy

[cornishfrogboy]

I go for simple editing.

We no longer take our Canon 77D and lenses as we go hand baggage only and the images are not sufficiently better to justify the ‘phaff ’.
We take our reasonably recent IPhones and an underwater Olympus Tough TG4 on vacation . Both obviously have an awful lot of pixels.

I simply use the editing suite on my IPad whilst on vacation (as I am invariably doing a ‘live’ trip report).. or more likely my MacBook Pro if at home.

I do sometimes crop heavily as I have pixels to burn and many of my shots are at distance. I obviously rotate when necessary. I will use the enhance feature and judge any improvement. That is generally it, whilst on vacation.

When I get home, then I have more time on my hands. I then go through all of my photos and play with exposure and features of either IPad or MacBook. I will in the event of improvements, swap out the Photos in my trip report, as I play with those trippies and edit them over many months upon return.

I put my vacation images in a Disney Medium Photo Album for that year (I know that I never do Disney), and thus get my best 200 printed, plus Mandies scrapbook images.. plus those for our ‘Our Disney Vacation’ photo frame (I know that I never do Disney).

As can be seen, all are 6x4 or thereabouts, so I feel no great need to get any deeper into editing than that. My pictures are a record of what I saw and what I did, so to get ‘arty’ or ‘abstract’ would dilute their purpose.

[grant_w]

I usually do a little bit of colour/brightness correction, and crop the photo.
That's usually it.

Not experimented with more arty edits yet, but have Adobe Photographers subscription now so I might give it a go.

The only thing I've done is replaced the grey sky with a better blue sky for one of my Spitfire flight photos

[Orlandobelle]

Minimal.
I take photographs, not make digital art and have no desire ( or the skill and patience 😅 ) to spend hours in lightroom making composites, adding backgrounds etc.
My interest is very specific though (sport) and I shoot mainly for editorial/ reportage purposes.

I think my ' style' was described as being in camera and natural light photography

[Stu]

I have been doing Photography most of my life and editing images has always been subjective. I've seen purists quote certain professional photographers without realising that those photographers actually edited their images such as Ansel Adams who edited photos in the darkroom by dodging and burning and altering exposure levels, etc.

Personally, I edit nearly all of my images, mainly as I may purposely underexpose an images at time of capture or I'm taking multiple images to be stitched together or mixing long exposure with short exposure shots or focus stacking for greater depth of field.

I mainly use Lightroom and change settings such as exposure, temperature (white balance), highlights, shadows and curves. I try to edit the image to what I saw/felt when I captured the image.

Some of my images are here :- https://prime64.com

Some have had very little editing and some have had more editing, but they represent what I either saw or was feeling at the time of capture.

The thing with editing is it's all personal, as long as you yourself enjoy the image that's all that really matters.