I have seen most of the photographers who are reluctant to post-process their photos. Some are lazy to do the retouch, whereas others feel it is not right to do so. But, in my opinion, you should always do a basic retouch of your images, even if they come from renowned sources like the Stock Photos by Dreamstime
I will give you five reasons to retouch your pictures.
1.Dynamic Range Limitation of Camera
You can capture all the details in the scene in your camera perfectly only if your camera’s dynamic range matches with a dynamic range of the scene. But, this doesn’t happen always. It will happen only when you have the perfect lighting conditions with a low contrast scene.
So, most of the time, if you check your image histogram, you can find that graph has shifted either to the right or the left with clipping details. It is a clear indication of an underexposed or an overexposed image due to the camera’s dynamic range limitation.
But, this lost in details can be fixed to an extent if you retouch your images in photo editing softwares like Luminar and Lightroom. Shooting in RAW format helps you to retain more details in the picture while post-processing.
- Wrong Exposure Settings
Most of the photographers out there, especially amateurs make the common photography mistakes of setting the exposure to zero level for all types of scenes and lighting. Thus, they end up in a wrongly exposed image in some situations.
Either the blacks in the image would have got crushed, or clipping of whites would have happened. But, you can correct the exposure if the shit is a minor one while retouching.
- Wrong White Balance
White balance can go completely wrong with tricky lighting conditions. It would leave a bad color cast in your image, which makes it unusable. Most of the cameras come with the Auto White Balance (AWB) Feature. But, AWB also fails at times.
Here, the trick is to capture the image in RAW format and set the white balance correctly in the post-processing part. You will not lose any picture quality by doing so.
- Noise removal
Sometimes, you may not have the luxury of good lighting conditions, especially if you are dependent on the natural light. So, you will have to increase the ISO settings of your camera to get a shake-free image. Higher ISOs make the images grainy, which makes it unpleasant to the eyes.
So, the only way to recover this image is by removing the noise. So, you need to retouch your photos here.
- Image Sharpening
There are situations where you get a slightly soft image due to wrong camera settings or poor lighting. You don’t want to show such a copy to your clients or viewers. So, some amount of image sharpening has to be applied to the image.
If you are uploading images to your website or social media sites, then you need to reduce the image resolution. When you reduce the image size, then you will have to apply some amount of sharpening to the image. Otherwise, the image will look soft on the web.
