Its always a hotly debated topic in photography whether to edit your shots or not. I always edit my images before they are published or sent to the client, and my type of editing is always kinda two fold.

1. Remove background distractions
2. Brighten colours and enhance features.

and thats it. In short I edit to make a shot look like it was never edited. I am not a massive fan of over edited or filtered shots, instead I just opt for a simple method, after all models, make up artists, stylists, designers, etc spend alot of time to look the way they do, and using photoshop to edit all that away is in my view pointless.

Of course smooth skin, remove blemishes, but do it in a way that you would never know its been done. No one wants a model who looks like a doll in their shots.

Real World Example

In a recent shoot I worked with a great model and make up artist, and we got some great shots. However the same could not be said for the surrounding. Take a look at the first photo.

Nice photo you may be saying and yes the photo is pretty good, the model looks great her makeup is great. So what the problem? Well lets look at the surroundings, I think that doorway could use some TLC.

Solution! Photo Editing

You can see I have not over edited the photo, I brought the colours up a little bit and simple fixed the surroundings. The final shot looks natural and a lot more pleasing on the eye. Now don’t get me wrong, if the shoot brief was a very urban shoot you may choose to leave the surroundings as they are. However for this being a more fashion based shoot, the background was a bit too messy and needed a bit of a tidy.

Do you edit your shots? Are you a fan of filters? What do you think of the edit? Let me know in the comments.