Post-Processing I

by Joseph T. Sinclair

What is post-pro­cess­ing? Post pro­cess­ing is pro­cess­ing your pho­to dig­i­tal­ly (with soft­ware) after you take the pho­to. In a point-and-shoot cam­era or a phone cam­era, the cam­era itself typ­i­cal­ly lays on a heavy dose of post-pro­cess­ing to make the pho­to look bet­ter. There’s not much you can do to con­trol such post-pro­cess­ing. If your pho­to turns out per­fect (unfor­tu­nate­ly it rarely does), you’re all set. But the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of pho­tos need post-pro­cess­ing that the cam­era does not provide.

There are dozens of post-pro­cess­ing pro­grams that you can use to make your pho­tos bet­ter. They go by such names as image edi­tor, pho­to edi­tor, and graph­ics edi­tor. You sim­ply trans­fer your pho­tos from your phone cam­era to your com­put­er and apply post pro­cess­ing using such soft­ware. This is per­haps the eas­i­est way to car­ry through your post-processing.

But you don’t need to do it this way. There are plen­ty of post-pro­cess­ing apps avail­able that enable you to do your post pro­cess­ing right on your phone screen or your tablet. Because a phone screen is so small, it’s awk­ward to do post-pro­cess­ing on a phone. But tablets are dif­fer­ent. You have plen­ty of space on the screen to do some com­pe­tent post-processing.

How do you choose a post-pro­cess­ing app? There are so many. The biggest prob­lem is to choose a post-pro­cess­ing app that has a wide range of flex­i­bil­i­ty to cre­ate bet­ter pho­tos. Thus, you’ll want to find a post-pro­cess­ing app that is rec­og­nized be very ver­sa­tile and professional.

Specialized Apps  Many of the post-processing apps are very specialized. Some do useful things; some do goofy things, and many do things that you’ll never use.

The lead­ing app for post-pro­cess­ing is Adobe Pho­to­shop Touch. It’s an app cost­ing only $9 that pro­vides much of the func­tion­al­i­ty of Adobe Pho­to­shop (rec­og­nized as the best post-pro­cess­ing soft­ware). When Pho­to­shop sold as a pro­gram for the PC and the Mac, it cost $650. Now you have to pay $20 per month to use it. Con­se­quent­ly, Adobe Pho­to­shop Touch for only $9 is a good deal. It has far more func­tion­al­i­ty than you’re like­ly to use and indeed has more func­tion­al­i­ty than most pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers are like­ly to use.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it is not nec­es­sar­i­ly an easy app to learn to use. Nonethe­less, it comes with tuto­ri­als, and there are also plen­ty of gen­er­al post-pro­cess­ing tuto­ri­als on the Adobe web­site. With such resources, you will be able to do the basic things you need to do to process your phone cam­era photos.

This is not an endorse­ment of Adobe Pho­to­shop Touch as being the only com­pe­tent post-pro­cess­ing app avail­able. There are oth­er good choic­es, too, and you may find that some of them suit your own set of dig­i­tal skills bet­ter than oth­ers. Some are even free. Try a few, and see what you think.

Warning About Apps  Now a warning about free software. Although free software may be great for doing things that you don’t do very often or that are not important to you, free software that you use regularly and devote your time to is not necessarily a bargain. A person or company making software that it sells (for money) is much more likely to continue making such software and refine it over time. A person or company that provides free software may decide sooner or later that such an uncompensated activity is no longer worthwhile.

If you devote your time and ener­gy to learn­ing soft­ware, you’ll want to use such soft­ware for­ev­er or until some­thing much bet­ter comes along. If the soft­ware that you’re using sud­den­ly dis­ap­pears from the mar­ket or is no longer updat­ed reg­u­lar­ly, it puts you in the posi­tion of find­ing new soft­ware and then learn­ing how to use such new soft­ware. That’s a big project that you don’t need and can avoid. Con­se­quent­ly, I advise you to pay for the soft­ware that you will use reg­u­lar­ly. It’s more like­ly to have the stay­ing pow­er that ben­e­fits you.

In a future blog post I will delve into the details of some sim­ple post-pro­cess­ing tech­niques that will make your pho­tographs come alive:

• Lev­els
• Expo­sure (bright­ness)
• Con­trast
• Sat­u­ra­tion
• Crop­ping
• Resiz­ing
• Sharp­en­ing

But for the moment it is enough to say that one way to improve your pho­tog­ra­phy a great deal is to apply the sim­ple and basic post-pro­cess­ing list­ed above to your phone photos.

Exper­i­ment.