Post-processing errors – how to avoid them

Avoid post-processing mistakes, it takes a lot of time to learn but you can always practice to create better photos. When I started landscape photography, I made a lot of mistakes in post-processing and sometimes I still do. In the beginning, I often over-saturated or added a lot of contrast to my images. With these tips, we try to help you create correctly processed photos.

While these tips are just suggestions, we can’t tell you what to do, we’ll just try to guide you in avoiding these basic post-processing mistakes. Let’s look at some of the most common ones.

Lens Correction and Chromatic Aberration

Some people forget this step, but it’s the first one I apply in Lightroom. It corrects lens distortion and removes chromatic aberration; red or purple fringing.

Curved Horizon

I often see this mistake even in photos by professional photographers. For me, it is very important to set the horizon correctly, and there are very simple ways to avoid and correct this problem. First, I always check the electronic level on the viewfinder, and in this case, I don’t need to correct it in post.

In Lightroom or Photoshop, you can use the Crop tool to correct for a tilted horizon. If the horizon is very tilted, you may lose parts of the image, in which case I would use the Warp tool to correct for the lost edges.

saturation

Rather than adding overall saturation to an image, try adding it individually, which gives you precise control over the hue, saturation, and brightness you want to add to a specific color channel. Use the Polar filter to enhance the overall saturation, adding more natural colors to your image.

Contrast is too high

Contrast is one of the most important steps in post-processing, although it’s easy to overdo it. Too much sharpness and contrast can make your image look less professional. Instead of adding it all to your image, try adding only the necessary parts using the dodge and burn technique.

Halo effect

This effect occurs when we recover too much from highlights and shadows. It usually appears on the edges of highlights, where dark areas meet light areas. The best way to avoid the halo effect is to use a separate sky mask.

shadow

When I try to brighten very dark shadow areas, I usually end up with a very noisy image. If you want to avoid this mistake, try taking multiple exposures of the same scene. In this case, you will cover both highlights and shadows at the same time. It is not always necessary to recover all the shadow details, you just need to make those areas darker.

emphasize

Over recovering highlights can make your image look very strange with an HDR effect. Using the same technique, the method I mentioned above could be a solution, but what if we only took one photo? Well, my opinion is not to overuse the highlights slider, even a blown out sky might be better than a poorly processed sky.

Over-sharpening

I always do the sharpening process on a duplicate layer of the final image, then add a mask and only add sharpening to the areas of the image that need it most.

Over-sharpening can result in a weird edge that looks like a holographic effect, but is narrower, like I’ve shown in the image below.

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