This post was borne out of my “Managing files” post; I’d wanted to touch on how I manage files which are currently being processed, vs finished files, vs JPGs, and meandered into my post-processing workflow itself. It quickly became apparent that this needed to be a separate conversation.

I don’t always post-process; but when I do, this is how I do it

Okay to be fair, I post process more often than I don’t. Transitioning to Fuji equipment has significantly reduced that process, allowing me to capture stunning images straight out of camera with the film simulations and recipes built upon them.

Post Processing Isn’t Always Necessary, Or Even Good

As I just mentioned, and as I’ve touched on in other posts, in-camera composition should be the primary focus for achieving prime results. The more effort applied to in-camera photography, the better the end result will be (post-processing or not).

It can become very, very easy to fall into a trap of relying on post processing as a crutch to lazy “on-set” photography. While there’s nothing wrong with shooting an image with the intent of cropping it later (particularly if you’re using, say, a wide prime lens but want to isolate the subject with a tighter crop), using burst mode / bracketing / “spray and pray” frequently with the common refrain of “oh I’ll just fix it in post” will almost always lead to dissatisfaction, burn out, and disillusionment with the craft.

Translating The Film Process to The Digital Realm

I touch on this in my article on Film Photography in a Digital Age but it bears repeating:

• JPGs are equivalent to shooting film, having that film developed by a lab, and then at most, scanning the negatives or prints & making mild adjustments but being limited to the depth at which those adjustments can go.

• RAW images are the equivalent to shooting film, developing the film yourself in a dark room, and having every tool and chemical imaginable available to manipulate the image during the emulsion process. As an example, Ansel Adams would dodge and burn images to increase/decrease shadows and highlights so that the subject matter would stand out and provide drama to his landscape work.

Both approaches are valid photography work. It’s fine to shoot JPG/film and focus on the in-camera process/results as much as possible; it’s also perfectly fine to shoot RAW/film with the intent on “sculpting” the image during post-processing to achieve the artistic vision you first had when you saw the scene.

Post Processing versus Image Manipulation

This is an extremely, and I mean extremely, subjective topic. I’ve known photographers who only shoot in RAW but who also believe that post-processing of any sort is unacceptable manipulation. Their work tends to be, in my opinion… uninspired. A RAW image is not actually an image; it’s a collection of data which allows some sort of processor (be it your camera’s or your computer’s) to interpret. Most RAW processors are going to provide a very flat image which falls squarely in the center of both a luminance and RGB histogram, leaving its colors muted, its highlights and shadows uninteresting. There will be little contrast in the image whatsoever; very little tension or drama in the work, which means that the composition itself has to be the primary ingredient to telling the story.

On the other side of the spectrum, some photographers feel that they have artistic license to completely manipulate an image so that it no longer represents the reality of the original scene at all. Images where a massive moon is superimposed behind a building or landscape come to mind as perfect examples. Listen… if the moon appears in the sky that large in real life, we should be very afraid because it’s likely on a collision course with the Earth, having been pushed out of orbit by some celestial event or extraterrestrials intent on destroying our planet. I do not see those images and think “wow that’s pretty;” I see those images and think “HOLD YOUR LOVED ONES CLOSE FOR THE LAST TIME! THE END IS NIGH!”

And look: that’s fine, from an artistic standpoint, so long as the image isn’t being marketed as a realistic depiction of the scene. Picasso didn’t claim that his surreal work was representative of reality; Dali didn’t claim that he actually visited a desert where a clock was melting. If an artist’s interest lies in creating imagery that begins with a photograph but ends as abstract impressionism, by all means: you do you. Just, please, identify the work as digital art and not photography.

The in-between is where the topic becomes extremely subjective. I’m going to tell you how I feel about it, and I believe there are a lot of photographers who will broadly agree with me on this, but there are also plenty who will feel I’ve crossed a line, and others who will feel I’m being too conservative. That’s okay, too.

