Choices, choices......

A customer usually has a fair idea of the type of images they'd like at the end of a shoot. If they don't then I'll quite often share different styles and examples prior to the shoot to see if any spark an interest and hence I can plan for those during the shoot. With all the tools available to post-process photographs these days the sky is pretty much the limit and I shoot in a format that preserves all the raw data from the photograph and allows different components to be tweaked after the shoot, like contrast and colour saturation. The following is an example from an outdoor shoot and is a tweaked version of the photo that came out of the camera.

A word or two about this image - I'm lucky that I've got wooded locations on my doorstep that make great places to shoot any time of year. This example was shot with the tree's in leaf and a canopy overhead that does a very good job of blocking out natural light or creating dappled light has the sun shines through the leaves. That needs to be fixed to get a good shot and so I was using off-camera flash fired through an umbrella to put a nice soft light onto the model. Once on the computer I boosted the contrast a little and added a vignette to darken the corners of the image and draw focus more towards the model and the center of the picture. So from here we could move on to a black and white conversion:

Now not every image will convert to black and white successfully. When colour is removed then contrast and texture take over to add emphasis to an image and there were better examples from this shoot for black and white conversion.  However, this isn't too bad. I always try to push the contrast up and make sure the blacks come out black, I see far too many B&W images that are just washout-out shades of grey and lack punch. So this was a simple conversion of the first image with no additional post-processing. For another twist I made a second conversion of the initial image to create a more retro-styled, colour example too: 

So there's a trend these days to apply retro-esque filters to photos. It started as a convenient way to cover up the poor quality delivered by cameras on phones but has established itself as a genre that's here to stay. So the final example uses some cross-processing to give the image a retro feel and if you look closely there are also spots, marks and blemishes. So from one shot we've ended up with 3 workable images for the client. Which is best ? I'll let you decide......