Years ago when I first got into digital
raw photography, my photo editing process was.. well, pretty much non-existent. I
would open a raw image in Lightroom, I would scroll through the Develop panel,
and I would move sliders left and right without really understanding what I
should be doing and in what order in order to create a photograph out of the
gray, dull, RAW image that I saw in front of me.
After plenty of failed attempts, I realized that my process — or lack thereof —
needed structure. A series of steps, each with its own clearly defined goal, so
that anytime I would sit down to edit a photo, I would know where to start, where
I was going next, and where I would ultimately finish. So today I'm going to
share with you my own 10 step RAW photo processing framework. It sounds rather
official but...it's really not. These are simply the steps which work best for me
and the way that I approach photo processing. By the way the focus of this
video will be on the framework itself, so I'm not going to go too deep into any
one area. If however there is a step you'd like to know more about leave a
comment below and I'll consider making a video about it in the future. Also if you
want to skip ahead at any time, there are chapter markers in the progress bar
below. Okay step number one — before you do
anything else — this is the time for Lens Corrections. It's important to make a
decision about Lens Corrections now because they affect exposure.
That's because Lens Corrections remove vignette and distortion from the corners
and edges of your RAW image. Once removed, your image will then be a little or a
lot brighter, depending on the type of lens you used. If your image hasn't been corrected by an embedded correction profile, which Lightroom will indicate down here at the bottom of the Lens Corrections panel, you
then have the option of enabling or purposely disabling this feature. Try it
both ways, and pay attention to how it affects your image. If you are using
Capture One you have similar controls to assign a profile to remove Distortion
and to control the Light Fall-off which is how Capture One labels Vignette in
this particular tool. You will find that in the Lens Corrections panel. Whichever
you choose — enabled or disabled — make that decision now, and then move on to the
next step. Okay step number two is Transform. This is the step where you
level your image and correct any perspective issues. This is most commonly
needed when photographing a subject with straight lines, whether that be a
horizontal horizon line in a landscape image, or vertical lines in architectural
photography. Instead of lines bending forward or backward like this,
you're transforming those lines into straight right angles. In Lightroom you
can fix this by using the Transform panel. Lightroom can automatically fix
perspective issues for you by clicking the Auto button, or you may have better
luck by drawing your own guidelines to show Lightroom which lines in your image
should be straight. In Capture One you can do the same thing using the
Keystone tool which is accessed through the top menu toolbar or through the
Keystone panel. Okay step number three is Crop. Now that you've addressed vignette,
distortion and perspective, now is a good time to crop
the image. Crop it using the classic rule of thirds, golden ratio, or to accentuate
the energy of the image by changing its aspect ratio. Keep in mind though that
you're not cropping the image for social media or any other place at this step.
You're simply cropping the image to what feels most appropriate for your subject.
Okay step number four is White Balance. This is when you decide whether the
color temperature and tint of your RAW image needs to be corrected from the
values your camera used. To quickly explain what "corrected" means, this means
you are shifting the white point of your image so that neutral colors are
actually neutral. Take for example this card. The gray area that you see right
here this is manufactured to be perfectly neutral in appearance. If I
were to use the eyedropper tool in Lightroom and select this area, the
colors in the RAW image would then shift to make the card appear neutral without
any tint or color cast. If you don't have a card like this, then you can use the
eyedropper with a cloud or anything else in your image which is neutral in real
life. After you see the result, now is the time to ask yourself some important
questions. Does this white balance correction benefit the photo? Do the
colors in the photo need to be displayed realistically with technical accuracy, or
does it feel more natural and correct without correction? Ultimately it's the
difference between an image that is correct versus an image that looks correct. If your image requires color accuracy for
use in product photography, skin tones in portrait photography, or if you plan
on using presets, profiles or look-up tables to apply a predefined style to
your image, correcting its white balance in this step is typically a good thing
to do. But for everything else, white balance doesn't have to be correct.