This Is Fine

Starting off broadly, I’ll state that if the captured scene could have been portrayed differently via other physical, real-world tools — filters, long exposure, film brands or types which would alter the color representations — then the use of digital tools to recreate those results are perfectly fine. If I use a color gradient to darken or slightly alter the sky above a landscape in such a way that could have been reasonably replicated with the use of a two-tone gradient filter on the end of the lens, or with a polarizing filter, etc., then that’s perfectly acceptable.

Similarly, adjusting the hue/saturation/contrast/highlights/shadows etc of an image is the digital equivalent to adjusting the work during the emulsion process. This is fine.

Now onto some grayer areas

One concept that I have mixed feelings over, but ultimately lean towards “this is acceptable,” is the removal of undesirable elements from an image. If I’m taking a picture of a scene and there’s, say, a telephone pole or street sign which distracts from my intended subject matter, especially if the object in question is man-made, then I have no qualms with ripping it out. Photoshop has become incredibly advanced in the area of contextual removal; it can replace the object with what would otherwise be behind it (based on the information around the area) with impressive precision.

Even in an image where the object in question is a natural occurrence, I’d say that generally speaking I wouldn’t take issue with it. If your scene has an otherwise pristine blue sky and your intent is that this expanse of rich blue sky is meant to convey a sky as ocean, and this one little puff of cloud happens to distract or muddle the intent, then by all means remove it if you feel compelled to do so. Another photographer might argue for keeping the cloud, but it’s your work.

Likewise, adjusting the hue of the sky so that it better reflects the time of day is generally okay too. I’ve taken images during sunset where the sky was a purple/blue/pink/orange concoction, but for some reason the camera captured it far bluer or paler than I recall the scene being at the time, so I’ll adjust the image to reflect how I saw it at the time.

Another real-world example: I watched a sunrise one morning where the sky was initially a brilliant pinkish purple over the mountain, but I was waiting for the moon to drop closer to the horizon before taking the image; by the time the moon got into frame, the sky was bluer than it had been a half hour before, so I shifted the hue of the sky to represent the sunrise colors as they had been. I’d been able to physically experience seeing the moon over the mountain with the pink/purple sky, but simply couldn’t capture it at the time without using a wide-angle lens (which would have marginalized the size of the mountain and the moon); shifting the sky color is certainly a less intrusive adjustment than, say, photoshopping the moon into the scene.

What about an image taken midday but then applying adjustments to portray it as a sunset image? This is definitely deep into the gray area for me. On one hand, the scene does clearly experience sunsets, and so therefore a sunset depiction isn’t inherently unnatural; there are plenty of occasions where a photographer may not have availability to be present for the sunset. On the other hand, shifting an image into the “golden hour” artificially can amplify a narrative that landscape images MUST be taken during sunrise and sunset, and saturates (no pun intended) the audience with an overabundance of these types of images. Better to find a way for your daytime image to be interesting than to try and increase its potential popularity by trying to go along with a trend. I say this comes down to intent and situational complexities.

Let’s Not Go There

Then there’s the edits which have very little precedent to be considered “acceptable” and still be labeled as photography. I’m beginning to see some professional photographers on YouTube and whatnot who casually replace entire skies with the sky from another image.

I feel this is too much manipulation — most of the time. If the bottom third of your image is land and the top two-thirds is sky, and the original sky is replaced with some dramatic sunset instead of the light blue or cloudy sky that originally existed, that’s digital manipulation. (Again, a reminder that this is all subjective and there are plenty of photographers who would disagree with me.) Sometimes, we just don’t get the shot. The weather doesn’t agree, the equipment malfunctions, we didn’t properly expose it, whatever. It’s been my experience that we’re all too often unwilling to take no for an answer or to accept a failure or mistake as a learning experience, and instead would rather manipulate the work to appear as a success.

Again, if an artist chooses to do this to create some sort of surrealist imagery and identifies the work as such, then by all means do that. I’m not gatekeeping what is or isn’t art. But there has to be some boundaries as to what can and can’t truly be considered “photography.” While I am obviously not the sole owner of such gatekeeping, I am certainly allowed to decide where I see that line to be.

Some might argue that if both are photographs and they’re just composited together, it’s still a photograph. I understand that. One might argue that the sky looked very similar to the one they used on another day, and that it’s ultimately no different than shifting the hues. It’s a reasonable argument, but I still consider one to be less intrusive than the other.

