Photographers don’t always have a good relationship with post-processing. Some photographers over-edit their photos, getting in the way of what they captured in camera. Other photographers neglect the post-processing stage – such as culling through their photos carelessly, or not utilizing the available tools to fine-tune a photo’s processing.
However, culling and editing are two of the most essential parts of photography and should not be ignored or done thoughtlessly. Culling lets you select the best photographs and more effectively transmit your message as a photographer. Post-processing – or picture tuning, as I like to call it more – then plays a significant role in making the chosen images perfect.
(I illustrated this essay using some pictures from the last mating season of Great Crested Grebe to make the case of a meaningful selection to form a small portfolio.)
Table of Contents
Why Image Culling Is Vital
The culling process – that is, selecting your images, the ones you choose to show – is essential because it extracts the best images from the mass of pictures taken (perhaps thousands if you, like me, use bursts a lot in action photography).
Being selective helps us become better photographers. Two reasons why this is true:
- Showing only the best photographs increases the perception of the photographer’s skill – even in our own eyes, improving our self-esteem,
- Quality over quantity. It doesn’t matter how many total photos you take during a photo session, it matters how many good photos you take.
Ansel Adams famously said, “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” I find this quote very explanatory of this concept, emphasizing the importance of selectivity. Consider this when showing your pictures to all your audiences, even with family and friends. A short selection of your best photos is often more appreciated than a lengthy sequence of lower-quality images (or even of similar good images; often better to choose the best of the set, even if it’s difficult).
What counts as your “best” photos and how many should you discard? In the past, I gave priority to discarding technically unsuccessful photographs. Now, I follow the opposite approach: I select those to keep based on how the image effectively conveys the artistic message I had in mind when shooting. And I mercilessly delete all the others, which often are more than 90% of the total.
How to Select Images Effectively
A straightforward place to begin is that you should not select any images with such technical flaws that you find objectionable. Sometimes, you may take photos with deliberate motion blur or other intentional “flaws” and of course, these images should be kept. Serious unwanted technical flaws, however, will only annoy you more over time and should rule a photo out of contention.
Then the step is to select images depending on their artistic effectiveness. This process includes an evaluation of several factors:
- Emotion and Impact: A successful image tends to evoke emotions and have a strong visual impact. It does not matter if this impact comes from the subject matter, the composition, the light, the color, or the contrast. But the image must strike.
- Clarity of the Message: The image should communicate the message or story that the photographer intends to convey – that is, the idea the photographer has in mind. It does not matter if it is a sophisticated project, or simply the desire to illustrate the beauty of a landscape or the intensity of the subject’s gaze.
- Originality and Creativity: The ability to offer a new or unique perspective often distinguishes an image from others and makes it special.
Suppose you have a project in mind for your selection, such as for a presentation, a portfolio, or a book. In that case, stylistic coherence is also necessary between the selected images and the photographer’s style in general. This helps maintain a uniform and recognizable visual narrative. However, variety is even more essential for projects like these. Two images that are very similar to one another can ruin the flow of a photo series altogether.
The Post-Processing Stage
Post-processing allows the photographer to fine-tune and perfect a good image. Software may be complex, but there are just a few fundamental tools for post-processing that matter for every photo:
- White balance – Remember that it is also a valid artistic tool that can significantly change the overall mood.
- Exposure – Think of low-key and high-key pictures, and how different their emotions can be.
- Contrast – Makes a photo more intense or more subdued by changing the difference between light and dark areas of the image.
- Saturation – Adjusts the intensity of the colors, and often, of the mood those colors impart on the image.
- Clarity – Increases the contrast in the mid-tone areas, emphasizing textures and details and their importance in the composition.
- Sharpness – Increase or reduce the perception of low-level details; however, too high sharpness looks aggressive.
- Noise Reduction – Reduces grain and discoloration at a pixel level, but too high noise reduction makes a photo’s details look like plastic.
- Cropping – It is often necessary to crop an image slightly to improve the composition, but a severe crop suggests a composition issue in camera
- Spot healing – A very controversial way to “remove” elements within a photo. I will talk more about this in the next section.
The names of these tools will not be the same in all software. For example, I like to use the Curves tool to adjust contrast and exposure. It is not the name of the tool that matters, but how the tool really modifies a photo’s white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation, etc.
