Before and After Photographs

Before and after photographs

Do you ever look at your images and wonder why they just don’t have the ‘pop’ that you see on other people’s shots. There are many reasons that this could be, but we have found that the main one is down to processing. We would like to show you some of our before and after photographs of the steam train we shot in South Africa. If you haven’t read the article yet, click here for these images and more.

in the train cab with firemansteam train south africa raw no settings 600
But I don’t want to manipulate my photographs

We hear this all the time. “I don’t manipulate my images”, “I only show the ‘truth’”, “What I saw is what I show you” or even “My shots reflect reality”. Let us look at what it is to ‘manipulate’ or ‘process’ photographs.
A photograph is all about using light from a scene and translating it onto a flat surface. This could be a print or on a digital device. Just the act of taking a photograph means you put your own slant on the image. You decide what to include and what to exclude. You change your camera settings and some things are darker and some things are extremely bright as the camera doesn’t have the same range of sensitivity that the human eye has. These things are, of course, a form of image manipulation.

Using dodging and burning as well as all the other options in Raw are just ways of getting the image to look how you envisaged it. Even one of the great photographer masters, Ansel Adams used a lot of image manipulation.

steam train engineer south africa raw no settings beforeDriver oiling steam train after

So, all our images are manipulated in Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo or other software, so that they look like we envisaged them.

Everything is manipulated. Do as much or as little as you want but always create your own vision of the world.

2 Comments
  • Adam Colins
    Posted at 22:08h, 24 March Reply

    Very interesting topic and beautiful photos
    Well done
    Can i ask, what camera and lens did you use?

    • Tim & Ally Wilson
      Posted at 18:55h, 01 May Reply

      Hi. Thank you for your kind comments. Both Images were shot on a Sony A7R with the top image inside the cab using a 28-70mm Sony zoom and the lower image was using a Voigtlander 15mm manual prime. Both images are cropped. Tim

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