Color correction. Pre vs. Post. Filters vs. Photoshop

There is an old adage in photography that if you get the exposure right when you take the shot, the image will have a quality you’ll never achieve trying to create it afterwards, in the old days in the darkroom, these days using an image editing application i.e. Photoshop.

What is a good photograph?

A good photo is first and foremost subject. How the subject is framed within the rectangle that is the photograph is the image’s composition. How the subject is lit supplies the character. The tonal and color quality completes the story by bringing the subject into the viewer’s eye in the most satisfying manner.

I think it’s fair to say that we have all become somewhat reliant on letting the camera do all the ‘thinking’ for us in regards to exposure. Cameras do a hell of a good job too. My newest camera, the Nikon D300 is phenomenal in how it reads a scene and delivers a superb exposure. However, a recent assignment showed me how much variation could occur over the course of shoot as I went back and forth between low and high ISO settings, flash and ambient light changes and the variety of skin tones of the people who were my subjects. I spent an enormous amount of time leveling out the 300 plus photos of the event. They all looked fine as individual photos but as a set of images, I couldn’t show them to my client without tightening the consistency.

Last week I had a personal shoot where I went back to the most basic form of photography I know. I set the camera’s ISO to 400. I set the white balance to daylight. I set the exposure mode to manual. I used color correction filters for the first time in years. I am a fan of the basic UV filter for lens protection. The polarizing filter has always stayed in my kit too, as well as a few others of the standards. What I experienced in using the correction filters though was a consistency of quality that resulted in my being able to enjoy the photos with no tweaking post shoot in Photoshop.

Color correction filters

These filters are subtle in what they do. I’m not talking about color conversion filters, the type that compensate for the lighting conditions compared to the color setting (or type of film) in the camera. A correction filter adds a quality to the exposure. It can be a slight warming up or cooling down of the color. It can be an enhancement of a part of the color spectrum such as red or green intensifiers. There are filters that help to even out skin tones and decrease the harshness of flash highlights.

What I saw was that by capturing the image with the quality optimized as it was being taken made for a better image. The benefit of not spending five to fifteen minutes with each image in Photoshop was cool too.

Some things never change

My exercise also satisfied me in that it’s nice to know that all I gleaned in school and by learning photography through hard knocks still has validity in these days of evaluative metering systems, face detection focusing and now even where the camera will tell you when someone blinked when you took the shot.

I began by saying a good photo is subject. The great thing about taking photos with highly advanced cameras these days is, you get more of ‘good results’. If what you took a picture of was interesting, chances are you’ll have a photo you and others will enjoy. However, it is when you get back to controlling what’s going to result when you make an exposure that brings you to the level where you’re master of the art and you can always anticipate how your image will look. The practice of doing this will result in your being able to give yourself over to the technology because a synergy will develop where you’ll know how to interface with the camera so that you get as close to the desired result as you can while still taking advantage of what your state of the are camera has to offer.

I have many friends and clients who turn to film cameras to experience ‘real photography’. I understand the allure. I recently ran a few rolls of film through a Nikon F5 I have and honestly, at first I forgot not only how to load the camera (and it’s auto-loading) and was perplexed for a moment when the camera stopped working…after 36 pictures! Now, there is a quality about film that is unique unto itself. I wrote of this in a previous blog entry. But whether it be film or digital…or oil painting for that matter, subject, composition, lighting and tonal quality make an image work. Playing with the light in real life is the way to go. It’ll show in your work.