"A great photo is not made by the editing - it’s made first, then refined by the editing." - 365 Project, Day 325

Gavin Seim's last key to crazy awesome picture quality is processing.  This is the only one I disagree with, but only somewhat.  My main gripe with processing is this: you can make or break a picture with any of the previous five keys (optics, sensor, light, focus and stability), but you can't make or break a shot in post.  A crap shot is a crap shot regardless of editing, and by the same token a great shot can be a great shot without any editing whatsoever.

In any case, Mr. Seim is a big proponent of post-processing (though, as with all photographers, he much prefers getting it right in-camera).  He states that you take a great shot and massage it and tweak it and make it better though Lightroom and Photoshop processing.  He does say, however, not to move sliders around for the sake of moving sliders around.  You do that kind of thing only if you have a reason to, because any small tweak you do introduces artifacts that you don't want.

Mr. Seim loves dodging and burning, for example.  He says to only use these tools for a reason, otherwise, you're just degrading your blacks or highlights needlessly.  To a certain extent, you can tweak a picture one way or another, but I don't find processing as important as the other keys.

Here are our pictures, mine being processed a bit, after having disagreed somewhat with Mr. Seim.

Frank

His note: Spooning bananas.  Yeah, they do that too.

My shot

Another one of those sunrise shots I tend to have.  I just like the dramatic clouds and the sunlight seeping through the trees.  It was cold outside, but the shot turned out really nice.  I really wish the background were a bit nicer than simple houses, but you can't really see those too much and they're not the focus of the shot.

Next!