Can editing make a bad picture good?

There are those who say that a photograph has to be good straight from the camera and, if it’s not, then you can’t make it good with editing. Some hardcore SOOC (straight out of camera) fans think you can make a picture entirely in-camera. What no-one really dares to suggest, though, is that you can make a picture work with editing alone.

I’m not so sure about that. It’s true that you can waste hours trying to fix a picture only to find it can’t be done. When a photo really is a pig’s ear and none of your tricks, or presets, or film simulations can turn it into a silk purse. This is not just an issue for amateurs. I’ve shooting and editing images for years, and I still get caught up trying to fix images that just don’t have greatness in them. It’s not always easy to tell.

But there is another category of images where editing is not an attempt to rescue a mediocre photograph, but part of the process. I started my photographic career shooting and developing black and white film and making my own wet prints in a darkroom, and like so many black and white photographers before and since, I treated the exposure and the negative as the first phase and the darkroom as the second phase in the process.

In black and white, the darkroom phase is usually essential. Sometimes, now and again, you can get a negative that makes a perfect print as-is, with not darkroom work, no swapping paper grades, no dodging and burning. But that doesn’t happen often. If you look at any of the work of the great masters, what you see is not just the negative, but how it’s been interpreted and enhanced in the darkroom.

Black and white is a special visual language that depends on contrast, light and shade, composition, texture, all of which CAN exist naturally in the scenes you photograph but almost always properly come to life in the darkroom. Or, in today’s world, in a photo editor.

It’s not just black and white that benefits from this digital darkroom work. Back in those analog days we didn’t really get to mess with color images in the same way, but they do respond to the same techniques. Just as we used to shoot black and white with the expectation of using darkroom techniques to make the photos work, it’s possible to shoot color images knowing that they’re going to need some extra work later to properly realise their potential.

Shooting to edit

So I do think that there is a hybrid approach that perhaps we all adopt without really thinking about it, where we know the image straight out of the camera is not going to be good, but that it can be turned into something good during the editing phase.

Editing is not a cheap fix for sub-standard images. For many of us it’s a necessary step, where photography is a two-stage process of (1) capture and (2) realisation.

You can take a picture knowing perfectly well that the image in the camera is not and never will be good enough on its own, but you have an editing process in mind which you know will produce the finished result you’re looking for.

The image with this article is an extreme example. It was taken while testing a fisheye zoom with a subject which I was sure would suit it, but in very flat lighting that just wouldn’t make for a visually interesting image. In fact, the finished image I had in my mind would never exist in nature and could only be produced in software – just as many of the classic images we admire were created in a camera but brought to life in the darkroom.

So perhaps you can’t use photo editing software to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but you CAN use it to reveal the silk purse in what might at first glance look like a bland and worthless image. The trick lies in visualizing what an image could become when you take it.

In this case, I used Capture One for the edit, but you could do the same thing in Lightroom or other editors.

1. I used a black and white Style that included Clarity, Contrast and Grain effects for the base look
2. I added a post-crop vignette effect to darken the corners, add to the visual contrast and ‘frame’ the subject
3. I used on of my favorite tricks, a ‘floating’ radial gradient mask to increase the exposure, which I can then move around the frame to find the best position
4. I finished off with a curves adjustment layer to tweak the overall contrast

• More black and white articles
• More Capture One articles