The Importance of Post-Production: Part One

This will be the first entry in a series I hope to keep up for a while, entitled "The Importance of Post-Production". My belief is that no matter how skilled a photographer you are, good post-production will always give you a better photo than you started with.

This is a picture of my friend Lexi's eyeball. I did some work on the photo in Lightroom and Photoshop. Increased contrast and played with the colors a bit, bumped up sharpness and cloned out a few specks of makeup under her eye. The difference is subtle, but definitely noticeable.

Roll over this image to see what it looked like before post-production. What isn't immediately apparent – due to the size of this pic – is the increased detail in the eye (due to the increase in sharpness via Photoshop). Click on the pic to see it on my Flickr page, where you can see it full-sized. It looks much more impressive that way.