The exception to this “line in the sand” would — for me — be astrophotography composites. The exposure times and whatnot required to capture the Milky Way can differ greatly enough from the approach one would take to capture the landscape at night; blending those two images could still reasonably represent an accurate scene — so long as it is, in fact, the original scene. Superimposing the Milky Way taken over the New Mexico sky into an image of the Golden Gate bridge is not the same thing.

Fully crossing the line would be acts of clear manipulation: superimposing a person into a scene who wasn’t there, or a Bolivian castle onto a seascape, or a terrifyingly massive moon behind a 20-foot-tall howling wolf… is it artistic? Sure. Is it photography? In my opinion, no.

(The only exception I’d give to such an edit would be if, say, a series of photographs were taken of a family for portraits, and in what is clearly the best image, one of the subjects happened to blink; taking an element of another image from the series to correct the scene, if done well, isn’t intended to misrepresent the scene.)

And Finally

Let’s touch on a couple of other scenarios because this blog post is already far longer than I’d intended:

• Face/body touchups: I take the “if it would be gone in 2 weeks it can be removed” approach. Facial blemishes and whatnot are okay to touch up since those are very temporary occurrences and not a defining characteristic of a person. Whitening of teeth can be similar: the hue/white balance might cause teeth to appear warmer or more yellow than they do in person, and so mild adjustments are appropriate — so long as they aren’t extreme or clearly unrealistic.

• Panorama stitching: perfectly fine.

• HDR: mostly fine, because the camera is far more limited than the eye is so HDR can more accurately reflect a scene; that being said, overuse of this technique is rampant and can also render an image completely unrealistic. In addition, the limitations of a camera’s ability to capture the full range of light is what we often use to tell the story we’re trying to tell. Don’t undermine your own opportunity to shape the light in a scene to best tell your story. Embrace the shadows.

My Post Processing Workflow

Pick Process

The first step in my workflow is to quickly flip through the images and mark them with some sort of “pick” system: in Lightroom I’d use the flag/unflagged/discard options, while in Capture One I use the star rating system to determine which images I want to definitely move forward with. Typically I’ll just use the 1-star rating to mean “yes move forward with this image”, but sometimes I’ll use 2 stars to indicate early on that an image is particularly exceptional.

Once I’ve established the first batch of images, I’ll filter my view to just the selected images and re-cycle through them again. Sometimes images are selected initially from a particular group (say, from a specific location or subject) in the first pass, but as I continued through the images, other shots of the same location or subject were actually superior to the first selection. Similarly, I may select 2-4 images which are similar enough that I can’t initially decide which I prefer. Ultimately, my goal is to slim down my images so that there are only 1-2 shots left which best represent that location or subject. (By subject I primarily mean “this flower” or “that tree” or “this landmark/building;” if the session is a portrait shoot, obviously the subject is a person, and I’ll keep more than just 1-2 images of the person. In that case, my criteria would be 1-2 images per pose/location with the subject.)

Selecting the “keepers” early on reduces the amount of post-processing necessary later. Why post-process 250 images and then discard 220 of them? Conversely, why keep 250 images that repeat similar themes? Your audience does not want to see the same subject over and over again, no matter how interesting it might be.

First Adjustments & The 5-Minute Rule

As mentioned, I use the stars to indicate my progress in the workflow. 1 star is generally an initial selection; 2 stars indicate a second pass keeper. By now I usually have under 50 images (generally it’s closer to 20-30, depending on the session) to work with.

My next step is to work on highlights/shadows, S curves and white/black levels, color grading & adjustments, etc. It’s the bulk of the work. It’s also when I’m likely to crop an image, modifying its aspect ratio or tightening up the composition. (Sometimes I’ll use the crop during the “wheat-from-chaff” separation process just to help determine if an image is worthy of continuing forward with; see my post on composition for more details.)

