Post Production Skills & Techniques

Due to one of my professional development points was to develop my editing skills, I decided to take some time and practice this after a photo shoot that I did at the beginning of december. I was asked to take some photographs of a friend of mine who models part time. He is signing to a new modelling agency and needs some portfolio shots for the company. We arranged to meet in the centre of manchester and we walked around and took some really nice photographs!! Below are examples of the photographs I took. 

Note, the below 3 images were all RAW files which I edited in Photoshop, I looked at the levels and other basic corrections then I delved further into certain editing tools such as layer masks, adding subtle colours to the images. I then used VSCO CAM to add effects onto the images, as requested by the client for a unique look. I have attached the edited images lower down in this post. 

I am really happy with the final images and the client is also very happy with the photographs. I decided that this would be a great opportunity to address one of my PDP points for university, it was also great exercise and practice for future post production. One thing that I took from the editing session is that subtle changes are often more beautiful than bold changes to an image, I am a great believer that most of the editing of an image can be done behind the camera when taking the photograph. Saying this, the edits done on the following images have came out very well.

I chose to use VSCO CAM, an up and coming editing software which I was told about through a tutor, its a way or adding filters and vintage affects to images but in a professional way. It is basically a professional quality instagram. 

Below are the VSCO edited images.

Another set of work that I decided to practice my post production skills on was the "praise of engineers" brief which I am currently working on for my final major project. I really tried to use all of the editing software to its full capability, making sure that I gave the editing process more time than I do usually. Below is a quick screenshot of just one of the areas that I looked at whilst editing, I looked into many more areas of photoshop than I have before and it has really made me more confident in terms of editing. I did not screenshot each of the editing steps that I have taken. 

Although the above screen shot is just documenting the hue/saturation section, I did go into more in depth methods of editing.