post-production

Why I do all my own post-production work

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I receive a constant barrage of offers from third-party photo-editing services. They find my Google Business profile and phone me. They find my website and use the contact form to send me emails. My LinkedIn feed is full of their advertising.

I’ve listened to their sales pitches and read their marketing materials. It all sounds pretty cool. “Grow your business faster! You’re a talented photographer. You should be out there shooting for your next client, not stuck in front of a computer editing a backlog of previous jobs. Do what you do best, and let us take care of the boring stuff.”

What I never have done, and never will do, is actually use any of these third-party services. They say they will expertly cull my wedding photographs. They say they can uniformly colour-correct my pictures of corporate events. Background cleanup, skin smoothing, portrait enhancement – they’ll do it all. I believe they use a combination of AI tools and human Photoshop experts. It’s possible that the results are technically correct. But I don’t want my work handled by a data centre in Kansas, or a graphic designer in Slovenia, however good they are.

From darkroom to Lightroom

For me, selecting the best images that I captured during a shoot, and then using the relatively simple tools available in Lightroom and (very occasionally) Photoshop to make them as strong as they can be, is as much part of the job as it was when I did the same kind of work manually, in the darkroom.

Am I just a Luddite, stubbornly refusing to accept technological progress? I don’t think so. I gladly embraced digital photography, and have no nostalgia for the darkroom. I love my mirrorless cameras, and wouldn’t go back to SLRs. I still control exposure entirely manually, because that gives me the best results. But I’m happy to use autofocus and auto white balance most of the time. Adobe’s photo-editing software is not perfect, but nor was my darkroom equipment and technique.

So, no, I am no technophobe. But I insist – as a photographer, selecting and editing my own photographs is part of my job. Here are three reasons why.

I was there

First, I was in the room. There was no AI agent present at the shoot. I didn’t see the Slovenian Photoshop expert there, either. I was there with my client, with my client’s guests or participants. I watched them. I talked to them. I heard how they talked to one another. I know why they were laughing or crying at the moment I released the shutter. I know what the mood in the room was. I know what feeling my client would like the photos to convey. I know what they are proud of, and I know (or can guess) what they are less proud of. So don’t tell me that I should delegate the work of selecting the ‘keepers’. How could an agent – whether human or machine – possibly make such a well-informed choice as me?

I want my images to stand out

Second, I don’t want my photos to look like everyone else’s. The way I recrop, retouch and colour balance each image is personal. I tend to think of myself as an artisan rather than an artist, but these are still aesthetic choices. I am proud of my style, and I believe that clients choose me not because my images look like what they are used to seeing on Instagram, but because they don’t look like what they are used to seeing on Instagram. (I am not on Instagram.) I’m talking about freshness, emotion, spontaneity, authenticity.

I want to be a better photographer

Third, I want to continue to improve as a photographer. Every job teaches me something new. I shoot. I try different things. Sometimes I screw up. Sometimes, a happy accident produces an unexpectedly magical image. Above all, becoming a better photographer means getting more images closer to perfection in the camera, and therefore reducing the time needed for editing. But if I wasn’t doing the post-production work myself, I would never see the mistakes or the magic, and would never have the chance to learn from them. Outsourcing post-production to a third-party service would break the feedback loop.

Difficult choices

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Choice is a critical part of the photographic process, especially when it comes to portraits. The photographer and the client both need to make a series of decisions in order to arrive at the single image which will represent the client to the world. These decisions include the choice of setting (studio, workplace, home or on location), background, clothing, lighting and framing (head-and-shoulders, half-body, full length). Here I’m going to focus on the way we choose among the images actually shot.

Why I shoot a lot

When I’m approached to set up a portrait session, the client quite often says “I only need one photo”, or “I only need two or three photos”. I explain that a portrait session will usually last at least one hour, during which I typically shoot 200-300 frames. It takes some time for most people to settle down in front of the camera, and to feel sufficiently comfortable to reveal a bit of their personality. And it really takes the pressure off the subject when they know that each shutter release does not have to be the ‘money shot’. From time to time, I’ll show them a few frames as we work. This gives the person an opportunity to adjust clothing, hair or facial expression, or to suggest a change in the setup. But mostly, it just reassures them that they are looking good and that we are making some great images.

If a client highlights one or two shots that they particularly like, I make a note of the frame numbers. But in general I ask them to trust me to select the strongest images from the session. This might seem strange, but the selection process is an art in itself. It’s my job, I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I’m good at it. For the subject, it would be agonisingly difficult and time-consuming, with no guarantee that they would even make the best choices – we are, in general, the very worst judges of what we really look like.

Picking winners

From the 250 images shot in a typical session, I very quickly select 35 or 40 ‘candidates’. I do this by rejecting not only the ones where I missed the focus or one of the studio lights failed to fire, or where the subject’s eyes were half closed or their mouth in a strange position, but also those which just feel ‘flat’. Often, I will pick the strongest from a series of three or four very similar shots. Where possible, I include at least one from each series – standing, sitting, white background, dark background, and so on.

I then work carefully on each candidate frame, retouching where necessary, making small adjustments to colour balance and contrast, and sometimes cropping slightly. As I do this, I generally promote five or six frames as ‘keepers’. I then take a fresh look at all the images I’ve worked on, and usually weed out a few weaker shots or near-duplicates, leaving me with the 25-30 portraits that I plan to deliver to the client.

Alternate versions

Finally, I consider possibilities for making alternate versions of some of the strongest frames – the ones that I identified as keepers. Would they work in black and white? Would colour grading of some kind bring out a different aspect? Perhaps a bit of vignetting would draw the viewer’s eye more strongly to the subject’s face.

In the end, my clients generally receive at least 30 images, including a few alternate versions. I’m aware that many photographers deliver many fewer image files from a session of this length. I also know that I’m giving the clients some work to do. Many have told me “I love the photos. My only difficulty is choosing among so many that I really like.” But I prefer to give them the opportunity to make the final selection themselves – and perhaps to pick different portraits for different audiences or occasions.