Photography has never just been about clicking a button and taking an image of a subject. There has always been a process of post-production to bring those images to life, though that process has changed over the years. From the analogue to the digital.

It was once the case that you had to take your photographs to be processed by a shop or lab. They would develop the negatives and print the images using light projected through the negative onto light sensitive photographic paper. This would then be further processed through wet chemicals to produce a print.

During the process, the technician developing your film would be making choices about how best to create great images from the negatives, simply by adjusting the colour and brightness. If they were badly composed or blurry or had a thumb in them, that was down to the photographer, not the person doing the post-production.

To say things have changed since those days is an understatement. Film has been almost entirely ditched and replaced with digital cameras; there are also sophisticated cameras in smart phones that have brought the advent of the selfie, the filter, and the ability to take thousands of images and select the one you’re happiest with.

Post-production has also evolved dramatically too – tools like Photoshop have been around since 1990 and most of us are familiar with how Photoshop can enhance an image or indeed result in a ‘Photoshop Fail’. But there are also apps like Afterlight, Snapseed, and VSCO, which can be used on a smart phone allowing photographers to edit images immediately.

At Fisher Studios, we use Capture One and Adobe Photoshop to make sure we deliver the best images we can for our clients. With simple post-production tools, we can make your images ‘pop’, remove any unwanted clutter, clone objects, or retouch portraits.

We thought it would be fun to show some before and after photos to illustrate how post-production can dramatically change an image, turning something ordinary into something magical.