Post processing is a very important step to make your pictures different from most of others, as well as to express what you want to say in the picture.
It is mainly used in my exercises to address below problems.
- Sometimes, camera system has a certain limit to catch the scenery the same as what we see, which can be reflected as insufficient dynamic range, unsatisfied color saturation, or improper contrast.
- Or some other time, the recorded image does not completely reflect what we feel upon the scene at that time. Often an image crop is needed in this case.
Normally I spent effort in the post processing of images as much as when shooting them. Nowadays I shoot in raw thus I can benefit from the image quality lossless workflow in Capture NX + Color Efex. Thanks to the computer technology, I don’t even need to use various optical filters (e.g. graduated filter, polarizer), but compute a “filtered” image in the digital darkroom.
When shooting the picture, I can concentrate more on picking up a nice viewing angle, proper aperture (for DoF) and shutter speed (for movement freezing), while leaving the rest to fix/adjust in the post processing.
Furthermore, each raw file is like a exposed film, and waiting for me to develop in the digital darkroom (fast computer + versatile apps + large flat panel monitor with good color performance). Isn’t this excited?
If you can learn to master some useful post processing technique, and start to enjoy applying them when necessary, I’d say you are turning your photography from a recording activity to a bit more creative activity.