My Shooting and Editing Workflow
August 13, 2024
People often ask how I shoot and edit my images, so I wanted to put together a summary of my process. However, I first want to emphasize that replicating someone's process will usually fail to yield artistically interesting results. You can have a technically sound image that still lacks anything interesting or worthwhile to look at. I think the spirit that goes into making an image is more important. However, photographers with the technical precision to boot will stand out. Learn the tools simply in service of the craft.
Composition
Many of the compositional tutorials you might find online are missing the point. My advice is to forget about any rules or formulas. Instead, fill the frame with what you like. Which part of the scene is saying something interesting? Does the scene move you or invoke some feeling in your body? These are far more important. Successful compositions generally have balance, harmony, cohesiveness, simplicity amidst complexity, and stillness. You might feel some of these things within yourself when you get the composition just right. Go toward these feelings as a guide for composing images in the field. Compositional rules can certainly still be useful. For example, many of my images contain leading lines converging to a prominent mountain located near the top third of the frame. But these facts alone don’t make for a strong image. So go ahead and learn compositional "rules" like leading lines, the rule of thirds, and including points of interest from foreground to midground to background. Just hold them loosely. They might work well in some cases but not others.
Spend time in the landscape, becoming more attuned with it. Prioritizing the actual experience of being there makes us more receptive to the full potential of the landscape (and also generally just feels nice). Listen carefully to whatever language the landscape happens to be speaking and let that permeate inward and offer guidance. If there’s a foreground that enhances the harmony of the composition, consider including it. If there are no such foregrounds, try to find a way to remove the foreground from the composition entirely. And be decisive when hitting the shutter button. There’s no need to be “polite” or “shy” when deciding how to convey a scene. Be bold enough to attempt to drill down right to the essence of the scene in a single frame. Hit the timeless moment or decisive moment as described by David Muench and Henri Cartier-Bresson. I’ve written more extensively about some principles underlying strong images here.
Additionally, when out shooting I usually write down notes about the place, trying to put into words the essence of the place and/or what I was feeling at the time. I often take a short phone video of the surrounding landscape on my phone too. I then use this these as references when editing to try to infuse the same emotional tone into the final image.
Camera Settings
The only settings I ever think about when shooting:
• Raw format, no matter what. Not jpeg or tiff.
• Focus point – using back button autofocus, most of the time I’ll either focus on the subject or the hyperfocal distance. Occasionally I’ll manually focus if the camera is having trouble picking up a focus point in low light. After shooting I'll check the focus from the front to the back of the scene by zooming in on the image playback mode.
• White balance – I always leave this on automatic and then just adjust it as desired when editing, which works well if shooting in raw format.
• Exposure – resulting from a combination of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Shutter speed is how long the shutter stays open for. The longer the shutter stays open, the brighter the exposure will be. Aperture is how wide the hole in the lens is where light passes through. Lower numbers correspond to a wider opening and brighter exposure. So an aperture of f/4 is brighter than f/13. Also, wider apertures have less depth of field, meaning that less of the photo will be in focus. ISO determines how sensitive the camera sensor is to light. Higher ISO values correspond to brighter exposures. Higher ISO values also introduce more grain into the photo reducing image quality, though the degree to which this happens depends a lot on the camera.
For the settings determining exposure, the majority of the time I will shoot at f/11 aperture, ISO 100 (or whatever the base ISO of the camera happens to be), while varying the shutter speed by exposing to the right with the histogram visible on live view mode.
There are several exceptions to the above:
• When I'm shooting in low light without a tripod, I'll aim for a shutter speed of 1/(2*focal length) seconds or faster while making tradeoffs in terms of aperture and/or ISO. It can be possible to get away with slower shutter speeds depending on how steady my hands are and the vibration reduction features on the lens or camera I'm using. Using a tripod allows for better image quality in low light, though I find that I am slightly better at composing photos when shooting handheld, so there is a tradeoff to be made here as well.
• When I’m shooting on a tripod and it’s really windy, I’ll use a faster shutter speed here too.
• When there is movement in the scene. Depending on the situation, maybe I'll want a slower shutter speed for smooth motion blur or a faster shutter speed to eliminate motion. This also applies to astrophotography to account for movement of the stars. A rule of thumb is to divide 300 by the focal length to determine the maximum shutter speed in seconds before visible star trails start to appear.
• When I intentionally want limited depth of field, I'll focus on the subject and widen the aperture.
• When I want a very wide depth of field, such as when there are parts of the scene that I want to be sharp from very close to very far. I'll narrow the aperture to something like f/16 or f/22. This renders more of the scene sharp, though the maximum sharpness at the focus point is reduced due to lens diffraction when stopping down the aperture.
• When I want to create a sunstar, I'll stop down the aperture to something like f/22.
In situations where the scene has very high dynamic range – for example with a bright sky and dark shadows in the foreground – it sometimes won’t be possible to get a great exposure. Either the sky will be blown out and unrecoverable or the shadows will be too dark to bring back much detail. One way around this is to bracket (just meaning multiple exposures ranging from lighter to darker) and then blend the exposures using photoshop, although this can be time consuming and difficult to do in a way that looks natural. Here is a good tutorial on this.
