I spend a lot of time thinking and playing around with photography techniques, trying all kinds of different methods to capture a picture. I love getting outside with my camera and getting lost behind the lens with all the things I notice. I tell my students all the time that it’s worth it to master your camera so that you can get closer to your envisioned picture without having to waste all your time in Photoshop or Lightroom fixing your mistakes. I have a few common edits that I normally make – a bump in contrast, an add of subtle saturation, usually a subtle vignette, but I try to keep it pretty simple most of the time. But maybe there’s a benefit in playing around with the editing sometimes too? I decided to try editing the same photo 10 different ways. Here is the original, unedited photo:

I edited the first one how I would normally edit a photo like this in color and then how I would edit it in black and white. Nothing out of the ordinary from what I would usually do, so of course those were the easiest.

Next, I went a little further trying to go slightly past my normal tastes. I’m not usually one for using presets in Lightroom, but there are so many now that it was interesting to try some of them out and tweak them to my liking.

Last, I exported the image to Photoshop and tried a few larger adjustments, stacking filters and layer adjustments as experiments. Even thought this is not how I usually work, it was fun to push myself past the habits that I usually follow in my post-processing routine.

Maybe it’s something you can consider when you go to edit too? ~Angie