QUICK FIXES
Whatever creative styles you want to apply to your photos later, there are some basic fixes you need to do first. Rod Lawton explains
There are so many creative directions to choose for photos that it’s easy to get lost in a sea of possibilities. But whatever you go on to do with your images, there is a set of basic image fixes that are an ideal starting point, whether or not you go on to do anything else.
There is a difference between creative styles and enhancements, and things that clearly just need fixing. This article is about those basic fixes, why they matter and how to do them. They centre on exposure, contrast and tones, colour (though that can also be a creative choice), geometry, such as image straightening and converging verticals, and clearing up any sensor spots, flaws or unwanted objects. You don’t need to do all of these things to every image, and you might not need to do any of them but they are a handy little checklist to go through. Rather than adopting a strict image-fixing workflow, you might want to try a ‘worst-thingsfirst’ approach instead.
The other advantage of this worst-things-first approach is that it’s the quickest way to find out if a photo has the technical quality, composition or visual impact to make it worth taking further.
BEFORE
AFTER
Shadow and highlight recovery in raw
Raw files have a major advantage over JPEGs – they have extended shadow and highlight detail which you can recover (above right) in programs like Lightroom. This process is not possible with JPEG images because with JPEGs if the detail is not visible, it’s been lost for good. If you open a raw file, however, and see perhaps that the brightest parts of the sky are washed out or that the shadows are too dark for any detail to be visible, you can use your software’s Highlight and Shadow sliders to bring it back. If you use Lightroom, for example, there’s a very quick way to extract extra shadow and highlight detail – use the Auto button in the Basic panel. This is a fast and efficient way to find out if a raw file has the tonal range you need to take it any further. If it does, that’s great. If not, it’s better to find out right at the start.
White balance blues
Sometimes a camera’s white balance set doesn’t do the colours in the scene justice, but shooting raw lets you choose a better white balance later, as raw files retain all the colour information captured by the sensor. If you shoot JPEGs, the camera will use the white balance setting you chose on the camera to fix the colours to that setting, but raw files simply record
