Processing Post: Editing and Quality Control

 After the two shootings, there were a lot of photos to go through. It is not possible to edit all of them, so my thought was to select those pictures that I wanted to be posted onto my website. But before my second shootings, I have already picked my 10 photos, so I actually did not add photos into my website.

This post will record the items that I will edit for all the photos. Take ZFC_4630.jpg as an example.

Photo above is the edited version of ZFC_4630 while the photo below was the original.

First, I usually starting my editing with the Basics, changing the light and darkness. I love contrast to be +35 as it is my preferences, as it would provide enough colour for the photo while not ruin the photo with too much contrast. Reducing whites and highlights would help reduce the brightness of the skies and the light from the car facing me. Increase blacks would help increase the black of the photo to make it brighter in dark area and reducing shadows would help balance the shadows that might be lost in editing the blacks. Increase clarity and dehaze is my preferences to make the picture a bit sharper and more contrast, and adding saturation would help adding more favourable colour. 

Next, I would edit the Tone Curve, which helps additional features when I feel there is need to add more or less on the lightings/shadows. I usually only edit the Parametric curve, as I am not good at editing the curves with the other four colour channels. In ZFC_4630, I did edit the Parametric curve, to further reduce the brightness of the sky and to add more bright in the shadows.

After that, I usually work with Detail. To maintain a good quality I usually set the Amount to 60 to have more detail. Since I am shooting raw, sometimes the radius of the pixel would be an eyesore, and therefore I would set the Radius to 0.5. Masking and detail would affect how much of a pixel be in effect the photos, and my preferences are to set them into +100 and +50 respectively.

The lens would affect the optical quality of a photo, and it needs correction in order to maximize it's quality. In most of the cases, I would just turn the function on and leave them in default positions.

The next stage that I will look into would be Calibration. It will reset the colour base tone to three primary colours. In most of the cases, I would reduce the Green Primary Hue closer to yellow and the Blue Primary Hue closer to Aqua. In this photo, I did the same by reducing both of them with 25. The photo would look a bit yellow and creating the vibe of Autumn, and when it is used in night shot, it creates another vibe of cool night photography. 

After resetting Blue Primary Hue, the photo would look too much contrast in the colour of Aqua. And I would go back to HSL to edit the hue of colours. I would pull the Hue of Aqua closer to Blue and further reduce it's saturation. I did the same in the photo.

The final stage of editing would be adding vignetting into the photo. It creates a kind of vibes of focus on the subject. In most of the cases, I would not set it to over -30 as it is enough to use similar setting at most cases. In ZFC_4630, I set vignetting to -20 which looks great for the photo.

I sometimes would edit the Colour Grading as well to create different colour tones in the highlights or in the midtones. But in this project, I do not think it is necessary to edit the Colour Grading and as a result I skipped this part of editing for all of the photos. I did not make the settings into a preset, but most of the pictures are using the similar concept, but there will be differences if there is a need to change the settings.