I am a follower of Teri White's Youtube channel and today checked out his video on 'How to Improve your Travel photos using Lightroom and Photoshop CC'. After watching this, we had a discussion about limits of post-processing on Travel Photographs. The main conflict in case of travel comes when you want to look the place natural(real) and at the same time it should be inspiring for others to go there to explore or shoot. So essentially most of the travel photographers want to share the place, as it looks (through different compositions) and then process them in softwares like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Now it's absolutely subjective and how much editing or post-processing is sufficient/right for Travel photographs. And there are varied thoughts around the same. Today I want to debate this aspect of post-processing travel photographs.
There is nothing right or wrong about this. It's all about the way a particular photographer wants to present his work and what is the purpose? Here I would like to share my personal opinion/style of processing photographs and why do I do that way. If you look at above photograph, there are mainly 2 types of major changes in photograph after post processing - First is perspective correction where you see that rounded pillars and minar are now straight in final photograph and second is change is color tones. The final one is black and white. Now, my main goal was to ensure that how human eye could see this view. a human eye would always see these pillars as straight. The second processing about Black and white was not to make it more appealing. In my opinion, Black & White gave me more flexibility in processing this photograph (are you wondering, how?) and the overall view looked better in B&W.
Soon I will also be talking about softwares/tools I use for processing my Travel Photographs? Now let's talk about above photograph. Have you ever clicked any photograph during sunset? If yes, you would know that when you click sunset - either you set sunset colors correct or appropriate light in surroundings. Typically, things around come out dark in your photograph even when human eyes could see everything. Just try to imagine such incident which might have happened with you and you would know what I am trying to say. So in above photograph, it's ensured while clicking that my histogram is correct so that I can handle all tones in the post-processing. So essentially final image is what I was seeing at that moment(probably a bit saturated but almost same) although camera failed to capture that.
Now if we talk about how much editing should be done in a Travel Photograph? I personally want to ensure that photograph shouldn't be manipulated. Now question is what does that mean. It essentially means that no object should be added or removed from the frame you captured with camera. There are few exceptions to my post-processing style. We sometime get dust particles on the frame or wires spoiling the photographs. So at times, I remove those from the photographs using spot healing brush in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. btw, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom hardly gives you options to manipulate your travel photograph and that's why it's my favorite software to deal with photographs. Obviously, there are many other reasons. One of the other major reasons is simplicity to use and time efficient post-processing. All my photographs in this blog are processed on in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Now watch this video by Terry White and share your opinion?
I found this video very informative, but I may not want to do processing which was told in Photoshop, especially the one which talks about adding reflection.
Would like to know your thoughts on post-processing of Travel photographs. Do let us know through comments?
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