LS 35: Creative Editing—Analysis
Live Session
Summary
In this session, we explored a composition-first approach to editing that transforms how you work with your images. I walked through a practical framework for evaluating your raw files—identifying major shapes, establishing visual hierarchy, and creating an editing plan that serves your story.
Using real examples, we examined how intentional adjustments strengthen compositional elements rather than just making images “look dramatic.” The key: let composition guide your editing decisions, and you’ll always know where to start and when you’re done.
Key Takeaways
- Your composition should guide your entire editing process.
- Establish a clear visual hierarchy before you touch a single slider. Ask yourself: where do I want the viewer’s eye to go? What’s the most compelling part of this image?
- Intentionality matters far more than whether your adjustments seem “aggressive” or “conservative.”
- The story lives in you, not the camera. Sometimes you know exactly what compelled you to press the shutter. Other times it’s more subconscious, and you need to discover it through the editing process. That’s perfectly valid. But there has to be something—some spark, some thread you can follow. If you’re making images completely at random, no editing framework will help you find meaning in them later.
Action Items
- Try the Photoshop Cutout filter on your images to see them as simple shapes and tones. This helps you think globally before getting lost in local adjustments. Look at how your major shapes relate to each other—are they working together to tell your story, or competing for attention?
- Before opening Lightroom, spend a moment articulating what drew you to the scene. Even if it’s just “I loved how the light hit those rocks,” that’s your thread. Write it down if you need to. This becomes your editing plan—everything you do should serve that initial spark.
- When you feel an urge to make an adjustment but aren’t sure if it’s “right,” follow it anyway and then ask yourself why. What about that change feels compelling? How does it affect the story or the hierarchy? This is how you become an expert in your own images and develop your authentic voice.
Questions or feedback? Please share them in the Academy Community!
Companion PDF:
Hi Rob
I missed the live presentation as we were celebrating our granddaughter’s 4th birthday. As much as I enjoy your presentations, you can’t compete with that!
I really enjoy these discussions of editing with intent. There’s lots of content on YouTube about how to use Lightroom, but there’s not a lot about why to use it; about how to recall what your mind’s eye saw when you captured the image and what needs to be changed in the raw image to to approximate that.
I find that as I learn to edit with intent, a feedback loop occurs where I think about that when I capture the image. That’s where I’m starting to edit. Should I move closer or further, left or right, up or down, should I zoom in or out, under-expose, over-expose, catch that light, avoid that light…
It’s not a checklist, but I find myself reviewing these elements of the scene.
I hope you plan to do more of these and eventually tie them into the process of capturing the image to best tell the story of what prompted us to raise the camera and click the shutter release.
As always, you’re providing a nice mix of the technical parts of photography and the creative part.
Steve
Thanks Steve, appreciate the feedback. I definitely agree about the “feedback loop” and that’s definitely what I was getting at, and always promoting, in terms of connecting the “essence” of the capture experience with the editing of the image. Discovering that essence is a process and that takes reflection and asking lots of questions, but it exists nonetheless whether we’re fully aware of it or not. Once you can harness that, you’re editing, your printing…everything in your workflow becomes more intentional and personal. That’s where the vision really starts to develop. Yes, much more to come on this in the future!