In the past, I’ve allowed myself to spend literally hours post-processing one single image. Do not do this. Currently, I employ a “5-minute rule”: if I can’t be satisfied with the direction an image is going within 5 minutes of starting my post processing effort, then it’s probably not that great of a shot to begin with and I’m trying to force the image to be what I want. This might be the case with shots where the sky just wasn’t that attractive, or the subject matter isn’t quite clear, or the bokeh isn’t what I’d hoped, or the subject is out of focus… there are multitudes of potential reasons why an image might not be as good as you’d expected when you first saw it in your “mind’s eye” and gleaned the inspiration to point your camera & smash the shutter button. That’s okay! Let it go. (More on that in a bit.)

To be clear, my “5-minute rule” doesn’t have to be strict; I’ve had plenty of images which needed more than 5 minutes to get them where I wanted them, but clearly did not suffer from any of the afflictions mentioned above. This is most prevalent with landscape images, in my experience. The point though is to avoid being too precious with any one image or to lead yourself down a path destined for disappointment.

Final Touches, Color Labels

Once I’m satisfied with the exposure/highlights/shadows/levels/curves/colors, I mark an image with a third star. 3-star images have sharpness, noise reduction, vignettes, or in some rare cases color profiles applied (as a general rule I don’t use a lot of color profiles, but occasionally after adjusting an image during the previous step I’ll decide it’s a decent candidate for a particular profile.) The completion of that step earns a fourth star.

At this point, I am generally done with an image. If I’m satisfied that there’s no more work to be done, I’ll mark the file with that coveted fifth star; more often than not, though, I’ll leave an image at 4 stars. This is to let me know later on that I’m likely done with the image, but that I’m also open to one last future review and touchup. I’ve found that giving myself some distance and revisiting an image can bring fresh clarity and can result in a different direction for the shot, something that I hadn’t considered when I first sat down to process the images.

At any rate, this is when I use the color labels. While the stars are all about objective workflow and processing, color labels reflect my emotional reaction to an image and how that translates into my expectations for it.

For example, there are images that might have sentimental value, but which don’t meet my level of standards to be shared on Instagram or to be printed. I want to keep them for a theoretical future “family photo album” because they captured a moment in time, but the artistic value is lower than I’d like. I might label that image “green.” The next shot is quite good, and I’d want to include it in the final collection to represent that session’s overall results, but perhaps isn’t quite the best image out of the bunch; I label this file “blue.”

Capture One has “pink” between blue and purple, but I believe Lightroom goes from blue to purple; historically I’ve seldom used the “pink” label for this reason (I used Lightroom for years before transitioning to C1; now I primarily use C1 but do still use LR on occasion). If I do use “pink” it’s to represent an image that’s almost great — logically (based on this process), it’s better than a blue but not quite to a purple. Realistically though it tends to represent my unwillingness to commit one way or another to an image, so I try to reserve “pink” for those shots that need to be reviewed again after the “purple” images are evaluated. If I don’t have many “purple” shots then perhaps a “pink” gets an upgrade; if I have enough “purples” then the “pink” gets a downgrade to a “blue”. I seldom leave an image with a “pink” label, but it’s a useful half-step to have.

Finally, if an image evokes a strong emotional response and/or is clearly a standout representation of the session/subject/event, it’s labeled “purple.” I strive to have no more than 10 images labeled purple; ideally 5 or less, but up to 10 is acceptable. These are the shots that I’d have printed at 8x10 or larger; the ones I’d submit to a photography contest; the ones I’d post on Instagram to showcase my work.

It’s possible to have an image be labeled “purple” but also be 4 stars, but I do try to avoid it. If we let ourselves, we’ll continue to push an image well past “good” or even “excellent” in an effort to obtain some sort of unobtainable “perfection” — this almost always results in ruining a good image, as well as a feeling of discouragement at the entire concept of photography. It’s where the seeds of self-doubt are sowed and nourished. Personally I’ve been focusing this past year or so on finding beauty in the imperfections of an image; I find that once I’ve given the work some time to breathe, it’s the imperfections which establish the character and soul of the piece.

Exporting The Final Results

All images with a blue rating or higher are exported. Occasionally I’ll only export the purple-rated images, but so long as the final batch of photos are approximately the same number as a standard role of film (so around 36 or less, ideally), I’ll do blue and above.

