When a lot of people think about edited photos, they think about overly-photoshopped models in magazines where the models have been edited to have perfect skin and the perfect shape. In these cases editing has been made out as something that makes photos fake. This belief has taken off even more with the rise of Instagram filters.
For concert photography, editing is extremely important, however. It’s not meant to make photos look fake, but to bring out the qualities and details in the photos. Editing makes the photo sharper and brings out the stage lighting. Concerts are often held in dark venues and sometimes details get lost in the darkness — editing brings them to the light.
Editing almost makes the photo even more real. You can see the sweat on the band member’s face as they are giving their all on stage. You can see the details of the guitar. You can see the emotion in someone's face. The colors become more vivid. It’s like you’re actually seeing the band live instead of just through a photograph.
If you’re taking photos at a concert and not editing them, you’re taking away from the photos and the people who see them really aren’t getting the whole picture. No matter how good your lens is, a really dark venue is still going to produce a dark photo lacking in detail. Spend some time in Lightroom or Photoshop (or whatever you use) getting that photo to pop so viewers can see what was really happening on stage.
I love editing. Yes, sometimes it can be tedious, but I’ve always enjoyed making something good even better. I love the process. I think this stems from my yearbook days in high school when I would design pages for the yearbook. It would always put me in kind of a zen mode and editing photos does that same thing. I honestly don’t know what to do with myself when I have no photos to edit for a while. Because that also means I probably haven’t taken any photos in a while and that’s a whole other zen experience.
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