Making a photograph
Chuq Von Rospach’s post Photography Before and After — Sunrise at Merced National Wildlife Refuge describes the thought process behind editing one image that at first glance might not have seemed worth pursuing but came to be one of his favourites.
Make your processing workflow a habit. Poking at an image at random makes it harder to get a great image and impossible to reproduce the results on a different image later. You want to know what your workflow is and follow it, not spend time with each image wondering what to do next. As you teach yourself to follow a specific workflow checklist like the one above, you’ll find that “what do do next” will become obvious, and your processing speed will go up.
Reading this thoughtful article, I was reminded of Ansel Adams’s Examples: The Making Of 40 Photographs: Making of Forty Photographs. And as Ansel said “you don’t take a photograph, you make it”.