Adjustments can be global or local; they can affect the whole photo or just a portion. Most photos can be improved mainly through global adjustments, with local adjustments providing the finishing touches. It is possible to change a photo substantially through editing – however, my goal (and my recommendation) is to use a light touch and always try to maintain the image’s original qualities.
This brings me to the following concept: ethics in post-processing.
Ethics in Post-Processing
Ethics are essential in post-processing and, more generally, in photography. After all, anything can be done to a photo today. You can add or subtract whatever you want from the photo. You can change the background or paste the subject into a different scene. And software is so good that the result can “look normal” no matter how heavily edited it is.
To me, this is a worrying possibility as a photographer. For me, the goal is never to invent images in this way. I prefer to use post-processing as a tool to optimize photos and pursue my artist’s intent as captured in camera. Fine-tuning and editing a photo is an appropriate way to highlight what you have captured, but once you use it to change the nature of what you captured, is it even photography any more?
If necessary, I crop and remove unwanted elements – such as dust on the sensor or small branches, but only if I do not change the image’s meaning. I do not add, move, or replace anything. I am comfortable removing small elements in the photo, such as dust on the camera sensor or small branches, but no more than that, and some photographers would not even wish to go that far.
We must distinguish photo editing from making artistic graphics. While the former aims to improve the quality and expression of the captured image, the latter completely transforms the original work, creating something new and different.
I do not wish to define universal limits; everyone establishes their own. But it is wrong to pass a “digital image” off as a photo if that image was not made through a photographic process, but rather through digital art, compositing, or something like AI. It is much better to be consistent and transparent in explaining how you arrived at a result, and simple transparency is enough to quell most ethical concerns.
Conclusion
Carefully selecting your work – and then fine-tuning the most successful images – is essential to allow us to identify and showcase our photographs at their best.
This ultimately makes us better photographers, as well. To understand photo culling and post-processing is to be a more effective photographer, one who already has an idea of whether a photo will succeed before pressing the shutter button.
I hope you enjoyed this essay about the importance of culling and post-processing in photography. If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments section below.
Suppose you photograph a busy marketplace for 2 seconds with a strong gray filter. Some people become blurred, streaks and blurs form. Other people dissolve almost completely. Is that still photography? If so, why is it no longer photography if you photograph this marketplace at 1/250 of a second and everything in the picture is in focus, but then use an AI tool to remove individual people from the picture? – You can set rules for photo competitions as to the criteria under which a photo may participate. This is a good tradition, but it has nothing to do with ethics. Unless the photo violates the competition rules without it being obvious to the judges or the public.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Actually, it has everything to do with ethics, because when people view something you present that looks like a photograph, they think it’s a photograph, or something basically made with a camera and light coming through a lens, projected on a sensor, taken by yourself. If you use generative AI to remove people, then the stuff that is “behind” the removed people is just interpolated, and had nothing to do with the real scene, so dishonest. Or, if gen AI did replace the people with exactly what was behind the real scene, then it must have used another photo that you didn’t even take, so it’s also dishonest. (I argue that it’s even fundamentally dishonest if you disclose that you used AI because the result is too close to a photo and can’t, on an emotional level, be distinguished from a photo.)
I’d say the same thing if you just cloned out a huge branch in a bird photo, even if AI was not used at all. Although there are some that condone such manipulations, mostly because they do it themselves and it gains them attention, there are enough people that also expected the photo to roughly represent traditional photography and the basic editing that goes behind it, that highly manipulated photos are dishonest.
Certainly, I don’t think such an “image” if that’s what you want to call it, has anything to do with photography, and it should never be called photography. You have to look at the reason why contests have rules against heavy manipulation: because people actually want to see photography, which in turn is because those people want something that roughly represents reality as represented by the traditional photographic process. And personally, I would find such an AI manipulated photo as you describe rather meaningless.
