Dodge and Burn

Here I going to explain why I believe extensive editing in Lightroom/Photoshop of images is a good thing, this is a bit contentious with some photographers as some believe it should be as near to  straight out of camera as possible, this is great if the light is perfect and subject are illuminated well, but life being what is, this very rarely happens.

In landscapes for instance the sky will usually be a lot lighter than the foreground, this can be corrected by using graduated filters which helps a lot giving balance to the whole image (so I not saying to not use them, they are a wonderful tool if you have them).

I feel that Lightroom & Photoshop and good quality digital cameras has given us the freedom to express ourselves like at no other time before, before we needed a darkroom now we have a computer and are able to do the same tricks to improve  our images as the pros used, such as dodging and burning.

I have a book called Darkroom were well known photographers talk about the techniques they use in the Darkroom, one of the photographers was the brilliant W. Eugene Smith in my mind one the greatest photographers of the 20th century, he dodged and burned most of his images, bringing out shadow or highlight detail etc. I know some people go over the top with extreame colours or heavy HDR but that is their choice.

So I say if it is good enough for Eugene it is good enough for me, here below is an image (not a great image, but it shows the point I am trying to make) shown in 3 stages the first is straight out of camera (very flat), the second is enhanced colour and the third is black & white.

Please feel free to criticise or comment, many thanks.