Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture....

How should I go about editing my images? If you are new to photography either as a profession or just as a mom or photography lover here's what I learned.

First of all, I cannot stress enough the importance of shooting in RAW as well as shooting in MANUAL. Why should I shoot in RAW? The biggest reason is for editing purposes. Taking an image in RAW or for Nikon users NEF form gives you an all access pass to edit every part of the image. If by chance the white balance was set incorrectly or the exposure is entirely off, a RAW image can be repaired and fixed. Here's a before and after image of a newborn picture that I took a few weeks ago where the lighting wasn't the best and my flash didn't fire. Because this image was taken in RAW format I was able to revive it and the image turned out well enough that I could even give it to the client.

If this is not incentive enough to go and change your camera settings to raw then I don't know what is. There is one minor downfall to always shooting in RAW and that is that every image has to be processed before you could get it printed up. A RAW file must be converted to a JPEG for printing, posting, etc.

This image above was also shot in MANUAL. This means that you as the photographer control all of the setting. This might sound daunting but with practice it is not as hard as it seems. I will have a separate blog post/tutorial on how to shoot in manual. But trust me it is so worth it to take the time to learn. Just go out to your backyard with your camera, set it to manual, mess with your settings, and just go at it.

When I first started taking pictures I was shooting in JPEG with MANUAL settings and was editing in Photoshop. I thought I was doing everything right, and that I was a pretty great photographer. I actually laughed at people who used Lightroom. I couldn't understand why they needed a different program. I would learn later that this was a foolish assumption.

Here's an example of what an image looked like with this editing process.

Now this image looks pretty good but could have looked a lot better if the conditions had been correct. Now here is an image that was shot in RAW and edited in Capture. Nikon Capture is a program for converting RAW images to JPEG and allows your to make only minor changes to the image. Although this is better than the color editing abilities that Photoshop has it still has several weaknesses.

Finally I took a photography class where we learned to use Lightroom. I purchased the software and started using it and I was amazed at how wonderful it was to use. It is simple an easy to use, gives you the most freedom to adjust settings, and allows you several options to export the images and allow the client to have the best images possible. Here is an example of an image edited in Lightroom.

If you are considering trying out Adobe Lightroom but don't know how to get started I've created a video of how I edit an image that might prove helpful. Watch for this video in a future blog post coming up soon.

I hope you enjoyed my ramblings on different editing softwares and I hope that this post can prove to be beneficial to you.