Almost every professional photographer has an editing style. To me, an editing style is created by the thousands of little choices I make in every photoshoot. The lighting, the subject, the angle, how I use my camera, and the many tiny manipulations I make in Photoshop & Lightroom come together to create an image. Over time, I tend to be drawn to certain choices that create specific looks. I find lighting that I love, subjects that I love, and editing choices that I love. Since I know those choices work well, I make similar choices consistently. Over time, those choices create a consistency in my work that becomes my signature style. This has taken lots of time, experimentation, and practice.
Today, I want to share with you what my editing style is now, and the process behind it! This will give you a peek behind the scenes of my business 🙂 I’ll start with defining my editing style!
My Editing Style
Overall, my style is light, clean, and elegant. I tend to keep my colors very natural, and use lighting to create emotion and interest in my photos. I love simple design and beauty. My style tends to work really well with portraiture and product photography, so most of my work is based on those two subjects. I shoot and edit probably 80%-90% of the time in this style. Sometimes I need a creative outlet, and that’s when I experiment with things that are very different than what I normally do. This helps me keep things fresh and interesting. However, overall my style is light, natural, and elegant.
The Process: The Photoshoot
When I photograph, I keep a close eye on my composition and lighting. I try to find simple, clean backgrounds that are natural and light in color. I keep an eye on my lighting, to make sure the light is the strength and quality I want. For example, if I want my shadows to have a crisp, strong line, I adjust my lighting. Or if I want my shadows to be very soft and gentle, I soften my lighting. Light is the defining factor in most of my photographs. Depending on the subject, I also adjust color, posing, and composition to create effects that I want. It’s an amazing creative process to create photographs!
Culling
After I finish a photoshoot, I upload the images to two separate hard drives at home. This keeps my images backed up, so if something happens I have a back up. Then, I start culling. Culling is the process of selecting what images to use. I pick the very best photos from the session to edit!
Editing in Lightroom
After I’ve culled my images, I bring them into Lightroom to edit. I straighten and crop them, and make color and tonal adjustments. I love working in Lightroom because I can make minor adjustments to large groups of images very quickly. It makes my workflow faster and easier. I’ve learned how to edit through this software through years of practice, research, and classes.
Editing in Photoshop
After I make group adjustments in Lightroom, I go through each image one by one. Usually there are small imperfections in each photo that I want to fix, to make it clean and polished. This is when I usually bring the image into Photoshop and make adjustments there. Here I retouch products and skin, clean up backgrounds, and make more in depth adjustments that I can’t do in Lightroom. This is where all my skin retouching happens as well.
Exporting
After I’ve edited all the images, I export them! This means that I save them to my hard drive. I usually save my photos in two different sizes – high resolution size and web size. Exporting both of these sizes at the same time makes life much easier for me! It allows me to easily upload the high res images to share with my client. When I’m ready to upload them to my website & social media, I can easily go back to my folder and upload the sizes for the web – instead of going and exporting them all over again.
In my editing, I try to streamline my process as much as I can! This saves me time, keeps me organized, and helps me serve my clients the best that I can.
Now that we’ve walked through my editing process, let’s take a look at some before and afters! These are always so fun to see!
Do you have any questions about editing, or want to learn more about my business? Contact me here!
