Photo Editing

Editing of digital photographs is always an emotive subject, and one in which photographers will hold very varied viewpoints.

I was opposed to editing photos to a great extent, perhaps a little crop here, and a bit of contrast enhancement there but that was about it, I still believe fervently that you should concentrate on getting the images as good in the camera as you can, after all if the highlights are blown out, then no amount of software editing will retrieve those.

Now however I quite enjoy photo editing, and like many of our Society members I prefer the “one-off” purchasing model for software.

So, what do I use? Well on my Windows laptop I use a freeware program called Faststone, nothing that I’ve used on any operating system comes close to this for versatility, I primarily use this for reviewing my images for further editing, but it’s a powerful editing tool in itself. The Faststone viewer operates in full screen mode, move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen to see the images in the file that are being reviewed, move the cursor to the right to view the camera information, moving the mouse cursor to the left reveals the editing panel. What makes this software so great, well for me at any rate, are the keyboard shortcuts, use the right / left arrow keys to scroll through the images in a file. The keyboard shortcuts are all listed on the editing panel, so a typical workflow would be: “X” to crop an image, “CTRL + E” for the contrast, saturation, brightness, and colour  edits, followed by “CTRL + R” to resize an image, for web use, or club competition purposes.

My next piece of  editing software is Serif Affinity, the layers, and masking tools in this software are really easy to use and make this an ideal editor for composite images, the tone mapping, and split toning are also easy to understand and use, it is a very solid piece of software, the tools are easy to use, and there are excellent tutorial videos on the use of the software.

Next, is Skylum Luminar 4, for me personally the AI (Artificial Intelligence) controls are the standout feature of this software. As an example, sky replacement; in other conventional editors time is spent creating a mask getting the “marching ants” just in the exact place, then pasting in the sky, and adjusting the lighting afterwards. In Luminar 4, one click, yes one click replaces the sky, simply select the sky from a drop down list (even better choose your own), and the job is done, fine tuning controls are there to defocus the sky, change the direction of light to match the shadows around the subject, just so easy. One of the features that I really like with Luminar is that it doesn’t create a separate Library of images duplicating everything on your computer, it adds the location of an existing folder of images to the Library. On the “Edit” panel are 6 categories: Layers, Canvas, Essentials, Creative, Portrait, and Professional. A recommended workflow in Luminar 4 could be 1) “Canvas” – crop / straighten. Next, 2) “Creative” – choose Color Styles, and select a style for the image from the Profile, or LUT. 3) Adjust Tone, “Essentials” – adjust the AI Enhance / AI Structure sliders, there is also a conventional “Light” panel with the familiar WB, Temperature, and exposure controls. 4) Apply noise reduction “Essentials” – Denoise. 5) Apply saturation “Essentials” – Color. 5) Apply sharpening “Essentials” – Details Enhancer – Sharpen. I find the “Portrait” category very useful, the AI Skin Enhancer is almost magical, only working on the facial smoothing. In conjunction with this is the AI Portrait Enhancer, all of the sliders in this panel just “work”, move the sliders to make adjustments. For example; to redden the lips simply move the slider, no need to paint in or select the lips with a mask, that is the power of AI.

Luminar 4 also has a set of pre-sets, these are called “Looks”, and can be applied to any image with one click, you can also readily create your own “Looks” pre-set which is what I did on a recent photoshoot, to enable each image to have that certain style, the process is really easy perform all the editing on a single photo of a set of images from the same shoot, save those edits as a “Look” pre-set, and apply to the reminder of the images in a set.  

When complete Export the image to the desired location; CTRL / CMD + Shift + E, and a copy of the edited image will be saved, together with the original image.

Enjoy your photography.

Article, and photos Derek Smith