You are or want to become a photographer… Why do you need processing software ?

Note : This page has been translated into English from French by a machine translation tool

Whether you are doing or want to do amateur photography on events, photographing nature landscapes or wildlife for pleasure, or whether you want to make the art of photography your profession in one or more of these areas, you will quickly be confronted with the need to acquire and/or learn how to use photographic retouching and image processing software.

Indeed, photography is a field that has exploded since the advent of smartphones (see our article Photo in the world for more information) and today we almost all have one of these tools in our pocket that allows us to take pictures. However, if you want to be able to exercise your creativity and take advantage of all that photography has to offer us in terms of possibilities to obtain pictures that are as exceptional as they are original, you need to incorporate two essential constants into the equation: the use of a digital reflex camera and the capture of raw images in RAW format. Thus, for a photographer, whether amateur or professional, offering quality images on social networks, on a specialized site for his personal enjoyment, or presenting on his own website or producing professional quality photographs for his clients, necessarily involves the processing of his images.

You don’t believe us ? Have you ever had the opportunity to photograph with a digital SLR in the two image formats it is capable of producing ? If you can answer yes to this question, it will certainly not have escaped you that there is a significant difference in file size between two equivalent images, one of which would be in JPEG format and the other in RAW format. We won’t go into details, but the difference between these two files is that the first is a compressed format and not the second. The latter therefore has information that the former has permanently destroyed. That’s why I insisted earlier on the necessity to capture your images in a format called RAW, a non-destructive format. There are a multitude of RAW formats that are generally proprietary. Thus, the file extension you will get will depend on the brand of your camera (.CR2 or more recently .CR3 for Canon for example). We will specify before we go on, in order to avoid offending the purists, that the RAW format is not really an image format per se. It is actually a file containing data recorded by the sensor of your camera and which will allow our famous processing software to extract an image.

You will have understood it, this format will allow you during your processing to recover details on your image that you would have lost if you had let your camera save the snapshot in a compressed format.

Let’s continue… You have taken a series of pictures in the middle of nature or during an event and you wish to know what to do with all these photographs. Then we won’t dwell here on the work of sorting the images, but this is for sure your next stop. This is an essential step in the restitution of a work – by which we mean a portfolio of images – of quality, it being obvious that you will have to eliminate a significant part of the captured images because you will judge that they have no potential or not enough potential to give a visual or emotional result that meets your expectations.

Finally, here we are… the processing of your pictures. We assume here that you have completed your sorting, having discarded all the pictures of poor quality or without sufficient interest. You can then move on to the ultimate phase. Again, to avoid any remarks, it can sometimes happen that the phases of sorting and processing are partially combined. Indeed, if some plates seem to be close in terms of quality, it is always possible to process them all in order to choose the plate(s) offering the best rendering after treatment.

For those who still doubt the usefulness of this last step, we will complete our argument. It is no secret that the capabilities of digital cameras are constantly evolving and we can consider today as excellent pictures captured by reflex cameras, especially if they are high-end cameras, in good conditions and with optimal settings. But there are some technical brakes that, for example, sensors have a limited dynamic range and are not as efficient as the human eye to capture both the light and dark parts of a high-contrast image. We can also note the defects of some lenses such as vignetting or chromatic aberrations. Here again, we cannot go into too many technical explanations but it is these small defects intrinsic to the characteristics of our dear machines that we must correct.

Fortunately, today software tools are available to correct these defects and sublimate the results that these already powerful devices are capable of producing. These software tools are then the solution to improve the characteristics of your photograph in terms of its brightness, clarity or even its colors and to bring a superb visual rendering to an image that was already attractive at the beginning in terms of its content, its composition, or even the emotion conveyed. It goes without saying, however, that they will in no way serve to compensate for the photographer’s low level of mastery of his art or to make a sharp and pleasing image that has been captured with significant motion blur. We are not going to present you miracle cures but a way to bring the final touch to your pictures.

If you are still ready to embark on this last operation that will make your photographs ready for distribution, we will discuss the most well-known software programs for this task. There are two main ones with slightly different functionalities :

• Adobe Lightroom : lets you edit your photos for brightness, contrast, and color on your computer, tablet, mobile device, and on the web. The software also offers you the possibility to save your photographs in the Cloud thanks to 1TB of storage to facilitate their saving and especially their accessibility.
• Adobe Photoshop : it allows you instead to transform your images to create original compositions and bring your ideas to life. You can combine several images or transform your photos into 3D objects on a computer or tablet.

There are two versions that are derivatives of the software presented above, namely Adobe Lightroom Classic which is a version of Adobe Lightroom for your computer, available on Windows and macOS operating systems, and Adobe Photoshop Express rather suitable for mobile devices and available under Android, iOS but also on the Microsoft Store for your computer equipped with Windows. We invite you to click on the links to access our detailed articles for each of the above software and learn more about their features.