From RAW to wow!/ Portland Children's Photographer

Sometimes when things are slow and the three year old has absolutely no interest in having his picture taken, I'll go back and reprocess old photos to see how I can apply new techniques or just give a picture a different look. As much as I love being out there and taking the actual pictures, I look forward to processing them just as much. It's funny, I think a lot of people think that a photographer's job pretty much ends when they put the lens cap back on, but really, the hour or two at the session taking pictures is by far the quickest part. After that comes the hours of editing, processing, tweaking, and fine tuning. Sure, you hope that your images come straight out of the camera looking great, without needing much work. But in reality, if you shoot RAW, every single image needs adjustments since the camera doesn't do the work for you like it would if you shot jpegs. Whether it's just a quick contrast boost and some sharpening, or something more involved, RAW images have to be given life. And because I love to see before and after examples, here are a few of my own. These are urban shots taken a while ago that I wanted to revisit, and as you can see, I went for a vivid, high key look here. If these were shots of a sweet little girl in a dress, in a field of flowers, I obviously wouldn't process them this way. That's the beauty of it, you can do just a little, or go a little over the top!

Here's an example of a shot straight out of the camera (top), processed (middle), and a little more processed (bottom). You may be able to see that on the bottom shot I've upped the exposure a bit more and sharpened the steel to give it some more texture.

I've processed this picture a few different times, and a softer look, or black and white version work well too, but yesterday it was screaming for something bold, so I did a high key version of it. You can see I've upped the saturation in the steel shutter and brick, while just doing a typical boost on him. Add a little contrast and some sharpening, and voila', you have a vivid picture. Ok, so it's not quite that easy, it takes practice, but that's what makes it fun!

Here you can see just how dull some images look straight out of the camera. This image was a bit underexposed from the start and was lacking the urban edginess I wanted it to have. So, like the ones above, I gave it some life. This is a little more high key than I could have gone, but I wanted something a little more dramatic. You can see I adjusted the exposure to brighten it up, boosted the saturation to add color, and put a touch of 'grittiness' in the background.

This is an example where not a whole lot needed to be done with the original image. The exposure was pretty good from the start, it just needed a little "pop" with a boost in contrast, a little sharpening, and a curves adjustment. The finished image reflects the beautiful golden light that was there at the time.

So, if you have an SLR, play around some time with shooting RAW and see what you can do. The best part is, you always have the original image, untouched, to work with if you ever want to go back months later (like I always do) and rework it. And I know Google's pretty much the only thing reading this blog, but if you like these kind of posts, leave a comment, let me know, and I'm happy to keep doing them!