How do you edit and post-process your wildlife photos?

Software is a super important aspect of photography. One thing to note is that the act of taking the photo is where the quality of the photo really comes from. A bad photo can be edited and sometimes transformed into a great wildlife image, but nothing replaces, lighting, balance, and the overall composition when taking the photo itself. A great photo needs very little editing, other than potentially a little color grading to match he rest of your grid or photos on a website. Focus on getting a great photograph from the start.

The choice of software depends on the platforms you are intending to use and the market you're targeting. If you're trying to produce the highest quality photo-editing product, I would use Adobe Lightroom, but if you need additional flexibility for manipulating the image beyond normal photo-editing controls and need to add designed layers, use Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Lightroom for Mobile is also a great tool for editing and posting on the fly, but it's good to use the desktop version of Adobe Lightroom so that you make your photo editing process efficient and so that you have the highest quality results using a professional monitor.

I am a fan of Lightroom. It is the easiest way to make adjustments to your photos. There are many presets available online that are helpful. Lightroom is very useful to adjust shadows, highlights, exposure or sharpness. Photoshop is useful if you need to remove something that shouldn't be there. I have been playing with their new AI features. If it is something that needs to be replaced with a similar object, like a rock or group of plants it is helpful, otherwise the AI feature still needs some improvement.

It's extremely important that you have the correct date-time amongst your different cameras and make sure that you adjust the time taking into account the timezone, and to one-second or less accuracy if you software allows for that. Photo's take up a lot of space, so I suggest that you have a tiered labeling system keeping in mind the possibility of having to move your pictures off that drive. I like to organize by year, month and project as some project are multi-day events.

I use Lightroom to store photos on my laptop. I organize them first in folders with the year. Inside the year folder, I label them by the location, or whatever is most important about that group of photos.

You have to get really good at flagging the photos and hiding the ones that were rejected, while having smart folders for great pictures. I like to go through the photo's at the widest gallery view so that I can get a birdseye view to identify sets of photos that subconsciously catch me eye. Don't forget to make use of multiple flag colors and the rating system. Quality is extremely important when dealing with wildlife photography, and the focus needs to be spot-on for the eyes, mouth, the face. I like to use the 1:1 zoom so that I can determine the sharpness of the image. I do agree that the photo needs to tell a story, so trust your gut but don't get stuck on that one photo that you love and doesn't make the cut.

You need to be ruthless when going thru your photos to decide which ones to keep. When I first started, I kept way too many that I thought I could fix up by editing them. That just created way too much work! I have learned to be more ruthless, and just go ahead and delete the ones that are not good. During my initial pass-thru, if there is a photo that jumps out at me because it is a good one, I flag it. My first impression is usually spot on!

The histogram is your friend because you don't want to push the quality of the image outside of safe bounds. Wildlife photography needs to be extremely accurate as you're trying to capture all the details, colors and contrast as best as possible. I like to adjust the exposure at max and min levels so that I can see what the lowest and highest bounds of the picture are. Make sure parts of the photo are not overexposed. Mask the wildlife vs. the surroundings and adjust each separately so that you can produce a great background and foreground. Don't oversaturate and always compare your result to the original.

When making adjustments, I always adjust the exposure first! Then I make any color adjustments. Most of the time my camera is pretty smart, and the colors look great. Messing around with colors sometimes makes the photo look unrealistic. I have a preset that gives colors just a little bump, not to much to make things look over edited.

Be careful when dealing with details and sharpness as you can make the picture over-digitized or washed, unpleasant and unprofessional. Remember to bounce between the original photo and your edit so that you don't over-edit. Spot-removal, healing and clone may be used but is challenging with wild-life photography since you may be dealing with hair, feathers, spots or textures. If possible remove the distractions without affecting the subject of the photo.

Details and sharpness need to be adjusted very carefully. It is kind of like salt. A little may be good, but too much will ruin the dish!

I prefer not to use creative effects on the photos as they can appear overproduced. However, I do love black and white filters that bush the contrast of the blacks and shadows in the deep black. I love a very contrasty black and white photos. When working with wildlife its good to bring out the colors and contrast of the subject.

The best way make a wildlife photo standout is to capture a great photo at the scene using a long lens with a wide aperture if possible. The quality of the lens and dynamic range of the camera is highly determinant of the quality of the picture. Of course, one must shoot in RAW so that the true dynamic range of the photo is able to be manipulated. When it comes to shooting wildlife, you have to sit, wait, observe so that you can capture your subject in its natural setting.