Neutrals don't have to be neutral. You are free to use white balance
creatively to capture the mood and atmosphere of your subject. Whichever
approach to white balance is appropriate for the raw image you are editing, make a
decision about it now, and then move on to the next step. Okay everyone it's time
for step number five and that is Exposure. This is the time in which you
should adjust the blacks, the shadows, the mid-tones, the highlights and the whites,
to accentuate and enhance the luminosity of your raw image. What I would recommend
doing if you're not already doing so is to use a black and white mode when
editing exposure. That way color is not affecting your decisions. Because when
you darken a pixel displaying color, its color becomes more saturated. And when a
pixel gets brighter, its color becomes less saturated. So when editing exposure
you are unintentionally editing color as well. That's the reason why I prefer to
think of color as a almost like a separate additive layer which sits on
top of your baseline exposure. Typically when I'm in the field, I expose my
landscape images to the right, which just means I'm over exposing them by a stop
or two so that shadows contain less noise and retain more detail. You
basically just raise your exposure just enough so that you're not clipping the
highlights and you're bringing more of that detail out of the shadow region. So
in this step, if I expose an image to the right,
I typically begin by bringing Exposure down a stop or two. Bringing it down by
however much I over exposed the image when it was captured. Then after I'm
finished with that I edit the black and white points to establish how narrow or
wide I want the dynamic range of the image to be. Then it's time to adjust the
shadows and highlights. This helps bring more detail out of the darker and
brighter areas of the image by pushing their values towards the center of the
histogram. Overall the goal of this Exposure step is to make exposure levels
smoother and more gradual throughout the image. Okay step number six is
is Contrast. This is similar to Exposure but in this step you are working the
middle of the histogram. You are now pushing those mid-tones further apart so
that the image doesn't appear too flat or dull. It may seem counterintuitive
that now you're pushing the histogram back out after pulling it in in the
previous step, but by pushing and pulling exposure you then have more control
over how much contrast is applied and also where it is applied so you don't
end up clipping your blacks and whites. And you're able to have more control
over the tonal range of values throughout your image. Contrast is the
kind of thing that you can add or remove from your RAW image many different ways.
Ff course there is a dedicated slider for Contrast in both Lightroom and
Capture One, but personally I generally avoid that slider because it's not quite as
nuanced, nor do you have as much control as other available tools. Other
contrast tools in Lightroom include the Clarity and Dehaze sliders which mostly
target the mid-tones and help protect your blacks and whites. Or for more
control you can use the Tone Curve and dial in one of those classic s-curve
shapes to darken shadows and brighten highlights. Then you just have more
more control over specific tonal areas — specific problem areas in your
image — to help balance out your exposure and contrast across the image. Okay step
number seven is Color. Now, we've already made a decision from earlier regarding
white balance, so the goal of this step is fixing and refining the color in the
raw image. What I would recommend doing first is considering any technical
problems with color. Are some colors now dense and oversaturated because of the
earlier exposure in contrast edits that you made? Does the hue of a particular
color feel weird? For example, are skin tones too orange or should the sky be
more cyan and less blue? Whatever the problem is you can
target those colors using Lightroom's HSL panel or use the Color Editor panel
in Capture One. Then once you've corrected color from a technical
perspective, it's time to express your creative intent with your image. What I
typically do is try and figure out which colors are strengthening my subject by
bringing attention to it, and which colors are weakening my subject because
they are distracting. If a color is distracting, you can try changing its hue
so that it blends more with a neighboring color, or reduce its
saturation to make its color less noticeable. This is also a great time to
try split toning your image. For example, injecting a cool tone into the shadows
and a warmer tone into the highlights. Spend some time on this step to make
sure you're happy with color and then... TAKE A BREAK. Seriously, this is the best time to do it.
