[This page supplies more information about the process of my taking an image — as discussed in this post — in four stages: from the camera, through editing, to final posting (as two images) on Instagram. It does not even come close to supplying all information about how I dealt with that image at the various steps; it just skims the surface.]
The camera and the image formats: For starters, my camera is a Lumix GX85 (made by Panasonic, which supplied this promotional overview video):
I got the camera new in June, 2018; the model was two-three years old at the time. It — like most more-than-basic ones these days — can shoot pictures in either so-called “raw” format or in conventional .jpg format, or it can capture both with every click of the shutter.
Raw images, very generally explained, capture all optical details that a given camera’s sensor is capable of capturing, and hence there’s no single “standard raw format”: each camera manufacturer has its own take on “raw,” because each manufacturer is using different electronics (particularly the sensors themselves) in each camera model. Raw images can’t be displayed as-is on the Web, or even in many image-manipulation programs; they’re much bigger in filesize than their .jpg counterparts (tens or even hundreds of megabytes vs. a few MB). The word “raw” is often capitalized, but it doesn’t seem to be an acronym for anything. Jpg’s and other Web-friendly formats, on the other hand, represent compressed images — images in which some redundant information has been discarded for the sake of speed and efficiency. (Language analogy: a phrase like 25 % signs is much more easily interpreted and processed than %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%.) For this reason, most photographers who are very concerned with how their images look — vs. what their images show — shoot raw, and convert to jpg (etc.) as needed.
Also important to understand: what software, if any, has created a jpg from a raw or another jpg image? As an Android smartphone-camera photographer, I’ve always used Google’s own Snapseed software for producing jpg’s which I’m posting somewhere on the Web. It’s powerful and flexible, but nowhere near as much in nearly any respect as software — like Lightroom or Photoshop — available on a computer. Nowadays, for photos from my “real” (digital) camera, I shoot raw+jpg, process the raw to a new jpg with Lightroom, then download that jpg to the phone or tablet. (Instagram has an annoying limitation: you can upload to it only from a mobile app, not via a computer-based Web browser. For Facebook and here at RAMH, on the other hand, I upload images from the computer all the time.) I back up both images from the camera — the raw and the automatic jpg.
About the individual images in the post itself: For reference, I’ll include the appropriate one here at each stage, without the Lightroom frames which show up in the post’s slideshow, so you don’t have to keep switching back to see what I’m talking about. Explanations appear beneath the images.
Photo (1): You’ll never “see” a raw image; it’s just digital gobbledygook. For this reason, the above photo is as close to a visual representation of “what the camera and lens actually recorded” as I can show you.
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Photo (2): My camera allows me to set a default aspect ratio (i.e., width/height) which is different from the one which the camera’s sensor actually captures. This doesn’t alter the raw image at all; it affects just the jpg as saved by the camera. I tinkered with this some time ago, but since I almost never settle for this “personalized” version of the aspect ratio, I should probably just let it go. (Its primary usefulness is in handling jpg’s for posting online — which I can’t do straight from the camera anyway.)
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Photo (3): When you’ve got an image opened in Lightroom, among the simplest adjustments you can make are (a) to crop it, and (b) to rotate it if it’s out of “true.” There’s even an auto-rotate option if you want the software to make a reasonable guess (at least to start with). The photo above is not only cropped from the original, to eliminate what I regarded (in the context of the series I’d been working on) as extraneous details; it’s also been very slightly rotated. Beyond that, though, Lightroom offers an almost infinite variety of specific adjustments you can make to a photo’s appearance, in general categories like light (exposure, contrast, and so on), color (saturation, vibrance, etc.), and geometry (various distortions or corrections to perspective etc.). For the image shown above, I tinkered very slightly with pretty much everything it’s possible to tinker with, although it’s not likely visible to anyone else. (Indeed: I couldn’t promise you that I myself would recognize the difference in a value of, say, 25 on some particular scale vs. a value of 22, 23, or 24.) Notice for example that the sky’s blue is a bit deeper than in the original, and that the tint of the “sails” is more obvious — a bit more orange/yellow, a bit less white or ivory-like.
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Photo (4): One of the blunt-mallet tools built into Lightroom is a simple conversion from color to black-and-white: you can do this just by switching the so-called profile to any of dozens of others which come with the software. These built-in profiles — for black-and-white conversions — provide starting points each emphasizing various features: higher or lower contrast, more or less grain, and so on. I’ve used them sometimes. More often, though, I use the “color” adjustment category to completely drain all color from the photo, and then go back to adjust the saturation and luminance of individual colors. This makes areas of the image which are those colors brighter/darker/deeper/more shallow when represented as shades of gray, than if the color is just simply set to the zero midpoint. For instance, in the photo above, after switching all colors in Photo (3), en masse, to 100% desaturated, I wanted those of the sky (that is, the dominant blue and aqua hues in the original) to be darker than their counterparts in the original true color; to do this I simply bumped up both of those hues’ saturations, and bumped down their luminance.
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One final point: although I’ve known of Adobe Lightroom for years, I didn’t actually use it until a few months ago. For all I know, I’ll have to completely rewrite this post in a few months more. I hope not, though. (Heh.)
