When you edit your images, do you make a lot of changes?
How much editing is actually too much?
I'm gonna talk about it on today's episode of...
Ask David Bergman!
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Now, today's question was sent in by Benjy S.
and he wants to know...
I shoot a lot of high school and small college sports.
I'm wondering how much editing you do, or recommend, on in-game images.
I know some sports photographers do very little and some do a lot.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Oh, this is a really good topic. Thanks, Benjy, for sending it in.
Let's talk about editing and first, we need to define what that means.
The definition has actually changed over the years.
When I started out back in the old days, young man...
editing was the process of culling through your images and picking the best ones.
You would "edit down" to the best of the best.
In film production, for example, the editor is the person who takes all the material that was shot,
and cuts it down to just the parts needed to tell the story.
Color grading is the process of applying tone curves, color, contrast,
and anything else needed to make the final movie look how you want.
Now, for still photos, it's pretty commonly accepted, that that process is now called "editing."
Although, you can certainly say "toning" or even "post-processing" if you want.
So now, let's talk about how much editing can be done.
Before digital photography, most of the editing was exclusively in the dark room,
when you made prints from negatives.
Master printers would spend hours making one final print
by carefully tweaking every little detail.
For most people, though, there were limits on what could be done (practically speaking) in the dark room.
Simple things like contrast, burning, and dodging were pretty easy
and very commonly done at that time.
Now if you don't know, burning and dodging is the act of selectively lightening or darkening
only certain parts of your photo.
I actually did a video about that topic and went into it in much more detail.
I'll put a link down to that video below if you wanna check that out after you watch this one, of course.
Today, with the advent of digital photography, as you probably know,
you can do almost anything to a photo with just a click of a button.
From simple things like lightening and darkening to more complex toning
like selective color and tone curves.
Those were really hard to do in the dark room.
But now, you can severely change the look of a photo using a free app on your phone, for example.
And with the newest AI technology, you can change almost any part of a photo
and make it look pretty realistic.
So now that we have all that, how much is too much?
And where do you draw the line?
Is it okay, for example, to remove a distracting element in the background?
What about turning a gray sky to a beautiful sunset?
Or maybe even changing someone's body shape?
Where does it stop?
Well, like most questions in a creative field like photography, the answer is...
it depends.
Of course, it depends on how the image is being used
but it also could depend on who you're working for and your viewer's expectations.
Let me explain.
In the editorial photography world,
places like newspapers and magazines that cover things like news and sports,
severe editing is a big no-no.
The point of news photography is to show the world as it happened,
you wanna convey that information to the public in the most truthful way possible.
Editorial photographers are usually allowed to do things that were generally done in the dark room,
brightness, contrast, slight dodging and burning - things like that.
But anything beyond that, like, removing a telephone pole coming out of someone's head,
is a fire-able offense - yes! You could get fired for that.
That's how serious this normally is.
I know that an argument could be made that simply removing a telephone pole
might not actually change the meaning of a photo in any kind of important way.
However, the distinction for news photography is that once people find out that something like that was done,
it casts doubt on any other pictures you might see from that photographer or in that newspaper.
If they're actually willing to do that once, they're likely to do it again on something that may be more important.
Now, I understand, of course that this is an idealistic view of the world
and the public's trust in the media today may already be quite tainted.
But that doesn't mean they shouldn't still be held to a higher standard of ethics.
Editorial photographers should be doing everything they can to communicate truthfully.
Now, of course, there are a lot of images produced today and only a small portion are for editorial.
Fashion photography is another beast altogether.
It's generally accepted that portraits are retouched.
Now, I'm not sure the public knows exactly how much those photos are changed,
but nevertheless, the viewer's expectation is that the images are meant to sell a product or promote a brand,
not necessarily to tell the complete truth.
It's obvious that the subject is posing for the photo and wasn't just documented for news gathering purposes.
So the acceptable amount of editing on a fashion photo is way past what's allowed for editorial.
