POST-PRODUCTION

Only half of what goes into creating a professional street style photo occurs in the actual taking of the photo. The other half occurs behind the scenes, in post-production. The editing is just as important as taking the picture and will propel your photos from good to extraordinary. A little editing and light correction can even salvage what would otherwise be an unusable photo.

Editing

Before we begin with this section, we have an important tip to recommend to you: Think of editing as applying makeup. Editing should enhance what is naturally there, not completely change what you shot. Go for a natural look, don’t apply so much makeup that it becomes a clown’s face. Many amateur photographers go overboard with lens flare effects, 1970s-style faded tints, sepia tones, over-saturated colors, and extreme contrast. Don’t fall into these traps. You are free to discover what works best for you as you develop your own style, and you certainly don’t have to do exactly as we do—just remember that fashion at its best often conveys class, sophistication, and refinement. Imagine Leonardo da Vinci painting gaudy colors onto the Mona Lisa, and sprinkling glitter over it. Why “fix” something that is already beautiful? Food for thought.

To edit all photos and images on theSFStyle.com, we use a combination of iPhoto and Photoshop. Apple computers and software are very well suited for working with photos, but most computers with a decent photo-editing suite will have the same basic functions as iPhoto. So most, if not all, of our tips here will apply to you even if you don’t use iPhoto.

Adobe Photoshop is expensive, and is not absolutely necessary. Its advanced features can be more than you need for minor street style edits. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to have it if you’ve got the bucks to spend. Adobe Photoshop can also be useful when optimizing your photos for Web use. We’ll talk more about Web optimization momentarily.

Selection

The first step is to review your images and select the best ones of each subject. It’s okay to choose several, even of the same type of shot—you can narrow your selection after editing.

Optimization for the Web

If you plan to post the photos online, you need to optimize your photos for Web. High-resolution photos are usually very large files, and multiple large files can slow down load time on a blog or Web site. Remember that not everyone who comes to your blog will have a fast computer and Internet connection. Some users may even be viewing your images on their smart phones. You want to make your blog load as quickly as possible, lest you lose potential readership due to latency issues. Smaller size photos are easier to work with in general.

We use Adobe Photoshop to optimize photos. Once you have your photo open in Photoshop, you select the FILE tab and go to SAVE FOR WEB. This sometimes takes a minute. You’ll see that it offers you an optimized version of your photo, which probably looks to you exactly the same as the original version, except that the image size is far smaller. Go ahead and save the photo, and you’re done! Most older computers are brought to their knees by Photoshop since the program hogs a lot of your computer’s memory—so do not open too many large-file photos at once. We recommend five to eight images, depending on how much memory your computer has and what it can handle.

If you’re working with large file sizes and don’t have a program for optimizing photos, a “cheat” is to take a screen capture of the photo. This significantly reduces file size while maintaining high enough quality for Web use. To take a screen capture on a Mac computer, hold down Command + Shift + 4, and crop as you like. To take a screen capture on a PC computer, hold the ALT key, click on the image, then press the PrntScr key. You have now saved the image to your PC’s clipboard. Open up Paint, which is standard in any Windows OS, and paste the image by holding Ctrl + V. Done! Now you can save the image in the desired format.

Cropping

Once you’ve optimized your selected photos, you can drag and drop them back into your photo editing program. You will want to go through and crop and realign your photos to address composition and balance. Play around and see what looks best. You can crop out unsightly objects at the edges of the photo or crop down to a particular subject to focus on, such as a purse or shoes. Ideally though, you should have some close-ups of those items already in your reel.

Lighting Correction

Correcting the lighting will make the most dramatic change by far in the post-production process. iPhoto makes this practice very fast and easy. The most basics steps to correct lighting are:

— Hit the EDIT button.

— Start by hitting ENHANCE. This usually helps, but if it does not make your photo better, you can hit UNDO.

Don’t worry if your photo is overall better, but still a bit too dark or light. That can usually be fixed.

— Go to the EFFECTS and ADJUST tabs.

— In the EFFECTS tab, hit BOOST COLOR.

— If the photo is improved, let it be. If not, UNDO.

— In the ADJUST box, begin by moving the levels up and down to see how your photo reacts. We start with the top right-hand level adjustment, and work our way right. These sliders darken and lighten certain areas of your photo. The goal is to make the colors of your photo as vivid and pleasing as possible without going overboard by overexposing or underexposing your photo.