Jason, it’s very clear that you have a misunderstanding of ethics. Ethics isn’t what your gut or your gut tells you. Your taste, your gut feeling, doesn’t like everything that’s labeled a photograph. That’s fine for you personally. That’s fine for competitions. But one shouldn’t deduce from such very respectable wishes that they are justified by ethics. Unfortunately, this is also how dictators in many countries justify their ethics: in their eyes, anything that isn’t pure in their eyes, that is, anything undesirable, is ethically inferior. Wanting to call a photo a photograph solely based on its purity and its trueness to reality is a standard worthy of respect, but it’s not a standard one can apply to others. That means if a photography group (just one example) sets the standard for its images that it’s still a photograph as long as no more than 49% of the original photo has been altered, then that’s just as fine. Or do you also deny Ansel Adams’s images the right to be photographs? After all, black and white photos have absolutely nothing to do with reality. If, like Ansel Adams, you expose a photograph differently in many areas in the lab (zones!), the original image, the image captured by the camera, is no longer there. For me, Ansel Adams’s images are first-class photographs. Many others dislike his pictures. But that has nothing to do with ethics. Jason, your ethical justification for classifying photos, is way too ambitious. Please read up on what ethics is in philosophy. Unfortunately, this term is used carelessly all over the world to make nonsense, without these people even being able to prove how they are ethical. Ethics is something fundamental that requires proof just as much as Earth’s gravity requires proof. Gravity: If an apple detaches from a tree, it falls. That’s a law of nature! Ethics is no less than this law. Not everything is ethically correct just because you want it to be. Ethics without respect for those who think differently is no ethics at all, because it couldn’t exist without others. After all, a person who is all alone in the world doesn’t need ethics. So if you use ethics as a yardstick for classifying or even evaluating photos, Jason, then please do so with respect for those who think differently. To put it bluntly: No camera manufacturer has software in its cameras that reproduces all colors faithfully. No lens manufacturer offers lenses that faithfully reproduce nature (colors, aberrations, etc.). Wide-angle lenses distort reality. Why is a photo taken with a 20mm lens at an angle of view of over 90° a true-to-life photo, even though it expands space and distorts it significantly towards the corners? Telephoto lenses contract space, which is why faces shot up close appear flatter. Ships photographed obliquely from the front with a telephoto lens have a rather thick stern compared to the view one actually sees. Please leave ethics out of your argument, Jason. Ethics are too valuable to simply use them to enhance the value of one’s own ideas. Photography has nothing to do with ethics; a photograph is always a photograph, regardless of how heavily it has been retouched, as long as even essential fragments of the original image can be recognized. Everything else is a matter of personal taste. Anyone who doesn’t share this broad view of photography and opposes it is disrespecting art. Andy Warhol and many others would certainly have little use for your limited view of photography.
I disagree with you, and I certainly won’t bend to your wishes by leaving ethics out of any argument. Morever, I disagree that photos have nothing to do with ethics. Photos that are heavily manipulated without disclosure can be misleading and lead to harm. The other modifications you mentioned, I don’t consider them, because with black and white, lens distortion, etc. are all obvious from looking at the photo. If you show me a black and white photo with increased contrast, I think it’s fairly obvious what was done. But if you show me a photo with three people in a scene whereas there were fifty, it’s not obvious at all what was done, and hence is misleading. That’s the difference between black and white and AI removal: in the former, it’s obvious what was done and no one would think the world is black and white, whereas if you remove ten people, others can believe that they were never there.
I will relent and say that if it’s disclosed, it might not be unethical. Perhaps I was too harsh with that viewpoint. But if it’s not disclosed, I think it absolutely is unethical because it is misleading and dishonest at least in some contexts.
And of course, I also disagree when you say a photograph is always a photograph, regardless of how heavy it has been retouched. Again, if that retouching is disclosed, I probably wouldn’t consider it unethical in most contexts, but otherwise I would. I disagree that it is just a matter of personal taste because it also has the capability to cause harm or mistaken beliefs about the experience of others.
In short, I contend that there is a big difference between B&W and removing people with AI, and the latter can absolutely be unethical in many contexts because it introduces dishonesty (when not labelled).
Obviously we are not as far apart as your choice of words makes it seem. Ethics are of course indispensable when it comes to the truthfulness of a photo. But a photo itself does not need ethics to be recognized as a photo. With a 500mm telephoto lens, you can gather a crowd and make it look like a large gathering. If the same crowd is photographed with an extremely wide angle, gaps open up between the people. In case of doubt, the whole crowd appears much smaller. In your opinion, the result of both views is also that they are photos. Nobody has manipulated these photos. And yet both photos can be misused for political purposes in completely different ways.
To limit it to everyday photography: take a picture of a blossom in a rose bush in a strong wind. It will keep swaying to one side and other flowers will get into the picture. At the end of a hundred photos, you might end up with the desired flower in the golden ratio. But if you’re a little unlucky, another blossom will protrude large and unattractively into the picture at the edge. Then the whole photo appears unsatisfactory. You can wait for a windless day and photograph the desired flower all by yourself again. If the flower hasn’t wilted by then. Or you can use an image editing app and remove the distracting flower at the edge of the picture. How big can this annoying flower be so that it still seems justified to remove it from the picture? Can it only take up one percent of the picture? Can it take up ten or twenty percent of the picture? There it is, the gut feeling I wrote about.