And then when we talk about more creative styles like fine art photography, for example,
There is zero expectation of truth. You can change anything and even use AI to add things.
Those images are limited only by your imagination.
Now, Benjy asked about how much editing I do on my own images. As I said,
it really does depend. I'm gonna give you an example.
When I worked for Sports Illustrated, we did absolutely no editing on the images at all.
When I started there, all of the photographers were still shooting film and just shipping the unprocessed rolls
to the magazine's lab in New York City.
Even when we transitioned to digital, the raw files were sent in
so that the pre-press department could do their own toning for print.
To my knowledge, there was never any editing done on live sports photos
beyond the standard dark room work (things I talked about before like
brightness, contrast, and color).
A couple of years ago, I digitized this photo that I made of Tom Brady
scoring his first ever play-off touchdown.
Yes, his very first one! Believe it or not, it actually wasn't a pass.
He ran it in during the famous Tuck Rule Game
against the Oakland Raiders in 2002.
It was Brady's first season as a starter and the last-ever game at the old Foxboro Stadium.
They did go on to win the Super Bowl that year.
Now, I shot this on film and when I digitized it, I only did some of those simple darkroom tweaks.
Even that can be subjective though. For example,
the magazine ran the image again when Brady retired.
You can see how they chose to edit it compared to mine.
Now, I don't have a problem with that and it doesn't break any editorial ethics rules in my book.
Now, today, most of my work is as a tour photographer.
I'm hired by the artists and bands directly,
and I'm basically creating promotional images for advertising, PR, and social media.
Those are not editorial.
Personally, since my background is in newspapers and magazines,
I try to get it right in camera as much as possible
and don't like to do much editing at all.
But I will make small exceptions here and there.
I'm Luke Combs's tour photographer and I'm on the road with him full-time,
and I made this shot of him going to town on a drummer's china cymbal
during a show last year in Minneapolis.
Here's how it looked after some basic toning
but I thought there were a couple things in the background that were distracting.
So I removed a small piece of cymbal on the left and a microphone on the right.
Now, again, if this was for a newspaper, I could get fired for that.
Absolutely could get fired.
But for this particular usage, I have no problem doing it.
The only issue, honestly, is I'd rather not spend too much time working on my images
and if I just shoot it right, there's not actually that much to do.
It's very rare for me to remove things like mic stands
but if it's a strong photo and the offending element is relatively easy to remove,
I'll make the extra effort to clean it up.
Now, on a more extreme case, I recently made portraits of an up and coming band in Miami, Florida,
called Tongue Tied.
This was actually during a live workshop,
so my primary focus was to teach the attendees how to make cool band portraits.
I wasn't in my own studio space, it was on location in another studio
so I just worked with what they had.
The background was white, so I put up some V-flats to give me a dark background
I put gels on the Canon speedlites, and used atmosphere aerosol spray to get some smoke in the background.
and you're looking at the final image after editing.
Do you wanna see the unretouched shot?
Here it is.
And there were lots of pieces of tape on the V-flats,
you can see a seam in the middle of the photo where they overlapped.
And you can even see the light stands in there.
Now, this one took me a little more time but I was able to clean it up quite nicely.
I even used a little AI to extend out the lights just a little bit.
Point is, this was a portrait for a workshop and for the band to use as promo material.
It's not editorial, so I went a bit crazy with my edits,
and that's just fine in this particular case.
So those are three different cases with very different amounts of editing.
Benjy, for sports, I would do as little editing as possible.
People expect sports photos to be real, especially if it's for media coverage of the games.
If you work for the team and they're using a photo for a poster, for example, you could probably get away with a bit more editing, if needed.
But I usually leave that to the art department, and would rather deliver the images with just basic corrections and no extra editing.
But that's just me, what do you all think?
How much editing is too much?
Has the line changed now that we have all this new technology?
Or should we be even more vigilant as photographers and always try to convey the truth?
Let me know what you think down in the comments below.
Remember, just like Benjy did, you can send in your own photo questions by going to AskDavidBergman.com.
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