How do you post-process?

Yes, I post process things. I’m def­i­nitely not a “purist.” How­ever, I gen­er­ally try to limit myself to only mak­ing fairly real­is­tic adjust­ments; I stay away from things like the clone brush. Post-processing is dif­fer­ent for pho­tos and videos. I like to post-process both kinds of media, so I’ll explain the process for each.

Pho­tos

Typ­i­cally, I’ll import all the raw files and con­vert them to .dng using Adobe Bridge; I con­vert to .dng because it allows me to save my non-destructive changes to the images with­out cre­at­ing a bunch of .xmp files. After I’ve imported them, I’ll go through and rate them between one and five stars. Then I take all the pic­tures three stars and up and post-process them in Adobe Cam­era Raw. I edit white bal­ance, expo­sure, sharp­ness, con­trast. Often, I’ll apply a vignette, some cross-processing, and crop the image. If I do any­thing crazy in the edit­ing, I’ll usu­ally men­tion it in the picture’s description.

One day, I’ll upload a youtube video of this process.

Videos

I use Adobe After Effects or Pre­miere Pro. Since the footage from the cam­era is unsharp­ened, apply­ing a sub­tle sharp­en­ing fil­ter is often the first thing I do. I like to use the RebelCC script to get the color cor­rec­tion just right. Then I’ll add a vignette and some­times add crop marks for a cin­ema feel. If the video has sound, I’ll usu­ally use Adobe Sound­booth to make it sound bet­ter by using some com­pres­sion pre­sets and level adjustments.

Most of what I do can be done with free soft­ware. RawTher­a­pee is really good soft­ware for pic­ture edit­ing, Win­dows Movie Maker or iMovie will let you do some basic color cor­rec­tion work, and Audac­ity is a great non-linear audio edi­tor like Sound­Booth. Another thing you can do, if you’re a stu­dent, is get Adobe Pro­duc­tion Pre­mium Stu­dent and Teacher Edi­tion like I did; it includes Pho­to­shop, Cam­era Raw, After Effects, Pre­miere Pro, and Sound­booth (as well as some other software).