Before and After

Occasionally I get asked how I edit photos and what I do when I edit.  Personally I like to make my photos stay as true to real life as possible.  The photo will look a little flat compared to real life so I boost the colors to help enhance everything and make them pop. For me the trick is not over adjusting.  The best edits involve slight tweaking and not a complete makeover.

I shoot all my photos in RAW.  For those of you not familiar with RAW I'll post more about this in the future.  For the purpose of the before and after photos I'll be showing you today, shooting in RAW helped me make slight changes to the exposure and white balance.


Here is a SOOC (straight out of camera) image.  As is this photo is gorgeous and there isn't a lot that needs to be done.  I do take into consideration that the favorite photos will be printed.  When printed photos will be darker than on screen. So as a general rule of thumb I brighten them just a little with the exposure.

My processing consisted of increasing the exposure by .25 and contrast by .10 I added a little vignette so the focus would stay on her face and increased the contrast on her eyes to make them pop just as they do when you look at this gorgeous little girl in person.  I only used Adobe Lightroom there was no need to take this photo into photoshop.  When printed this photo will have plenty of contrast to maintain what you see on screen.

This next picture of the family was also right on target with the SOOC image.  Once again I increased the exposure for printing and warmed up the colors just a smidgen by adjusting the white balance.

You'll notice the majority of the light is coming from the left so their is a natural shadow and vignette on the right of the photo.  I increased the contrast which helped enhance the lighting as well.

With newborns it becomes a little tricky deciding how much you should edit.  They usually have the really dry skin still so most photographers will do a lot of skin smoothing and things like that.  I like both but I hate to have things over done.  It's okay to have a few of those newborn imperfections.  So finding a happy medium is important to me.

Once again I increased the contrast and brightness to taste with printing in mind and just a light smoothing of the skin just so the picture wouldn't be too harsh.

This final picture with mom and baby is one of my favorites.  The SOOC shot is gorgeous but a little dark.  That was my error when shooting the original photo.  But because I shot in RAW it was easy to adjust in the after shot.

Looking at these pictures now I would probably brighten it a little more for print but on the screen I think it looks great.  I sharpened mom's eyes just a little and tweaked the white balance.

This is just a small example of the adjustments I make when shooting indoors.  What do you think?  Did I maintain the integrity of the photo?  Is anything over edited? Under edited? What is your opinion on editing?