Just a peek at image editing – Ontario professional pet photographer

I’ve been photographing exclusively animals – dogs and the occasional cat and horse and a few other critters – for over 15 years now.  In that time I have gone through almost a dozen professional camera bodies, too many pro lenses to count, Nikon and Canon, several camera bags, jerry-rigged carts and trollies, not to mention hundreds of pounds of dog treats and too many session toys to count.

I’ve also gone through five different custom-built computer systems and high-end Eizo monitors for the editing portion of things, which – when it comes to dogs and a natural setting – is a huge component of the images you have seen here over the years.  And I must say – as I always say to fellow photographers I mentor – no matter what, you have to start with a solid, high-quality and perfectly-exposed RAW image to begin with.

For example … let’s look at this image of the stunning and VERY well trained Quill.  Here is the image straight-out-of-camera.

This image is taken at 1/640 sec at f/3.5, ISO 500 with Canon’s 1DX iii and 70-200 f/2.8 ii.  I would have preferred to have shot this at 200mm, but there was no way for me to back up any farther in the deep snow, so it was shot at 70mm.

Now, after so many years photographing dogs, you wanna bet I know better than to start shooting until I’ve had an opportunity to clear any distracting elements like all those dead weeds.  In fact, I even carry a pair of secateurs in my camera bag.  However, on this day, the snow between Quill and I is hip deep, and for this shot, I am actually sitting back in the snow as though I were sitting in a chair, it was that that incredibly deep.  Prior to this shot, we were having Quill run through this deep snow for some stellar action shots, so here was an instance where I could neither get to the weeds, nor did I want to trample the snow before we’d captured those running shots through fresh snow.

So … all I could do – as he stood so proudly in that opening in the cedars – is shoot.

Next we see the same image with my standard editing in LR. Again, we always start with a high quality RAW image … and – from my perspective – editing isn’t about fixing mistakes made in the field or creating something that was never there.  Editing is about shifting the image you shot into the image you SAW.

Yes, when I sit hip-deep in the snow and ask Quill’s mom to stop him in that opening, I am absolutely seeing in my mind the burst of colour the cedars provide in this cold, white landscape … and I absolutely see the glow and light coming from the trail on the other side of this cedar patch.  But the camera doesn’t see all of these nuances.  Its job is to find neutral grey for its white balance and essentially ‘flatten’ that expansive, breathing landscape you see with your eyes.

So it is my vision that dictates the editing I do … and in fact, it is the editing I know I am capable of that allows me to have that vision in the first place and know what look for and see when I am in the field.

… definitely improvement over the flatter, rather monotone image straight-out-of-camera, but man, all those stupid, distracting weeds!

So this is where I will take that image, still in LR, and edit it as a tiff in photoshop (as I prefer to keep my workflow on the images all in the same LR catalog).

With this next image – while Quill looks smaller in the frame – I have actually increased the canvas size and resolution of this image from 5472 x 3648 to 6072 x 3992.  This way – should the client decide to have this image printed as a larger print, a canvas, or perhaps a full spread in a custom album – I have even more pixels to work with.

So, in photoshop, I first increase my ‘canvas size’. Then I figure out the best way to tackle those horribly distracting dead weeds.  In this case, the best approach was to copy some of the cedars and use that to cover some of the weeds; and to use a combination of the cloning stamp and very careful content-aware fill – while zoomed in by 200 or 300% – to get rid of the weeds in front of Quill’s body and to the right of the frame.

And for those wondering about the amount of work done an image like this before the client even receives the gallery … well, yes, I do put that work in with a very limited number of images.  Most of the images receive no more than my personal LR editing – which is still a LOT of time investment into each image – and with only a few do I conduct this kind of more extensive work.  I do this for a couple of reasons … I might want to share that image on social media … but mostly, I want to my client to know what is possible with their images.  I would hate for a client to not choose a particular image simply because of some distracting weeds.

There are two more images of Quill in this setting … one where he is looking dead into the camera, and the other where he is panting and looking to his left.  I will likely put all three of the images in the client’s gallery, but only this one will receive that fuller extent of editing until I know if the client wants any of them in print.

Of course, sometimes I just like to have a little laugh with an image and a fun client, especially one who knows her super handsome dog is really a fun-loving dufus …

While culling Quill’s images the other day, I thought that this image – with the placement of his feet – looked as though he was doing some ballet instead of catching the ball …

I could see it in my mind!  … and I was already giggling when I went back to his images to find a usable ‘head’ … pasted it on his body and sent it to his mom who probably laughed as hard as I did.  It is SO Quill … like: “what? nothing to see here. I’ll just pirouette on over this way.”

And sure enough, in the same moment I received her response about a adding a tutu, I was already on a stock site searching for a png of the right pink tutu.  Of course, the funniest part in all of this is that THIS image is more true to Quill’s fun-loving, dufus, comical character than the first image I shared.  LOL

I hope you enjoy Quill’s image.  Of course, this boy is a rare model in the level of training that has gone into him.  I do have clients with dogs at similar levels, who can be off-leash and even collarless, but at least 90% of my clients over these many years need to keep their dogs on leash, and THAT’S OK!   There are ways around all of that as well – in the field and back at the computer – and I will try to share some more of that kind of shooting and editing content in upcoming blog entries.