The Most Important Point to Remember About Processing Photos

We’re continuing our journey of exploring the Decoder Ring of photography the Cycle of Photography. This post we’ll be talking about processing.

Processing in the Cycle of Photography

Here’s the most important thing I want you to remember about processing. This is way more important than moving all those sliders around and all the things that you can do inside your processing software like Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture One or any other program. It all begins with one thing. And that’s your vision.

Where do you want to take this photograph? And as a sub step to that, what’s your purpose? What are you doing with this image? Is it going to go out on social media? Are you putting in a book? Will you be printing it? Are you putting it in a magazine or are you going to edit it into a film?

All of these questions will help drive your processing. If, for instance, you’re going to print it then you’re going to take some extra time. For one thing, it’s going to go out physically. If you’re going to spend the money to get something in print, you want to take all the little imperfections out of the way. Those little sensor spots. You definitely want to handle the noise if it’s going out on Instagram and it’s going to be viewed by this big audience. Maybe you don’t have to stress over that, but that’s good to think about.

But more important of those questions, what do you intend to do with this photograph? And how is it going to look? With that in mind, you can take a look at the video above where I start the process of editing a photo I took of the Bixby Bridge near where I live. It’s a beautiful location as you can see from the unedited photo I have above.

The Value of Presets

In the video above, I show off the power of using presets. A strong preset can lay an excellent foundation for your processing. To help, I’ve been working on getting some AYP Presets which we are hoping to make available soon. But I show off the AYP Presets for the first time publicly so you can take a look at them and get ready for having them available for you to use!

In fact, the best way to stay up to date when these presets will be available is to sign up for our Newsletter which will send the updates on the Presets when they come out, our latest videos and other major news. So be sure to sign up to keep up to date.

Watch the live stream based on this blog here.

Be sure to keep an eye on our blog as we continue decoding photography through the Cycle of Photography.