The Freedom to Interpret

A few weeks ago, I was coaching a student through an editing session in Lightroom where he was struggling to find the “right” adjustments for the image. At one point, he adjusted the blacks and said he wanted to “pull it back until it looks credible.”

I said, “ok, but what do you mean by credible?” What followed was a 20-minute conversation about authenticity, vision, and why the camera is completely inept at capturing what we actually see.

By the end, he looked at his before-and-after and said: “The one on the right (after) is what I want everybody to see.” He went from measuring credibility to evaluating the interpretation on its own merit. That doesn’t mean abandoning reality, it means sharing your vision.

Here are 10 principles from those conversations. I’m calling it the Authenticity Cheat Sheet. Bookmark it, print it, tape it to your monitor, whatever helps.

1. Don’t edit for “believability.” Edit for what you saw and felt. Credibility is limiting; vision is open-ended. The word “credible” shouldn’t be a part of your editing vocabulary.
2. Cameras are mostly inept. They have no soul, no feeling, no emotion. They’re simply recording devices (rather sophisticated ones if it’s a digital camera) that capture light entering the lens, that’s all.
3. Everything starts with composition: the camera placement, the visual design, the perspective. That’s your unique artistic input and determines everything that comes afterwards. Someone else at the same location will invariably have a different starting point.
4. Ansel Adams, great photographers, YOU: artists are the ones who imbue that file with life. We give it direction and vision. The interpretation continues after the shutter click. But only if we choose to, and I’d argue it’s your responsibility to do so.
5. The RAW file is just raw ingredients. A blank canvas with pigments ready to use. Express the idea, the story of the image, because the only thing you need to be truthful to is what you saw and felt, and that’s what I mean by authenticity. Editing reconnects the image to that experience, not to what the sensor recorded.
6. Worrying about whether your edits are excessive isn’t the right question. The goal is making adjustments transparent, for depth, for emotion, to evoke something in the viewer. If and when you do that, the excessive question disappears because the viewer responds to the story, not the editing.
7. Editing should emphasize and strengthen what you already saw when composing. You’re not adding something false. You’re completing what you started in the field.
8. When evaluating your edit, compare against the original RAW capture, not previous editing attempts. The RAW shows you where you started; failed edits just confuse your judgment.
9. Successful editing evaluates the entire image as a whole, not how individual parts look by themselves.
10. Live with it before you decide. Make a print if you can, keep it somewhere you’ll see it for a day or two, and notice how you feel about it. And don’t take my word for any of this, run your own experiment and see what you learn.

In a more recent session with the same student, we were working on a black and white picture of mountains and water, and we raised the light on the water so the foreground and the snow felt like parts of one picture.

At one point he said, more or less, “Wow…letting go of credibility is liberating because I can share what I really saw and felt without any worry…”

So the next time you’re unsure about an edit, try asking what he asked himself: is this what I want everybody to see?

“People believe in the reality of photographs, but not in the reality of paintings. That gives photographers an enormous advantage. Unfortunately, photographers also believe in the reality of photographs.”

Duane Michals

If this way of working is something you’d like to develop, it’s the heart of what we work on inside the Creative Path Academy, together, every month. And if one-on-one guidance fits you better, take a look at my three-month mentorship. Not sure which is right for you? Book a free call and we’ll figure it out together, no pressure.