Eight RAW Photo Editing Mistakes That Are Spoiling Your Photos

D
igital cameras revolutionised photography in so many ways, but for my money the biggest change was giving every photographer a darkroom, unlimited film, and zero supervision.

And while an actual darkroom offered a degree of flexibility in shaping the look of a photographic print, it doesn’t get within a nautical mile of the outcomes possible with even the most basic RAW editor. But typically speaking, before you could use an actual darkroom, you had to go through some fairly extensive training in order to understand the way that the enlarger, the paper and the chemicals shaped the end result.

With RAW editors, most photographers learned by waggling sliders left and right in the vain hope of accidentally making it look good. It’s like learning to perform surgery by poking around until the patient stops making that noise.

Learning through experimentation works fine for love-making but it tends to produce some fairly horrific results when applied to landscape photography, and there’s no safe-word for over-saturation.

So in this article I’m going to look at eight of the most common bad habits that photographers pick up as they learn to use their RAW editor. Most of which I learned the hard way. Repeatedly.