One of the most frequent things I am asked from well-intentioned people is “You edit ALL your pictures? Even all your personal family and travel images? Why spend so much time doing that??”  I suppose part of the answer is us photographers are normally slightly OCD and normally pretty huge perfectionists so there is no way I could edit just a few of the pictures that I was going to keep. I want them all to have the same unifying style that marks them as my photos.

But the more technical reason is that digital cameras, while absolutely amazing, simply cannot capture contrast and colors the way our eyes see them. Even if you nail the shot perfectly in camera, it will still be slightly more “flat” than how our eyes processed the image in real life. Shooting in manual mode and in RAW files (not JPEGS) is essential in order to have complete control of the images from the beginning to the end of the creative process. And that’s just it, taking a picture is just the start because photography is itself a process, it’s an art, and in many ways, capturing images in my camera is kind of like drawing a very sophisticated sketch that still needs to be colored in and perfected.

Having said that, lightroom is magical if you know how to use it as a tool, but on it’s own, it will not produce amazing images. Lightroom cannot fix a bad composition, or add that beautiful bokeh to images, or create glorious golden hour sunshine or make blurry images suddenly crystal clear. It’s just as important to learn how to take the images you want in your camera as it is to learn how to master lightroom (or any other editing software). I would in no way consider myself an expert at lightroom (there are plenty of people out there who know more than me), but after using it for almost five years and spending hours perfecting my style and figuring out how all the sliders and options effect my images, I have gotten my workflow down to a short and specific process and I can, 99% of the time, without fail produce the final image that I had in my head when I originally snapped the picture.

To help demonstrate the magic that is called Lightroom 5, I’m sharing a few before and after screenshots from some of my more recent edits:

I hope this sheds some light on the sometimes mysterious-seeming reasoning behind photographers who edit every single photo they intend to keep (whether for personal or professional purposes). This should also help to explain why you will probably never find a professional photographer who will be willing to give you unedited images. As a professional photographer I am an artist and like any other kind of artist, I want to deliver my very best and finished work.

Xoxo,

Mary Kate