Starting earlier this year, I began using Capture One’s “batch processing” capabilities to export 4 different versions of my final images, all at once:

• One set of full quality JPG’s without a watermark;

• One set of full quality JPG’s with a watermark;

• One set of smaller JPG’s (for the website or social media posts) without a watermark;

• One set of smaller JPG’s (same reason) with a watermark;

• One set of uncompressed TIFF files, theoretically for printing or future edits.

Lightroom has very similar functionality. It’s worth spending some time familiarizing yourself with, and setting up, these “blueprints” for exporting because it’ll allow you to set rules to rename the images, place them in folders, etc., without having to do so manually.

Watermarks

At some future state I may change this approach; the first time I designed a watermark, I was often saving only the final, full quality JPGs of the images with the watermark included and then printing & displaying those images. A few months later I grew weary of the watermark and even found it to be distracting, but was rather stuck with it for those images. (Photoshop’s context aware removal worked pretty well to remove it on some images; mild crops worked on a few others.) You may see them here or there on the website, it’s the white “Wild Ivy Photos” in block letters with vines around the lettering.

My current watermark is my website logo, gray, discreetly placed in a corner of the image. It’s seldom distracting and hardly noticeable. So unnoticeable, in fact, that I’ve now begun to question why I’m doing it at all. If I can easily remove my own watermark, then someone wishing to steal my work could too if they really wanted to. I’ve also read opinions from other photographers that watermarking is sort of like the “full frame or GTFO” talk which typically comes from those who are a couple of years into their photography journey but not quite “mature” enough yet to know how wrong they are. I’m beginning to drop the use of my watermarked images on my social media posts and on the website, so continuing to create separate images dedicated to watermarking might be pointless.

Those exported files are then stored in my “Pictures” folder under “Finals -> <Year> -> <YYYY-MM-DD Description>” folders. Each export type (full jpg with watermark, full jpg w/o watermark, tiff, etc etc) is itself a folder; the images are inside those folders. So they’re pretty deep into a folder hierarchy.

Time To Clean Up

After any project, it’s important to clean up. Put up the tools, clean the workspace, prepare for the next project. Photography is no different. Those hundreds of RAW images you imported are taking up valuable real estate on your drive.

This is another extremely subjective take, but this is my site and my post so I’m telling you how I approach this.

I have very, very seldom revisited images with the intent of editing them again. Even if my style has changed today from my style of years ago, I still want those images to reflect my style then. At the very least, it’s a great learning opportunity to see how I approached post-processing in the past so I can adjust my approach today. I can count on one hand, across 20 years of photography experience, how often I’ve wanted to redo the post-processing on an image taken years prior — and it’s usually because the software is better today or my technique is so dramatically improved in a particular area, and the image is of significant sentimental value to me. I’m pretty sure the number is 3: it’s happened 3 times in 20 years. And in all 3 times, I’d have to just sigh and move on.

Those 3 times are not worth consuming terabytes of data to retain RAW images forever.

I’m starting to venture back into the original topic, file management, so I’ll try not to be too redundant here. The bottom line is this:

• Any image that is rated lower than blue, or has no color rating at all, has its RAW file deleted.

• For the rest of the calendar year, and/or for a period of approximately 12 months, I’ll keep the RAW images of the “keepers” in the session/catalog of the software application. While still uncommon, it’s possible that I might revisit a session from a month or two ago and make light modifications or touchups. After 12 months, the JPG and TIFF exports will have to suffice.

But Wait! What If I Decide Later I Really Wanted That One Image?

While rare, there have been occasions where I recall taking a particular image which, at the time of post processing, didn’t seem like a “keeper.” This is especially true when the “session” and “subject” was, say, your own kids or pets. I’ve also had images which captured important details from a scene which weren’t known to be important at the time; maybe there’s a vehicle in the background that later on you need to identify, or… something. I don’t know. It happens.

