8 Post-Production: Working Your Prints
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When using film, work in the dark room is essential for the quality of your picture. The dark room is where you turn good pictures into perfect ones. Today, of course, your digital “dark room” is the computer screen. A few standard tricks are outlined below. These tips are primarily for black-and-whites, but are also applicable to color. Darken the sky. A darker sky dramatizes the photo’s story. If you darken all four corners, you create an effect which is called a “vignette.” This provides portraits with an “old touch” but is usually detested by editors. Lighten the whites of the eyes and teeth. The contrast will dramatize the portrait’s expressiveness and will draw the viewers’ attention to the most essential feature of a portrait: the eyes. Darken any nonessential parts of the picture. Again, the viewer’s attention is drawn toward the light, so you are liter-ally highlighting the important parts of the story for your viewers and, in contrast, subduing the nonessentials. Doing so will direct the absorption of the story. And finally crop, crop and crop! Always crop the picture a little more than your gut instinct may instruct. The more you crop away, the more pronounced the picture’s visual effect will be. Don’t hesitate to cut the top of the head or limbs if doing so doesn’t eliminate a vital prop. This will expand the size of the eyes and draw the subject closer to the spectator. Please note that editing is particularly subjective. Not all editors like tight cropping. Some prefer space around the subject in the original, so that they may have room to crop the picture themselves.
This picture experienced some quite heavy post production. The sky was darkened and contrasted. The area in which the kids are playing was highlighted to heighten the impact of the reflections and to attract attention to this important part of the picture. The kids and the boat were also sharpened slightly. As you can imagine, sharpening was a tool unavailable in the old dark rooms, but in the digital format, it can be an important tool when telling your story.
This picture was shot in Albania in the early nineties. In post-production, the window, curtain, pillow, drugs, and face have been lit, while the wall, covers, and floor have been heavily darkened. The original shot is just bellow. Without the post-production changes, the photo is flat and unimpressive.
Digital photography has also brought about some important and even ethical issues: as photographers and editors, how far are we allowed to go in enhancing a photo? If you intend for the picture to be published, then any alteration may be critical. When you digitally edit your photo, do so limitedly. In fact, it would be wise only to edit as far as was possible in the old-fashioned dark room (i.e. darken, lighten, contrast, and alter color tones). Any retouching should be strictly limited to cleaning the picture of spots due to dirt on the sensor or lens. The bellow example is an original of a girl sitting in front of a small tree, holding her sibling. It was edited only in order to make the two children stand out. There was actually a small tree just behind the girl. For many newspapers such manipulations would rightly not be acceptable - even if it was done for optical reasons only, without changing in any way the story of the picture.
The picture bellow is an example of a perfectly boring picture with no story telling whatsoever, if left untouched; however, with the darkening of the sky and the contrast of the building, you create a passable illustration of the Vatican garden. For many viewers, it may actually be overworked, with too many and too strong post-production effects. As mentioned before aesthetics is very subjective. Every photographer will make his very individual and personal re-touches.
The picture bellow tells a story about the clash of social classes. In the background, men in shiny shoes pass by a starving, begging child. If you see the full-frame, the photo is less effective, because the men are actually not attired like the elite and the surroundings are rather blase, but cropping to a tighter frame emphasizes the message.