File 1 - with 16x9 crop and slight lowering to the blue end of the White Balance

Post production is always a matter of choices. From the photographers point of view they will aim to improve the photograph and make it more pleasing to the viewer. But this always depends upon what the photographer themselves believes beauty to be and their perception of what photography is and the audience they wish to appeal to. In other words there are no rights or wrongs. More a matter of steps you can take that will alter the image, sometimes in very subtle ways.

The website does not allow me to post RAW files, taken straight form the camera, but that was how I shot the original. It was taken at Far Ings nature reserve and shows reeds against a stretch disturbed of water. It is a straightforward shot with not much in it although for me that is the appeal. How can I improve it, if indeed I can?

Because I shoot in RAW I always start any processing in Lightroom as this helps preserve the most detail in any photograph but then converts it to another format (I usually use either TIFF or JPEG). On opening this picture I decide that I will use a crop to letterbox the picture to 16x9 as it feels this helps emphasise the reeds more by reducing the amount that water takes, There is some interest in the water due to the ripples and reflections but the reeds need to stand out. I also moved the White Balance slightly towards the blue end to improve the water background and help the reeds stand out.

I then considered the exposure and contrast and decreased both marginally. That left the photograph like this.

File 2 - with changes to exposure and highlights

I then increased the slider to improve both shadow and whites within the photograph. It now looks like this ...

File 3 - Slight changes to shadows and whites in the picture

Next I considered the texture and clarity, experimenting until I found a result that seemed to improve the picture as I wanted....and ended up here....

File 4 - Increasing texture and clarity slightly

Next I worked on the vibrance and saturation, increasing both slightly before dropping into the colour mix and decreasing the blue saturation a little. So now we are as it looks below....

File 5 - The vibrance and saturation of the colour are considered and the blue saturation is droppedslightly in the colour mixer following the changes made.

I often think around this stage whether a photograph will be better suited in mono, and so I changed it to a simple black and white file and increased both the black and the white in the picture .....

File 6 - Convert to mono

Sometimes I will stop around here, perhaps keeping both a colour version that I like and a mono one but this time I wondered if I could improve it any further and decided to have a look in the Presets that come with Lightroom. Dropping down the list to Landscape presets I tried those available and decided to stick with LN05. This also brings the colour back into the picture....

File 7 - a final version after applying a preset

Which of these versions is best? Of course you may not like the photograph at all but the point is to demonstrate that any picture is the end result of a series of decisions made the the photographer of how they want the picture to look. There are many other decisions that could have been made and perhaps I will repeat this blog with another, and much more radical series of interventions. Of course some people feel that it is cheating to alter pictures but bear in mind that long before digital photography people working in analogue still used shapes and paper to "dodge" and "burn" areas of their negatives during development so this is nothing new, although AI (which I refuse to use) has added a whole new landscape to how pictures can be manipulated, merged and altered once taken.