Tag Archives: after

I edit all the time. I rely on it! Maybe a little too much. I digress… My days in school (for photography no less) were spent playing with film canisters, enlargers, developing solutions, etc.
Taking the photograph, was half the battle. After that, I had to develop the film just right (especially slide film. That stuff is SUPER temperamental). And if I felt so inclined, I could “push” or “pull” my film (a method of intentionally under or over exposing film, then developing it to compensate.) Then there was the darkroom. Here you can (and often MUST) use various filters to bring out certain tones, or create more or less contrast, “burn” and “dodge” to get much needed detail in stubborn shadow and highlight areas, you can even create different effects in the way you run it through your various developing solutions. The variables were pretty endless.

Enter digital.
Now I have no film to process. I shoot an image, then stick the memory card in my computer. There are the variables I set in my camera, not too dissimilar from those on my previous film body, but it’s like going straight to the darkroom. The darkroom now being more of a lightbox, my computer. So since I was a large fan of spending copious amounts of time in the darkroom to achieve customized results with any given image, this naturally carried over into my transition to digital. (It totally helped that I got a decent introduction to Photoshop in school as well)

So.. I don’t think one of my images straight out of camera fully represents me, and my capabilities.
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here is my first  ”Before and After” post.

And a brief run down of what I did…

Mostly, I just dodged out the shadows on her face and neck/chest. After dodging, I then blended these areas to the non affected areas with the patch tool.
After that, I gave it a film treatment, or something. Using Alien Skin Exposure. I went with (color slide film – grain off) Fuji Provia 400f.

That’s it!