If you had to pick one edit, then this should be it. In my view, cropping and rotating (which are really two halves of the same operation) is the most critical element. However, the human eye is quite tolerant of these variations and less prone to the conscious complaint. You also want to get the exposure balance correct how you do this will depend upon your personal style but could involve editing shadows/highlights, curves, or levels. However, that is about the gross error most of the time it is small corrections for metering where you havenвЂ™t applied any exposure compensation and are usually in the one-stop range. Sure, you can have desperately under or over-exposed images which you might be able to rescue to an acceptable level, although blinkies are non-recoverable. Focus is the most critical to get right in-camera, although sharpening can at least partially mitigate small mistakes.Д«y far and away the most critical element - in my opinion - is the crop and rotation. So what are the core image edits? I think these boil down to the three primary controls you utilize when shooting: framing, exposure, and focus.ДЇor post-production, this means adjusting crop and rotation, relative brightness, and sharpening, while also adding in color. Or, to put it another way, you want to capture the moment, and how you frame it is less critical. Perhaps inevitably, the end results will not always meet your aspirations and the role of editing is to take that less-than-perfect capture and turn it into a more polished output. This is no more evident than when shooting weddings or sports you are in a time-dependent situation and have one chance (no re-runs!), often with limited gear. Divorcing editing from shooting is increasingly apparent the more frenetic your shooting becomes. As soon as you step outside, then more time is spent covering any mistakes. Only in a controlled environment - typically a studio - do you get the luxury to control every aspect of your shoot.

This then gave you something to work with in the dark room. This created a dilemma: did I capture the image I wanted? The solution was to shoot multiple images - both repeats and variations - on the same theme.

Whereas a smartphone shooter may well take one image, touch it up, and post it before moving on to the next, film required that there was a pregnant pause between shooting and editing that necessitated focusing on one before the other. Core Image EditsДЇor the more subtle eye, editing is a far more nuanced practice that has deep roots in the film world. This is no more true than when shooting with a smartphone where the cameraвЂ™s weaknesses are brutally exposed, to then be deftly covered up by some clever automated post-production which goes completely unnoticed on a heavily over-saturated, over-sharpened, selfie on Instagram. In truth, most of us sit somewhere between those two extremes because we donвЂ™t have the luxury to outsource, donвЂ™t get it right in-camera every time, and because some things you just canвЂ™t do in-camera.

Photo time edit