This is why I shoot RAW + JPG. Well, it’s one reason. Prior to doing any post processing, I’ll copy the JPGs from the entire shoot to a separate folder specifically dedicated to retaining those files. I’ll name the folder the same as (or very close to the same as) the label I use for the final post processed images, and the folder structure is similar: <Year> -> <YYYY-MM-DD Description>. The parent folder is named “<Camera> in-camera JPGs” — so for the X-T3, it’s “XT3 in-camera JPGs”.

I feel this is a reasonable compromise between the desire to have every image taken potentially available, while also keeping the overall storage and work space tidy. Today’s JPG’s are so flexible, many can have the same post processing workflow applied to them as you’d do to a RAW file and achieve the same result. Not always, not every file, not every camera… but the Fuji JPG’s, in my experience so far, have been probably about 80% as pliable as the RAW images. That being said, I still edit the RAW images so I can maintain the integrity of the original JPGs.

I haven’t had to take this next step, but at some point in the future I may resize images older than 5 years down to reduce file size. Today’s JPGs can average between 12MB to 25MB; looking through 2010-2015’s pictures, those JPG’s megabyte sizes are in the single digits. I also may decide to purge the JPG backups older than 3-5 years when I know I have the finals safely stored and backed up. It’s just a bridge I haven’t had to cross yet.

What If I Shoot JPG Only?

There are times when I either intentionally shoot JPG only, or I shot R+J but am happy with the JPG results. This often happens when I shoot some photos with a film simulation or recipe I really like, then copy the images I want to keep directly onto my phone. Typically they’re then shared on social media.

RAW + JPG

The scenario that’s hardest to definitively state a position or process on is when I’m generally happy with the JPGs but have the RAW images accessible. I’d say about 50% of the time, I’ll feel perfectly happy with the JPG, but then for the sake of doing it I’ll toss the RAW images onto the computer and wind up doing a bit of post work that exceeds my satisfaction of the JPG. The problem is that I don’t know if I’m genuinely making the images better, or if I’m just being a perfectionist. This goes back to the 5-minute rule and the philosophy behind shooting JPG only in the first place.

On the other hand, if the JPG’s were truly just fine and in no need of post processing work… well, Capture One already applies the in-camera processing of the JPG to the RAW image when it’s imported, so at worst I just skip down to my export step. Doing this was more important to me when watermark application was considered a crucial step; now that I’m thinking of ditching watermarking, perhaps it’s less important.

Truly JPG Only

When I’m shooting with the X-Pro 1, I’ve taken the approach that this camera is to be used for JPGs only as much as possible. This goes into a broader philosophy of trying to achieve the final result in-camera at the time the image is taken, and living with the results one way or another. That’s not to say the X-Pro 1 won’t ever be used for RAW. It’s just not how it’s used regularly.

At any rate, if I haven’t copied any images to my phone already, I’ll still copy all the JPGs to the “in-camera JPG” folder for that camera. The primary difference is that I’ll then open the images in a lightweight photo viewer or editor (for example, the “Photos” app in Windows) and quickly run through my “pick” process. Most photo viewing apps have the ability to at least “favorite” an image; the Windows Photos app has a heart icon, which actually applied a 4-star rating to the image. After flipping through and marking images to keep, I’ll go back to the folder and group the images by rating. This will separate all of the images I just favorited into a group. I’ll then copy them, go to the “Finals” folder under “Pictures” and create a folder under the appropriate year, and paste the images there. This way, if at some point I do want to make any edits to the images, I’ve still maintained the integrity of the originals back in the “in-camera JPG” folder.

Using Mobile Devices For Post

As for the images copied first to my phone: I try to make sure and remember to connect my phone to my computer and copy those directly to the Finals folder. Typically those images have had “post processing” done to them on my phone, if any; I’ve also usually deleted the images I don’t want to keep and only have the finals on the device, so there’s no bulk backups of JPGs to manage.

File Management, Backups, Etc

Just kidding! You’ll have to hop over to the post dedicated to this topic to learn more.

I hope this was useful for you; as always, feel free to try out and adopt an approach that works for you, and to discard what doesn’t. I’m constantly refining and improving my processes and workflows; if I discover a more efficient method, I’ll certainly share it.