Remember that camera settings are the tool not the craft. Learn it to the point where you can immediately and systematically dial in the appropriate settings in the field without thinking about it. You can max out your ability to simply operate a camera relatively quickly, beyond which more time spent learning about camera settings isn’t going to yield better images.
Shooting from my sleeping bag in Patagonia
Editing
When editing an image, there are literally only three things that can be done to each pixel: change its brightness, hue, or saturation. That’s it. I have tried to simply learn a bunch of techniques for making these three types of adjustments to the precise groups of pixels I wish, and then reach into this bag of tools and choose whichever is most appropriate for the particularly image I am working on.
During the editing process, it can be helpful to take breaks and return with fresh eyes. Our eyes easily get desensitized to subtleties in color and contrast when working on an image for a long time.
I try to avoid formulaic approaches and instead decide what each specific image needs (for the love of God please don't use Lightroom presets especially if somebody else made them). I aim to make each one the strongest standalone image it can possibly be, in a vacuum as though no other images existed whether mine or others’. I just try to edit each image to the best of my ability. Though I am never going for a particular style to begin with, patterns in my processing style have naturally emerged over time by doing this repeatedly. I often include lots of contrast constrained to the midtones without running the highlights or shadows off either end of the histogram, cool desaturated shadows and warm highlights, manual dodging and burning on a soft light or overlay layer to bring attention to certain areas of the image and away from others, targeted high pass filters of different pixel sizes to bring out detail and texture at different scales, and targeted gaussian blur.
Some of these techniques are fairly advanced and require a baseline level of proficiency to effectively implement. I will be delighted to teach you every step in 1-on-1 mentoring sessions 😉. Here is the workflow I usually follow:
Preparation
• Clear my editing space externally
• Make sure my external lighting and computer brightness are consistent with how I have edited previous work
• Commit internally to producing the best work I can
• Select photo to edit
• Pull up reference notes or video or whatever I have, try to reconjure the feeling/experience when I was there shooting, think about what I can do to convey that experience in the final edited image
Lightroom edit - erring towards being conservative (undersaturated, less contrast, expose the darks), usually saving any local adjustments for Photoshop
• Dehaze to visualize spots, remove spots, reset dehaze, create base snapshot, set settings to before view
• Rotate and crop
• White balance and HSL for color cast/separation
• Exposure
• Contrast, dehaze
• Whites, blacks, highlights, shadows
• Clarity (often negative clarity)
• Saturation usually via color calibration and HSL sliders rather than main saturation or vibrance sliders
• Vignette
• Open as smart object in Photoshop
Photoshop edit
• If possible, close my eyes and edit the photo in my mind first and write out all the steps in a bulleted list in a word document. Ask myself, “what do I want to adjust and how do I want to adjust it?"
• If I’m using multiple exposures, try to put that together (ideally with smart objects if I’m able to manually align them) before any further adjustments. Do any obvious spot healing and other stuff that will affect the base, then create a group and collapse it before proceeding
• Create high pass filter layer, gaussian blur layer, brightness/contrast layer, curves layer set to linear contrast with midtones luminosity mask (I've created a custom Photoshop action to automate this)
• Use some combination of the following tools
○ Go back and edit the smart object in camera raw
○ Duplicate smart object
○ High pass on overlay blend mode 2-4 pixels for sharpening
○ High pass on overlay or soft light blend mode 10-50 pixels for texture
○ High pass on overlay or soft light blend mode 100+ pixels sort of as a clarity tool
○ Gaussian blur layer
○ Brightness/contrast adjustment
○ Exposure adjustment
○ Curves adjustment, especially linear contrast
○ Levels adjustment
○ HSL adjustment
○ Color balance adjustment
○ Neutralize color cast by using "merge layers via copy">"average blur">grab midpoint dropper on curves layer and click on averaged color>delete "average blur" layer
○ Dodge and burn on blank soft light or overlay layers
○ Color dodge on blank soft light/overlay layers
○ Color painting
○ Layer masks stacked, added, subtracted, or intersected as many times as needed to target any of the above adjustments to specific parts of the image
‣Freehand with brush tool
‣Magic wand and object selection
‣Luminosity range using TK7 Panel (external plugin)
‣Color range using TK RapidMask
‣Saturation range using TK RapidMask
‣Gradient
‣Circular gradient
○ Layer mask density
○ Layer opacity
• Hide all the non-base layers, do any remaining clone stamping or spot healing or warping underneath these layers, then unhide these layers
• Levels adjustment if needed to normalize white point and black point
• Noise reduction
• Export
• Downsize and web sharpen with TK7 Panel, setting the long edge to 2500 pixels with usually between 20-50% sharpening
• Export as “[filename] (downsize)”
• Make any further adjustments to the Photoshop layers as needed, and re-export. By working with smart objects and editing with this structure of Photoshop layers, the workflow is almost entirely non-destructive.