Perfect Your Post-Processing

Hi Fotography Community!

Back with an exciting guide. This time, we’ll step out of Forza and into your favorite photo editing application to uncover ways you can process your photos like a pro, extract the utmost potential out of your capture, and create the wow-factor you’ve always wanted to produce.

Above: Adobe Lightroom Creative Cloud

RECOMMENDED PHOTO EDITING APPLICATIONS

• Preferred: Lightroom or Lightroom Classic, via Adobe Creative Cloud.
• One-Time Payment: Luminar Neo
• Free for PC: Darktable
• Free for Mobile: Snapseed (Android) Snapseed (Mac)

FOR NVIDIA GRAPHICS CARDS: NVIDIA In-Game Overlay (activated with alt+z by default) has filters you can use to adjust lighting settings, “natural” blur effects, and more. I only use the standard Brightness / Contrast filter offered in their effects panel. It works well in FH6 for shadows and contrast. Fortunately, this does impact your screenshot.

THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE EDITING

• Your photo’s resolution. The larger the resolution of your screenshot, the smoother the transitions for gradients, details provided for textures, and data your application must work with to prevent artifacts (dramatic, unnatural shifts of color, blurring, or pixelation).
• Your screen color calibration. It’s best off set to default, usually SRGB. Ensure you don’t have boosted contrast or saturation levels either. Having this set to default will show you the exact colors the screenshot capture. The screenshot apps you use by default usually capture in standard SRGB.
• Exposure and saturation levels of your image. Check these before you snag the screenshot. Are your white values bleeding in the sky, on a light, or on a texture? Adjust your exposure. Are your shadows sinking into the void? Adjust your brightness and contrast. When your highlights, shadows, and saturation are overused, they are no longer recoverable in an image.
• Image-cropping potential. You may find a great frame in game that just needs a crop once post-processed to maximize the impact of the image. Crops help when the subject matter is comfortably framed in a specific portion of the image, and you are looking to cut out busy areas or unnecessary open space. The photo example below has plenty of clear space on the top and bottom that can be cropped out into a cinematic ratio (21:9)

Post-processed with no crop. (Standard 16:9)

21:9 Cinematic Crop:

• Light. Foundational of any good photo is good use of light. Whether it’s dim or dramatic, your light source will dictate what part of the photo grabs the attention first. This is why I always encourage people to explore their weather options and time of day settings. FH6 gives you tons of combinations to explore. Light should bring clarity to a composition, not confusion. Are the car’s features highlighted well? Is the mid-noon light making buildings, trees, and textures too jarring? Is Dawn light not giving clear context? You get to decide, so be on the lookout.

Below: Three different light arrangements that work well for this composition. The first and third are back-lit; the second image is front-lit. If this image appears too small for you, you can right click and open in a new tab.

SAVE TIME BY ELIMINATING BAD LAYOUTS FIRST.

I did a guide on this a few months ago, covering what flaws you could find in photos. Here's another important strategy: when you are sorting through your captures deciding what to keep and what to discard, a great way you can do that is by detecting which ones have proper use of visual weight balance.

VISUAL WEIGHT BALANCE

Essentially, these are the physical elements in your photo commanding presence; they carry “visual weight”. The human eye is naturally able to look at a composition and decide quickly if something feels off.

If nothing feels off and weight balance is achieved, usually your brain processes that intuitively. If you think something feels incorrect, trust your gut. You can train your eye with detecting this in your fotography.

How do you improve at this? It’s good to take a closer look at your image when you are unsure. You can evaluate any layout breaking it down with lines and basic shapes to address what is happening in the photo. This is precisely how I find what I do and do not want in my frame. I'm looking for basic geometric shapes pleasing to the eye.

Visual weight balance types: specific examples that work.

JUXTAPOSITION

When you leverage the weight balance with juxtaposition, photo elements contrast with harmony and intent.

Below: a cold mount fuji complimented by a warm orange jaguar on the opposing side of the photo. The road leads the eye from the car to the mountain.

SYMMETRY

When you compose your foto with symmetry, photo elements bring predictability, calmness, and structure. Symmetry gives the focal point a high level of sophistication, emphasis, and framing.

Below: The Audi on the bridge is near-perfectly framed in symmetry. The fog seeps in from the top, with a low camera angle that brings the clarity to the car first, as the rest of the bridge fades into clear space.

ASYMMETRY

When you compose your foto with asymmetry, you make room for unpredictability and visual surprise. Asymmetry is the ultimate test for improving your compositions. It will force you to focus more intensely on visual weight balance, since there’s nothing on both sides anchoring the photo in place.

Below: The clear space of the open, airy, square of brightness feels of similar weight-balance to a thinner area of heavy darkness. This photo doesn’t have a car perfectly centered, it embraces asymmetry with the main frame of light off-center and the road that contains the focal point (the car) that doubles down on the asymmetry with a confident curve off to the right.

ORDER

When your photo has order, each part of your photo is playing an intentional role in bringing the focus back to (or complimenting) your subject.

Below: Organized chaos. There's established areas of negative space for the car, visual rhythm with consistent use of red, tan, silver (a color conductor,) black, and curves from the car choice that complement the industrial structures behind it.

UNDERSTAND YOUR LIGHT ADJUSTMENT TOOLS

Here’s a high-level look at primary light adjustment tools. It is important to know how they impact a photo’s appearance.

Your first light tools, exposure through blacks, impact your photo’s dynamic range of pixels. They should be used first to establish the correct exposure baseline, recover clipped highlights, and to recover over or under-drawn shadows.

• Exposure: Control over your photo’s overall brightness.
• Contrast: Separation of bright and dark pixels
• Highlights: Control over the bright areas of the photo
• Shadows: Control over the dark areas of the photo
• Whites: Manual adjustment of brightest white tone value in photo.
• Blacks: Manual adjustment of darkest black tone value in photo.

A CLOSER LOOK AT TONE CURVES:

Used second after the Basic panel above, for creative styling, punchy contrast, faded matte looks, or precise color grading. When you adjust a curve, you aren't adjusting targeted ranges of pixels. Instead, the brightness adjustments from curves shift smoothly across the whole image in a natural gradient-like effect.

Your photos will very often benefit from targeted curve adjustments. The end goal is to make curve adjustments that add tonal contrast, whether in shadows and highlights via the neutral tonal curve, or in color tones via the red, green, or blue tonal curves adjustments. See the diagram below for reference.

You will as you capture eventually stumble upon photos that react heavily to one of the RGB Curve panels due to its color palette. For example, a photo in the forest at dawn or evening might react well to Green Tonal adjustments. A snow scene with cyan notes might break up nicely with soft adjustments in the Red Tonal Panel.

Right click on this image and view it in a new tab to read closer. 

TIP: TRY EDITING IN BLACK AND WHITE

Give it a try! One way you can more easily evaluate your compositions is by turning on a black and white filter. This allows you to focus strictly on composition, details, depth, and focal point without the color dictating your decision-making. At the end of your retouching, turn the black and white filter off and make your desired color-adjustments if you have any.

That wraps up the content for this guide. I hope you found this information useful as you go to process your next fotos!

Keep the captures coming!

Vindico