Jason, the least productive thing in art is blinders. Nothing hinders a photographer’s creativity more. I’m happy to remove ten or twenty percent from a photo if it’s more advantageous or aesthetically pleasing afterwards. It remains a photograph, no matter what it has been manipulated with. You can manipulate a lot in the photo lab when developing negatives, and you can do the same in digital photography using various methods. It is not the method of manipulation that is important for the value of a photograph. Only the message of the photograph itself is important. You are welcome to conceal the fact that a photo has been manipulated. This does not affect ethics. Because every sensible person knows that almost every photo depicts reality with more or less restrictions. As I have written, no photo depicts the much-vaunted reality. But you must not create a false impression with your photo. You must not abuse your photo. Then ethics come into play.
To come back to the rose bush: Nobody needs to know that a large blossom has been removed from the photo. After all, the photo’s sole purpose is to arouse interest. However, if the photographer is asked whether the photo actually reflects reality, he has to stick to the truth. Then ethics become relevant again. A photo is therefore allowed to deceive, to depict something other than reality. Every photo does this, especially photos taken with a lot of creativity. But the photographer is not allowed to tell false stories, that’s all that matters in the end. A manipulated photograph should not manipulate people, otherwise it would be unethical. A manipulated photograph should represent the creative power, the creativity of the photographer. At its best, that is art.
>> It is not the method of manipulation that is important for the value of a photograph. Only the message of the photograph itself is important. You are welcome to conceal the fact that a photo has been manipulated. This does not affect ethics. Because every sensible person knows that almost every photo depicts reality with more or less restrictions.
Here is where we differ. I don’t really agree that the message is the only thing of importance in photography. Simply put, we are just disagreeing based on definition, I guess. You consider heavily manipualted photos to the point of removing all sorts of things like branches, people, etc. to be photography, I don’t. I also believe there exists a line, fuzzy perhaps, but a line nonetheless, after which manipulation becomes unethical when manipulations are concealed, you don’t. I think so because I think certain photos can mislead even if their intent is purely artistic, and you obviously don’t. I never said it has anything to do with representing reality, as there are obvious distortions like perspective, etc. But I do think that some distortions such as AI removal of objects still crosses the line.
Not sure what else there is to say about that.
>> you can use an image editing app and remove the distracting flower at the edge of the picture. How big can this annoying flower be so that it still seems justified to remove it from the picture? Can it only take up one percent of the picture? Can it take up ten or twenty percent of the picture?
My personal view is that if something is to be removed, then a person looking from your photograph to the real scene, if they could step back in time and look through the viewfinder, shouldn’t be surprised to see something that was/wasn’t in the real scene that differs markedly from the photo together with the traditional distortions of light+lens and manipulations of color/contrast and other basic edits that are possible to glean directly from looking at the photo.
If it goes beyond that (especially with AI), which I admit must be more carefully defined for individual cases as the line is fuzzy, then I think photography can be misleading simply because there is no chain of reasoning that could match the photo with the original scene.
A very insightful read! Culling and editing are often overlooked, but they’re truly essential for creating a strong, impactful final portfolio. This piece highlights their importance perfectly.
Pointed out very good points. Especially regarding work and professional ethics. Thank you very much.
Great article, thank you. I typically shoot several thousand frames in a few hours out in the field with the mindset that if I come home with a single keeper then the trip was a success and if I come home with zero then it was still worthwhile. As the years go by my keeper rate goes up but so do my expectations. I delete far more than 90%. Some would call this kind of burst shooting spray and pray, and to a degree I guess it is, but we are talking fast moving, erratic subjects, and field craft is everything. Right place, right light, right subject, hiding under camo or a blind, all the camera settings ready and then burst shoot for that perfect pose or frozen moment of action. Its a lot of effort. Of a sequence of 60 images maybe only 1 has the correct pose, no distractions, eye contact with the subject, and then the moment is gone. You can’t capture that if you just wait for it and then click, by the time you hit the shutter the moment is passed and the shot is missed. Even then, that image may still not be usable if the AF stuttered or the animal shifted position faster than the camera could keep up. It’s very rewarding when it all works out though.
