ALAN BARBER : GUIDE TO POST PRODUCTION

Post production is fiddling with pictures on the computer to make them look their best !
It can take minutes or hours, I charge one hour per hour of shooting. If I take longer I don’t charge you.
Photographers who don’t charge for post production either are not doing it properly or work in the night for free and will soon be divorced bankrupt or both

Why do my clients need to have a basic understanding of post production?
* To get the best from the photographs I have taken
* To control their costs

MY BASIC GUIDE
Ok, digital cameras collect 1s and 0s - RAW DATA
Some cameras interpret this data and write a CAMERA JPG FILE too - their instant interpretation of the RAW DATA

CAMERA JPG FILES
CAMERA JPG FILES are nice little files that email easily and your mum has the software to view them - very handy for your Christmas pictures and holiday snaps; as digital cameras get better actually CAMERA JPG FILES are beginning to be usable for non glossy publishing and websites
Cheap compact cameras like yours write the CAMERA JPG FILES file and THROW AWAY the RAW DATA
Foolish professional photographers set their expensive cameras to THROW AWAY the RAW DATA too - don t hire one of those guys or gals

RAW DATA
RAW DATA uses lots of disk space, is generally too big to e-mail and can only be read by fancy software that you probably don’t have - how annoying
However RAW DATA stores loads of information and opens up the possibility of doing some tricks to make the final photos look really cool
* You can get rid of the funny yellow tint made by indoor lighting
* You can create moody skies
* You can lighten shadow areas
* You can rescue over or under exposed pictures
* You can write TIFF files that print much better than JPG files and don’t go funny if you fiddle with them in PHOTOSHOP unlike JPGs which slowly break apart and go 'blocky' when you edit and save them (bet you didn’t know that)
The trouble with working with RAW files is that they EAT up computer time - saving a 100 RAWs out to JPG could take an hour or two - photographers have been known to run their computers over night to make CONTACT SHEETS for clients - it is easy for ONE days shooting to turn into THREE days of computer time

SO WHAT DO I DO FOR YOU?
Well I'll do anything I am paid to do but here is what I like to do;
I shoot RAW and CAMERA JPGS at the same time
I then deliver you a CD of the CAMERA JPGS with the work completed.
RETOUCHING
We now have a set of images that look really good, balanced, exposed and all the rest
But the brands you are competing against don’t stop there - they want to make images 'better than life' - they cheat, lie, exaggerate and sell more stuff – everyone’s at it - yes everyone - realise it - the pictures you see everywhere in the modern advertising media are all retouched - ALL OF THEM
ALL OF THEM

Every car advert, make up advert, beer advert, coffee advert, hotel brochure, telly advert, all of them and it’s what your customers are expecting to see - everything else just looks a bit amateur

MY RETOUCHING
Ok hardcore retouching is a profession, long legs, silky skin the queen taken from the palace and stuck on a grouse moor
This is what I can do..
BASIC RETOUCH
Skin smoothing, blemish removal, a bit of chopping of bingo wings, killing a few crows feet, going up a cup size, removing clutter from the background, cleaning stuff up, getting rid of some folds in clothes
Just making the images look a bit smoother
It takes about half an hour per image and is worth it
TONING
That is merging a black and white and a colour version of the same image and its very trendy right now partly because the files from digital cameras are a bit garish
I recomend that too

Hopefully we are now speaking the same lingo, we will understand each other better and you know what you are paying for
AB