Go for a walk. Get some coffee. I mean, just get out of the room and the
lighting environment that you've been sitting in. If you have the luxury of
doing, so wait 24 hours if you can. The reason to do this is because then it
will help reset and refresh your eyes. Then after you're done come back,
take another look at your image, and if you're happy with it, then it's time to
move on and to break out the fine grade sandpaper and get to work on the
remaining steps. Okay step number eight is Dodging and Burning. Dodging and
burning is photography darkroom speak for brighter and darker. This is similar
to earlier Exposure and Contrast steps, but here your focus is on enhancing and
improving specific objects or areas inside the image by adding or removing
contrast. What I typically do in this step when I'm trying to get a smooth
even exposure across an image is to look at the image from a distance you know
typically by just zooming out to see if there's anything in the image which is
drawing too much attention. Drawing the viewer's eye away from the subject
because it's contrast is either too high or too low. This step could be as simple
as just adding a vignette using the Post Crop Vignette tool in Lightroom. a
graduated filter to darken the sky, or lighten the foreground. Or you could use
a brush to paint in exposure and contrast adjustments in a specific area.
You can use the local adjustment tools in Lightroom or Capture One to be doing
your dodging and burning, but if you want to get really deep into it, this is the
best time in this framework to use luminosity masks in Photoshop. By the way
I am planning on making a future video on that topic where I will go into much
more detail about luminosity masks in Photoshop, so if you haven't done so
already consider subscribing to this channel if you'd like to see that video
in the future. Okay step number nine — this is probably my most favorite step of all
and it feels really good when you get to this point — and that is Cleanup. By
this stage your image should be about 95% done, but there may be some small
distracting things like rocks maybe some grass or some trash in your image. Now this is purely a subjective call and really a matter of
personal taste, but for me I don't like going overboard with cleaning up images.
I like to keep things kind of simple and only remove something if it's
non-essential and helps simplify the image to draw more attention to my
subject. I don't like just cleaning up an image for the sake of cleaning it up,
because when you do that then sometimes you may remove too much and the image
begins to look a little too perfect, a little too manufactured. If you can
clean up within the RAW image usIng the tools in Lightroom and Capture One...
go for it. This will allow you to keep your edits
within the non-destructive RAW file. For more difficult cleanup jobs however you
will need to open that RAW image in Photoshop. Okay step number ten.
Congratulations! You've made it all the way to the end. Your image should now be
about 99% complete, and to finish the image now is the time to be sharpening.
This step is saved for last because how much or little sharpening you apply
depends on where the image is going to be seen, whether that's on social media,
your website, or as a print. Typically you can be a little more aggressive with your sharpening, especially if you're down scaling or displaying on
social media, and you can be especially aggressive when creating a print. But if
you are creating a large image for your portfolio website, it's not going to need
as much sharpening. You can apply sharpening on export when you're
creating a JPG in Lightroom or Capture One, or you can open that RAW image in
Photoshop and then do your sharpening and your resizing there. Okay everyone,
that's it. That is my 10 Step RAW Photo Processing Framework that I go through
every single time I sit down to edit a photo. And just to remind you as I said
earlier, the point here isn't to say that my approach is better than anyone else's,
but rather just to promote the idea of organizing your processing work into
clearly defined steps so you are progressively enhancing your image step
by step over time, and with each step providing the requisite foundation for
the next. Oh and by the way, if you are a Lightroom user there is a panel which is
tailor-made for using a framework approach like the one I've talked about
in this video, and that is the Snapshots panel. If you've never used it before,
Snapshots just creates a saved state of your image over time. So what you can do
is that when you complete a particular step you can go over to Snapshots, create
a snapshot to capture that step, move on to the next one, and then when you're
done with that one, create another snapshot, and then over time you will
have a timeline of the edits that you've made within each particular step. So at
any point if you get to a particular point in your editing and
perhaps you came back from that break I talked about, and you really
don't like the color. Then you can just delete what it is that you've done in
that step by just rolling back to the snapshot prior to when you started work.
If you enjoyed the video and learned something from it, please remember to
give it a thumbs up below because it really does help with YouTube's
algorithm and getting a video exposed and recommend it to other people, so I
greatly appreciate it if you would and also if you just like to keep in touch.
If you are interested in videos about photo processing or product reviews, I
also have reviewed a number of products recently from tripods to lights to
lenses, then you can check out the rest of my channel to see some of those. And
then when the world isn't falling apart, I am out in the field making some
landscape videos. But right now that's kind of hard to do, so not
something that's happening right now, but we'll get there eventually...someday.
Thanks again everyone. Be safe, be well, and I'll see you next time.