All of these changes can be undone, so don’t be afraid to play around. Try moving the adjustment bars to their maximums and gradually lowering them to an acceptable level.

Details and highlights are used to show more of the details in certain areas. Use these features sparingly, as too much will cause your photo to look very odd. Both are useful to make a washed-out background more visible, but pay attention to your subject’s skin, since these adjustments often adversely affect skintones.

Shadows affects just what you would expect—the shadows in your photo. This is extremely helpful. Use it to correct any shots that may have a little too much shadow obscuring important areas of the photo. Remember that a bit of shadow is good for contrast, and photos without any shadow at all can look muted and unnatural.

Saturation controls how much color saturates your photo. It is useful to boost color in photos that rely heavily on how striking the color is. This is often the case on close-up shots of bags and accessories. If you have done the steps in the order we’ve laid out for you so far, you will rarely need to adjust saturation by much.

Temperature and tint essentially adjust the amount of certain colors in your photo. They are the second most dramatic change in the editing process. You’ll use these often to reduce the yellow/red hues in photos that are taken in very bright spots or in poorly lit indoor areas. You can also reduce the amount of blue in shadowy, overcast photos. You’ll want to use this tool in moderation, and remember that any color adjustments made should be balanced. (If you increase the temperature level to make a photo more warm looking, you may need to increase or decrease the tint level to keep the colors looking natural.)

Sharpness Who doesn’t like sharpness, right? You might be tempted to boost this up to max on all of your photos, but we caution you to use restraint. You really only want to use this tool on photos that aren’t already sharp to begin with. Oversharpening runs the risk of making your photos appear too pixilated. We find this feature most useful in close-up shots of accessories. Try to avoid oversharpening images that include human faces.

Reduce noise is our personal favorite secret weapon. It essentially makes the entire photo look like a painting, softening the whole image and reducing the “noise” (aka grainy appearance). We try not to use this unless needed, because it is like adding a layer of makeup to EVERYTHING. It’s good for photos that are too sharp—because let’s face it—nobody needs to be able to count every one of your model’s pores. We use this tool to soften skin tones and details. But it’s also a good way to resuscitate a photo that turned out slightly blurry or otherwise unusable. As always, don’t use it unless it is needed, and even then, only in moderation.

Blemishes Since we don’t travel with a full hair and makeup crew for our models, we will often take it upon ourselves to add a little “concealer” or “delint” someone’s attire in post-editing. It is considered a common courtesy to edit these out for your subjects.

This rule also applies to any close-ups on hands and shoes where the nails are exposed. Street style photography being what it is, your subjects are not likely to have come straight from the salon. If they’re wearing a particularly striking shade of nail polish that you plan to showcase, do them a favor and remove any chips to make it look as if they just had a mani-pedi. You’d want the same.

You can also remove visible lint or lose strands of thread from an outfit. Hit the RETOUCH tool. Adjust the size of it as needed, and slowly click over blemishes and any undesirable spots on the photo. Use this judiciously, since going overboard can make your retouching obvious.

Once all those steps are done, you can sit back and bask in the glory of how your photo now looks. There’s a REVERT TO ORIGINAL button under the PHOTO tab if you change your mind on any alterations you made. If you save the new photo to your desktop and revert the iPhoto copy back to original, you can compare the two and see the dramatic difference.

UPLOADING AND PUBLICATION

You are now ready to upload your photos to the Web. Many blog platforms let you upload directly, but they often reduce the size of your photos by lowering the resolution drastically. This can essentially destroy all the hard work you’ve just done. Don’t let this happen. You will want to upload to an image hosting site and link to your photos using HTML. We use Flickr and have never had any problems. Flickr.com has free account options, but Pro accounts grant you unlimited photo uploads and unlimited storage for a very low annual fee. While Flickr has become an industry standard for bloggers, other similar sites offer comparable options.

Once you’ve uploaded your photo, you are ready to do some HTML coding to post the image onto your blog!

HTML Code Basics

Here is the basic html code to post an image to your blog:

<img src=“insert the URL of your image on flickr or whatever hosting site you use”/>

Pretty simple, huh? You don’t have to be a programmer to post images on a blog. There’s more, but that code is all you need to know to start. Of course, additional html codes will help you customize your photos and blog posts. Turn to page 154 in our resources section for more information.