It's always helpful when clients understand what is happening behind the scenes - in the digital age it's easy to assume that a professional photographer has is easy - yet many photographers will look back in fondness at the days of film when processing was normally place in the hands of a laboratory and the photographer could put his feet up after a shoot!
So what's the difference between the process that may be familiar to you using a' point and shoot' digital camera and that employed by a professional photographer? Well here's a few significant steps in the process that I employ:
1 Shoot in 'RAW'
When you use a typical digital camera, the camera itself does a lot of processing in creating a jpeg image file. In most conditions this improves the image, but often it does not. And because the processing loses information (amongst other things the .jpeg may be compressed substantially) subsequent processing in a compuer to correct things often yields poor results.
I shoot in 'RAW' - this records all the original digital information making no significant in camera changes. This RAW file can subsequently be opened in specialist software and I then make my own judgements on what tonal or colour changes need to be made. And because no information has been lost, very significant changes can be made without degrading the image.
Put simply - shooting RAW maximises the potential quality from each and every image.
2 Download and backup images to computer, initial review
We are dealing with big image files (and potentially hundreds of them) taking up huge volumes of storage space. Depending on what you a looking for as a client (it may be one good final image or 50), the images that simply do not work are edited out.
3 Initial image processing
Each of the images is examined and changes are made to the tonal quality and colour balance so that all of the retained images look good - time efficiences mean that it's senseless to make fine adjustments to each image at this stage when only a smaller proportion will be finally used. So while these images look good - they will not necessarily at their best.
They are however certainly good enough for a selection of final images to be made. So all these images are loaded to a website for review by the client.
4 Final preparation
When the final images are selected these are re-examined in much greater detail. Depending upon the final use, what happens at this stage will vary but normally the tonal and colour adjustments will be fine tuned, the image examined for digital blemishes and these 'spotted' out. Specialist noise reduction software may be used if the images were captured in low light.
5 Detailed retouching
Although the changes made at step 4 will give as near a technically perfect file as is possible, sometimes a further step is required to retouch the image. This is usually because the client wants the image presented in a way other than as it was naturally captured. Here changes are made to specific areas of the image - for example, the main subject to be isolated (eg on a white background) or distracting background detail removed.
Why all the fuss?
At each of the steps 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 the images could be provided to the client. However this is a little like employing a professional builder to construct a house and then do the plastering yourself, many images will be simply not be at their best and the point of hiring a professional may be lost.
However circumstances differ - the normal process that will be quoted for by me is to take things to Step 4. Should you be prepared to deal with image processing yourself (with, for example, images being burned to disc on site) then alternative arrangements can be discussed.
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