Thank you, Dalin. I’m glad you enjoyed it. I agree with your perspective on productivity! I also added a few notes in response to Kln in the previous comment that are meaningful as a side note here, particularly regarding the productivity level Paul Niklen mentioned during an interview about his journey to capture the perfect picture.
I STOPPED READING AFTER THIS:
“Being selective helps us become better photographers. Two reasons why this is true:
Showing only the best photographs increases the perception of the photographer’s skill – even in our own eyes, improving our self-esteem,
Quality over quantity. It doesn’t matter how many total photos you take during a photo session, it matters how many good photos you take.”
In other words, “Cheat yourself and be shity at photography”.
Thank you for your comment, Kln.
Actually, the meaning of those sentences is quite different from what you interpreted.
First, photographers, even the most famous ones, take a lot of photographs each year. The result of their selection process is what their customers, followers, and friends see. This is true now and was also the case even before digital photography; you can check some reports from National Geographic assignments, just to name one.
Second, my advice (and not just mine) is to experiment; the more you experiment, the better. Fortunately, experiments can lead to beautiful photos, but they can also produce a lot of less successful images that a photographer should learn from and then discard without overthinking the number of mistakes made. This isn’t “spray and pray”; it’s a pathway to growth.
Third, a photographer is an artist. Often, the first photos are merely sketches to help clarify the goal of the photography. The farther the goal, the more sketches there will be.
Some time ago, Paul Niklen – an artist and photographer every wildlife photography enthusiast should know – mentioned during an interview that in one assignment, he took 100.000 pictures, of which only 40 were selected.
For example, when one takes the driving test, one should drive at the average of one’s ability — because driving at one’s best would be cheating.
Do you apply this to all of your endeavours [rhetorical question].
Many thanks for the entertainment 😂
Do poets and song-writers show every early draft?
Display all the wrong words they chose before they hit on the right one?
Or just the finished product?
It’s not just nature photos we have to be concerned with. That’s why I no longer follow Nikon ambassador Kristi Odom. During a presentation, she showed a lightning storm photo. She said it was a composite of many lightning photos which explains how amazing it looked. And, Audrey Woulard constantly removes her husband holding the light out of photos with AI. How can Nikon endorse these unethical post processing decisions. That’s why on my website, I have a photo processing statement which I think all photographers should have. Are we allowed to post our website URL here in the comments?
Thank you for your comment PixelMakerPro. I completely agree with you; the idea of writing a post-processing statement in addition to the photos on the personal website is very good.
Would you be able to share just that statement here?
Here is my statement on my website: All photos are real and none were AI generated. I will remove minor distracting elements within a composition. I do not use sky replacement, fake bokeh, compositing, or generative AI in my photos. I do not make misleading changes to photographs that would materially alter the scene as it originally existed.
But if she is open about her process, I really don’t see a problem. There are many ways to skin a cat. Even if I don’t like this or that way, unless the creator is trying to mislead you, what is the problem?
Not sure if it’s unethical or not, but I do find idea of removing someone holding a light from a photo with AI to be a bit depressing anyhow. If I saw a cool portrait but then later I found out it was manipulated to that degree I would be rather let down if I originally thought it was just a photo with some basic manipulations.
She is not open, she never mentions it. Also, in her portfolio on her website, show me where she mentions it once. Besides, if someone says they killed someone, we don’t let them off the hook because they admitted to the crime.
Agree with Kurtz. The issue is not with the postprocessing, but how you present your work. Most of the lightning photos are multishoot. If you say it is fine. Personally I love mutishoot techniques – you can generate something that was simply not possible with film, so claiming that this is not photography doesn’t not work. New technology and new possibilities always move boundaries ahead.
I agree with your perspective, but I wanted to point out that multiple exposures were very easy with film. I learned on a Crown Graphic 4×5 sheet film camera. Multiple exposures were not just easy, but easy to do by mistake!
Thanks Tom. My experience with film is terribly limited, so I can image that lightning at night can be easily obtained by multiple exposures on film. But I seriously doubt that you can have a decent focus stacking in macro at 1:1 using film.
Well written article on a very important topic. Beautiful photos as well!
Thank you, Rob. I’m glad you enjoyed them.
The high key photo has great impact. Nice work.
Thank you, Julie. It is also one of my favorites!
Amazing article! Love the simplicity and the way you bring the important parts across! Also great selection of accompanying photos :)
Thank you for your comment and kind words, Philipp.