Photography is a process interpreting, capturing and documenting the world. Editing is simply a part of that process. Images in their raw form simply do not do justice what event the best camera captures, therefore the post-production is often just as important as the camera work. I am not trying to create an imaginary world, enhance something to the point where it is untrue or fake an image. That is not documentary photography. But I aim to enhance the photo so that it looks more like the world I am aiming to capture because the photo alone, without editing does not do that.
Affinity Photo is similar to photoshop, except there is no subscription. You pay once and get it forever which I love! Affinity's panoramic stitching tool is fantastic. To start with I dropped a whole load of photos I had taken of the beautiful Welsh landscapes into the panoramic stitching box. After a few minutes, Affinity had stitched the photos into a selection of the different views I had photographed. This saved me manually trying to figure out which photo was part of which panorama, as some panoramas are made up of several separate photos. I chose two of the best panoramas to edit; the first one is of the Dragons Back, a hike along ridges (the dragon) surrounding a spectacular, lush valley. The second is taken after hiking up to a view point in the Black Mountains, where hills and valleys were being washed with sunrays and cloud shadows.
Using Affinity photo, I aimed to bring out the stunning green valley surrounded by the Dragons Back along with some of the contrasting shadows. The second photo was a bit of a longer process to bring out the shadows using a black and white overlay, re-saturating the image and then enhancing the shadows and highlights.
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