The four purposes of post-processing

Whether for digital or film photography, post-processing is an essential step into the image creation process. However, there are so many post-processing softwares on the market with different interfaces that people get easily distracted from the purpose of post-processing. They tend to think more and more in terms of what tools they have at their disposal and what they could do with it, which is quite illogical. You don't grab a hammer on a Saturday evening and wonder what you might do with it. You start with a project that could be planting a nail in a wall, and then you think about how you could do that. And then comes the hammer. So, if you have always been randomly twisting buttons on Capture One or Lightroom until you get a nice, pleasing result, you have been wrong your whole life. Here are the four purposes of post-processing:

Eliminate flaws

The first purpose of post-processing is to correct the flaws in your image. Your image could tilt a little bit, your lens could show a little bit of distorsion or color fringing, your camera could have missed white balance, or your subject could have a button on the cheek. These are flaws you can correct right-away with any decent post-processing software and it is usually the first step I take into post-processing an image. Of course, a flaw isn't always a flaw in photography, a blurry image can be stunning. It's up to you to decide what are the flaws before correcting them.

Enhance what matters

When you take a picture, you make a rather radical choice: the whole world stands before (and around) you, but you decide to trow it all to the trash and to only keep the little part of it that fits in your frame. In a nutshell, you decide what is going into your picture and what isn't. Post-processing is a natural continuation of it as you get to chose, among all the things you decided to put in your frame, what matters and what doesn't. When you are done correcting flaws in your image, you can start applying local adjustments to push forward the main elements that matter to you in your composition. Post-processing softwares offer tools like masks and gradient filters that allow you to apply local adjustments to your images to drive the viewer's attention to what is important to you.

Apply your own graphic style

Your image is now free of flaws and its lecture is cristal clear, but it isn't finished yet. Post-processing gives you the opportunity to make the overall looking of your image better. Of course, what is better for you is not necessarily better for someone else, and processing your images with taste is what will make your photographs unique because your tastes are different than someone else's. Tools that affect the overall look of the image like the contrast curve, color luminance and saturation will be useful to enhance a picture with your own graphic signature.