The debate on the post production of photographic images, an activity that with the web has become almost necessary, is always very accessible and is able to clearly divide groups of experts, professionals and even simple amateurs. The eternal diatribe, if we want to call it that way, between natural photos, retouched photos and the consequent social implications of the so-called no Filter. How many times have you heard someone complain or denigrate blatantly retouched photos, automatically going most of the time to express a negative judgment not only on the medium and the product itself, but also on the portrayed subject, clearly in this case without any fault.
If anything, the fault is, if not of the photographer who has materially clicked on his camera, then of the person who has done the post production. Post production, therefore, is always a double-edged sword. In this article we will deepen the topic, to understand if post production is really bad in itself and if we can still talk about natural photos, given the wide availability of filters, photo retouching tools, automatic image enhancement algorithms, some of them present by default on all our electronic devices, whether computers, smartphones, tablets or digital cameras.
Photographic post production or trivial retouching?
Let’s start from the beginning. The photographic post production, which finds its fulfillment and its diffusion with the advent of the digital image, is the activity that includes all those actions aimed at improving and modifying, vulgarly even retouching, the photo just taken. On a professional level, thanks to the use of expensive and sophisticated professional programs, but now not even so exclusive, you can go to define lights, contrasts, intensity, vividness of the digital image. When photographic film was still in use, post production was a field reserved for a select few, who had to use chemical components, cutters and make a great artisanal, artistic and technical effort together to modify a photographic image.
Nowadays, as we all know, all we need to do is download a photo editing app, even a free one, onto our smartphones to make our photos significantly better than they were when they were taken. Photographic post-production is, in theory, nothing more than a decision-making process with respect to what the photo, with its colors and intensity, should communicate. So it is not a good or bad thing in itself, it is to highlight even more the nature and the soul of an image, in order to better communicate what is portrayed, that is contained in it.
Photographic post production transforms the photo in a real, powerful means of communication, keeping at the same time its value of object, of work of art in some cases, of find, memory, knowledge, document, memory in others. Let’s discover now how photographic post production thanks to the web has become fundamental and let’s see some of the most important aspects, from formats to techniques, and some of the best free programs, and not, in circulation today on the market that make this activity now an integral part of the work of any photographer, if not a profession in all respects.
Photographic post production: formats and techniques
Photographic post production is the basis through which today every shot of the photographer must pass before being spread to the general public of the web, be it art, advertising or a simple souvenir photo of a vacation. On the net, in order to circulate, photos assume a certain “weight” in bytes. This weight, the number of “boxes” that contain information about the image, obviously determines the resolution, and therefore the quality, of the photo itself. It determines the sharpness, the watershed between good and bad quality, and the “speed” with which the photo can be displayed on a web page. This is a fundamental issue in our world, which has become accustomed to the immediacy and speed of fiber optics.
It may seem absurd, but in order to be published on the web, photos must be resized, that is, compressed by acting on the parameters that make up the relationship between resolution (sharpness) and size. The most used and known photographic format is jpeg, which guarantees low weight and extreme sharpness. A jpeg photo will therefore be very light and with an optimal definition, both in terms of details and colors. Once you have chosen the format, you can also act on the size of the image itself, height and width, which allows the photo to become extremely versatile, at the same resolution, and therefore perfectly usable on screens of different sizes, from computer monitors to smartphones.
Once you have decided on the size and format, you are ready to change the resolution, expressed in dpi (pixels per inch). The standard dpi value for the web is 72, for print, for example, it must be at least 300. Now we can move on to the real modification of the photographic image, or better of its content, in order to improve it, retouch it, modify it to make it usually more beautiful, more attractive, more impactful, more exciting, more evocative, etc.. To do this, photo-editing programs detect for us and transform into editable values the parameters contained in any image, i.e. contrast, saturation, brightness and sharpness. Bisogna in questo caso trovare un bilanciamento ottimale di questi valori, aggiustando i parametri, così da ottenere l’effetto desiderato.
Questi software ormai sono talmente sofisticati da permetterci di andare ad agire manualmente sui parametri, e in questo caso una minima conoscenza e formazione su di essi è consigliata, oppure automaticamente, con effetti standardizzati al fine di facilitare le operazioni e agevolare i meno esperti a ottenere un risultato apprezzabile e desiderabile. Una volta fatto questo, la creatività, o il cattivo gusto, che si può esprimere attraverso la post produzione fotografica non ha praticamente limiti. Si può quindi concludere che l’attività di post produzione fotografica non è un male in sé: dipende dall’uso che se ne fa, dalla sensibilità e dalla competenza di ciascuno di noi, fotografo professionista o semplice amatore.
La post produzione fotografica: i migliori programmi
A conclusione di questo articolo, per semplice ispirazione o curiosità, andiamo a individuare quelli che al momento sono i programmi di post produzione fotografica, o di photo editing, che vanno per la maggiore tra a pagamento e quelli gratuiti, adatti anche ai meno esperti:
- Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop è il non plus ultra dei programmi di post produzione fotografica. Il più famoso e conosciuto nel mondo, tant’è che è ormai prassi linguistica dire photoshoppato al posto di ritoccato. La sua popolarità però non coincide però con la sua facilità di utilizzo. A prima vista potrebbe sembrare un software estremamente piacevole e intuitivo, ma dietro un’interfaccia sufficientemente user-friendly si nasconde un programma di grande complessità, ma anche di grandi possibilità, che richiede un minimo di formazione (fanno tantissimi corsi, soprattutto online, per imparare a usare Photoshop) per poterlo utilizzare anche a un livello base, data la grande varietà di strumenti che mette a disposizione;
- Adobe Lightroom. Fratello minore di Photoshop, Lightroom può essere considerato, per un professionista, un valido software da integrare al primo in quanto mette a disposizione una serie completa di tool per trattare le vostre immagini come all’interno di una personale camera oscura (lo dice anche il nome), trattando direttamente i negativi digitali e organizzare poi le tue foto all’interno di un’intuitivo e giocoso album digitale;
- Gimp. Tra i migliori software gratuiti disponibili sul mercato, tra i quali anche Picasa e PicMonkey, le funzionalità essenziali di Gimp vi permetteranno senza sforzo di avvicinarvi al mondo della post produzione fotografica e anche di ottenere risultati molto più che soddisfacenti. Vi ricordate l’antichissimo Paint? Si, però con più possibilità, grazie alla possibilità di utilizzare più livelli di filtri, unita comunque a una grande semplicità di utilizzo.