Geoff Greene was one of the photographers at my lighting workshop a couple of weeks ago where he took a picture of our model Mary sitting on the bar in the back of the room.  A couple of lights, not a whole lot of set design as you can tell.  Anyway, Geoff sent over his version of the image along with some post-processing comments and I thought it would be interesting to show what two different photographers would do with the same RAW image from the camera. So I had his send it along and here are the results.

So here’s the original exported straight from Lightroom:

Then here’s the version Geoff sent me. High-contrast, high saturation, and very ‘fashion’ to my eye:

And finally, what I would have done with it if it were my picture. Not as drastic, closer to the original, but still trying to pull something more out of the RAW data by highlighting Mary a bit. In comparison, mine looks really boring and conservative.

I’m sure if we gave it to 10 photographers we’d get 10 varying versions of the image.  Just goes to show how much post-processing is part of the process.  We may have gotten rid of the chemicals, but you’re still not done when you press the shutter release.