How I Process my Pictures

A few readers asked how I post process my pictures, and I was hesitant to answer.  Not because I want to keep it to myself, but because it varies, depending on the kind of picture.  I process people pictures slightly differently than say, flower pictures or landscape pictures.  You may be disappointed how simple it is, though.

I don't shoot commercial products, so absolute colour accuracy is not important to me.  I strive to make the pictures with the looks that I like.  This may include adding vignetting, boosting colour saturation and/or contrast.  We will look at one example for this post, but if there is interest, I will expand on the topic to cover people pictures, which, unfortunately, is not my strong topic.

I like pictures with more saturated colours, except portraits, which i try to make the colour as real looking as possible, except those I want to leave alone to preserve the atmosphere/ambiance.  I know saturated colours are not accurate, but I like it.  Same reason so many people who love Velvia slide film.

All my pictures are shot in RAW.  Not exceptions.  If I need a quick jpeg, I would shoot RAW+JPEG.

Before and after.  Note the crop marks

  

The screen above shows the picture before and after adjustment. You can see that the original looks pretty dull with the defaults.  I accidentally shot this series of pictures in 16:9 aspect ratio.  It's not a format I am comfortable with.  So I cropped to a more comfy 3:2 ratio.  What adjustment did I do?  Below shows all the adjustments I did in Lightroom. I only touched two area other than cropping: Basic and Tone Curve. 

That's it.  This is pretty much all the adjustments I normally do.  Depending on the picture, I may increase or decrease the above settings to fit my taste.  One other area I may touch is the vignetting section, but I don't do that often.  Below is the final picture, which I used in this blog post (picture is at the bottom): 

Finished picture.  Pretty, eh?