So you’ve shot your show…great…what to do now? Well outside of getting the images off of your memory card (or if you are extra cool, develop your film [yes I have shoot concerts in film, medium format to be exact]), then it is time to edit. The thing is that the brighter and having the colors pop is key. The people who are viewing your images want to see what is on them.
So with that in min, get them into Adobe Lightroom (or your preferred editing software) and look at them. Now don’t put EVERY one up there, because it will take forever to edit. You have to be mindful of which images you import into Lightroom (and I am just going to say Lightroom from here on out because that is the post editing software that I use), Go through in your camera raw (yes shoot in RAW, for the love of god, don’t shoot JPG. I’ll get into that later) and select the best images, the ones where the subject is in focus, that you haven’t cut off heads, or have blur in them or what have you. This is your chance to really see what you have before you put time and effort into post-production. I tend to have both Lightroom open and to be going through the images at the same time, so when I have/find the images I am wanting to edit, I can go ahead and select them and upload/import them into Lightroom and I don’t have to write down the file name or guess after.
Once you have your selected number of images in (still think about at least a 10% keep rate at the least), I suggest to let Lightroom do the first edit by selecting the “Auto” button in the develop window. Shut it, I know what you are thinking “But that is cheating Chris…wtf?!?!?!” but hear me out (trust me I said this to a student yesterday and she said the same thing to my face). use this as a guiding off point. The great thing about this is that this is what Lightroom suggest the edit to be. You can still go through and edit the photo further to your own liking. Plus, the “Auto” feature only does it’s work on the Light and Color sections. This leaves everything else up to you, including any effects that you want to add or details.
Now, I do use the “Auto” feature a bit, especially if I am under deadline, to help speed up the editing process. However, like I said, I do NOT use that as the say all/end all. I do go through and make my own little tweeks there in there under the Light and Color panels, and also go into Effects and Details to finish the editing to my personal liking. This is also where shooting in RAW kicks in. In RAW, unlike JPG, you have more control over the colors and contrast and basically everything about the image that you would want to edit. JPGs compress the image too much and you loose WAY too much digital information that will make editing very difficult and frustrating.
Is it redundant to go back over the Lighting and Colors even though I trusted Adobe to correct that for me? No, because like I said., I can still adjust everything to my own personal liking. I use the “Auto” feature strictly as a starting off point. Remember, it is your photograph, not Adobe’s or any other editing program’s photo and you, as the photographer have the final say.
So if you finally have your first show shot, and not sure where to even begin editing your images, or if you are a few edits in and are not happy with the way they are looking or wondering why your photos are not looking like other photographers that you have looked at and studied their work, hell even followed them on Instagram and created Pinterest boards of their work (Yes, I would STRONGLY suggest that you do both to help see what the industry is currently doing and the current standards), then hit that auto button and see where that takes you and what slight adjustments you can do outside of that. You will see then what suggestions will be made to help improve your post production edits.