[madisonphotogrl]

So if I have to do post processing on each photo every time I shoot, am I doing something wrong?

[palmor]

I think it depends (there is a concrete answer)

For me if I'm just taking snapshots of something (nephew's bday part ect) I usually don't post process those things at all. I might find a photo here or there that I need to correct exposure on but mostly I just let Lightroom convert with the default settings. For these types of events I usually take a few shots and determine if there are any specific settings I want to shoot with for the day, just to avoid the need to post process anything.

If I'm going through photos of a day out birding for example I'll go pick out all the better shots and I will post process each of those for even minor things I see.

I have no idea if that helped or not


John

[emalvick]

So if I have to do post processing on each photo every time I shoot, am I doing something wrong?

That is so subjective, I'm not sure you'll find a right answer.

When you say you have to do post processing, is it because you are constantly having to adjust the exposure? or are you just doing minor tweaks here and there?

Are you a perfectionist?

I find I do some PP on each photo, but that's partially because I work in RAW, and I figure I might as well make the most of a file before I output a JPG or Tiff. However, for all intensive purposes, my shots are pretty close to begin with, so I am not usually doing anything major unless I did make a mistake and underexpose a shot or end up in a situation that was beyond my abilities when I took the shot like a backlit scene.

Like John, though, I find that for simple snapshots, I'll adjust one photo and apply the adjustments to all the photos. Only on the real keepers for myself do I bother going the extra mile (or km )

[HouseOfHorla]

short answer is 'no'. unless you are a purist in which case 'yes'.

it's all a matter of personal choice and the results you want to see.

helpful? i think not, but there's not really a final answer.

[Marc Sabatella]

I'd put it this way: if the pictures are so bad that anyone else would agree they are unusable without PP, then yes, you are doing something wrong.

If they look fine to most people, but you're not satisfied, then no, you're not doing anything wrong - you're just picky. While there's a *chance* that choosing different processing settings in the camera menu (eg, natural/bright, saturation, contrast, etc) would make you happier, really are pretty coarse controls. As far as I am concerned, the photo hasn't been taken that couldn't benefit from some custom adjustment of the exposure curve at least. It's insane to assume that out of the literally *infinite* ways an exposure curve could be contructed, the one that happened to chosen by the camera JPEG engine or your RAW processors defaults is going to optimum all the time, or indeed ever. But for "most" images, "most" people would say the default is "good enough". So back to what I said - if you're always doing PP on an image others would say is good enough, you're just picky :-)

FWIW, I rarely mess with this in pictures taken outdoors, but indoors, I very often want to change the ratio and distribution of shadows to midtones to highlights. And of course, get the WB looking how I want it (the right balance of capturing the color of the light but also the local colors of the scene). I typically custom process *one* image this way, then just copy those same settings to my other images from the same setting, so it doesn't take more than a few seconds to process a whole shoot this way. I may then go in and tweak some images further, but for many shots, the copied settings are good enough.

[Kerrowdown]

I find as I shoot in raw, most images can benefit for a touch of sharpening at least.

Otherwise it's all a question of how far you want to go.