Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting: Take Memorable Shots Every Time

Chapter 11. Basic Image Editing

There is a strangely persistent rumor that I have heard from time to time. It goes like this: professional photographers take perfect images right in the camera. Well, I'll let you in on a not-so-little secret. It's not the professionals who say that. What professional photographers do is try to compose, light, and pose the perfect portrait right in the camera. This is what you do, I assume. This is what we all do.

Of course, no one has gotten it down just yet. No one. Sure, I get some perfect pictures, you get some perfect pictures, and my 15-year-old niece could get a perfect picture too, if she had the right equipment and the right information. But until you get the perfect picture every time, each and every time, you're just like the rest of us. Trying. It's like golf. If you went out and got a hole in one, would you just assume every hole you played thereafter would be an ace and stop bothering to check where the ball landed? Of course not, that'd be silly.

Although no amount of work can rescue a badly conceived and composed photograph, the difference between a good image and a great image is often that the latter was post-processed properly before being printed. Your camera may already be set up to do some image processing internally when it saves images to its memory card (as discussed in Chapter 2), but the fact remains that your images will most ...