WCC Post Processing Training Resources

Welcome to the Waverley Camera Club post-processing resources website, an initiative of Paul Spence’s Creative SIG.

This website provides some training resources on photographic post-processing techniques, and will grow over time as I add new material. The menu structure (see the navigation list to the right on all pages) should give a guide to help you find what you want, but the search box at the top right is also a good way to find keywords.

I don’t want to spend my life re-inventing the wheel, so mostly I will be generating this training site with a bit of my own material but mostly by curating a selection of links to other people’s instructions and videos on how to achieve different effects in post processing. Fortunately there is a wealth of free resources, including software, so developing your photographic post-processing needn’t be expensive. According to our recent survey, many of the respondents use Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom, but there are also a lot of people who use other software packages.

Each person has different preferences for learning style and educational resources, so I have tried to include both video based resources and ones that use pictures and text. If you have found other resources that you find valuable, feel free to add them via a comment, or email them to me.

With a bit of editing, a fairly unexciting image (left) can become much more memorable. Move the slider left or right to see more of the before or after image.

Within post-processing I will try to cover the processes that occur with your digital image file once you take it out of your camera. I’ll give some advice on storage strategies and backup and file management (often much neglected). There will be instructions on basic editing – adjusting exposure, contrast, colour balance, cropping, sharpening and so on, and, of course, I will cover some more sophisticated processing including local edits and the process of combining material from multiple images to make a new composite image creations.

In difficult lighting a series of different exposures (eg left) can make a high dynamic range (HDR) composite image (right) with details that cannot be captured in a single exposure. The image was also straightened and cropped.

Feel free to browse the site via the menu system or use the search tool to find what you need. If something you want isn’t there, let me know and I will see if I can add something … this is a going to be a work in progress for quite some time.

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