How to Edit a Wildlife Photo Without Losing Its Natural Feel

By Carol Leather

My first SLR was a Zenit, back in the olden days when film was the only option.

I'd drop the roll at the chemist and spend the next hour staring at my watch, counting down until I could push back through the door and set the overhead bell jangling.

The envelope often held more blurry animals and another "photo too dark to print" label. Sometimes only slightly lighter shadows on a black rectangle. There was no way to salvage a bad shot. The settings had to be right in the moment, or the moment was lost.

Digital photography changed that. It gave me a second chance.

Now those failures are my greatest teachers, and I want them to be yours too. A technically imperfect photo isn't a dead end. It's the start of the editing.

But I'm putting the horse behind the cart, editing is the last step. The settings, light and composition that come before it are in my guide to getting into wildlife photography.

NOW, most photos need some shaping before they match what I saw at the time. This is how I approach it.

The same steps work for any nature photo, from a garden robin to a wide woodland scene.

Cropping

Cropping is where I start. It's the least destructive edit, and it shapes everything that follows. Nature doesn't position itself in the frame the way I'd like, so I crop to fix the composition I wanted but couldn't get in the moment.

Three things I look at before I crop:

• Whether there's enough room in front of the bird
• Whether the background is helping or distracting
• Whether something I missed through the viewfinder is now competing for attention

In this robin photo, a lighter patch of bark behind the bird kept pulling my eye away. My brain was saying "look at the robin, Carol!" but my eye kept drifting left.

Rather than cutting straight in, I studied the picture longer. The background was already out of focus, but those bright branches were still spoiling the shot. The camera had enough megapixels to let me crop hard, so I did.

If that pale bark had been right in front of the robin, the photo would have gone in the bin. This one won't win any awards, but I like it now, and that's what matters to me.

The square crop is unusual, but I don't tend to play by the rules.

Exposure

Even with a plan, sometimes a grab shot is all I get.

I was photographing bees when a buzzard flew over. There was no time to change settings. The result is a bird that's much too dark.

When I bring it up on the screen, I see the mistake. The shutter speed had been set high to freeze the bees, and 1/8000th of a second was overkill for a soaring buzzard.

If you're still finding your way with ISO, shutter speed and aperture, my guide to choosing the right settings in the field walks through how I approach those decisions.

The bird is also too high in the frame, with a lot of blue sky around it that wants cropping. But first, the exposure.

I work in Lightroom. Like most editing programs, it has an Auto button.

Eeeek! Definitely not. A monochrome bird in an almost white sky. Quick, press the undo button, Carol.

So I tackle it slowly, by hand. First the exposure slider goes up by half a stop. The sky turns pale blue, but there's little change in the buzzard.

Shadows to +20, blacks to +10, to see whether that lifts the bird without affecting the sky.

Hmm. An improvement, but still too dark. And now I can see a white halo around the feathers that looks unnatural.

Dropping the contrast by -30 helps the halo.

By now I'm fed up with squinting at the screen, so I crop in. It worked for the robin.

But cropping this hard surfaces another problem: noise. It gets worse when I push the highlights and whites sliders to +20. The picture takes on a graininess that reminds me of static on an old TV set.

At this point I give up on the buzzard. Editing isn't a rescue mission for a fundamentally bad photo.

I could have saved myself the time by checking the histogram before I started. The histogram has become so central to my editing that I wrote a guide to using histograms, for anyone wanting to avoid the same mistakes.

Colour

I edit colour from a RAW file. RAW is the camera's unprocessed image data, the digital equivalent of a film negative, and it gives me the most flexibility when I push colour around.

But that flexibility is also a trap. RAW makes it too easy to push the colours too far. I learned this the hard way.

My usual method for checking white balance (the overall colour cast of the image) is the eyedropper tool in my editor. Clicking on a spot I think should be neutral grey or white tells the program to adjust all the other colours from that reference. Most of the time it works.

Sometimes it works too well, and "correcting" the colour erases the actual colour of the moment.

Take the morning I drew back the curtains to a sunrise pouring across the garden. The dark greens of the hedge were glowing in the golden light, and a Dunnock was perched on top, its usual grey tones transformed into golden browns.

My camera was nearby. I opened the aperture wide for bokeh (the soft circles the highlights form when they go out of focus) and took the shot.

A photo on the computer rarely matches the memory of what you saw. When I brought the Dunnock into Pixelmator Pro, I was underwhelmed. The colours didn't look as glowing or golden as I remembered.

The warmth you're trying to protect in the edit starts with the light itself. See golden hour wildlife photography for catching that warm light in the camera.

My first thought was saturation. This time I didn't want to neutralise the colours, I wanted to intensify them. I dragged the saturation and vibrance sliders to the right.

Instead of improving the photo, my heavy hand almost destroyed it. Yikes. No, no, no.

Dragging the sliders back restored the image. The original was already where I should have stopped. It took seeing the overcooked version to make me accept what the camera had captured.

Sharpening

Sometimes a photo is technically in focus but lacks life. The details feel a little soft.

I had this exact feeling with a Mandarin duck I'd photographed. The colours were vibrant, but the patterns on its feathers could pop more with careful sharpening.

My first port of call is the Amount slider, under the Details section in Lightroom's Develop module. I pushed it up gently, watching the fine feathers on the duck's head become more defined.

Then I played with the Detail slider. My trick is to push it all the way right to see the extreme effect, then dial it back slowly. The point I'm looking for is where the detail emerges but the picture doesn't yet look artificial.

But there was a problem. As the duck got sharper, the smooth water around it started to look gritty. The peaceful feel of the water was being undone.

If only I could sharpen the duck and leave the water alone.

That's what the Masking slider is for. A friend once showed me a trick: hold down the Alt or Option key while dragging the Masking slider. The image turns pure white. As you drag, the sharpest areas turn from white to grey to black. The black areas are protected from sharpening.

I keep going until the background is solid black, then pull back slightly so the smallest hint of texture remains. For this duck I ended up at 72.

Sharpening is a delicate balance. I wrote a sharpening guide covering what I wish I'd known when I started.

Noise

The long-eared owl below was shaded by foliage. To get the shot I had to push my camera's ISO high, and I knew what that meant. Digital noise. Again.

The challenge was to clean it up in post-processing (the term photographers use for editing) while keeping the texture of the feathers.

There are two types of noise.

The first is colour noise: small coloured specks scattered across the smoother parts of the image. These are quick to deal with. A gentle nudge of the colour noise slider in Lightroom handles them.

The second is luminance noise, the grainy texture itself. This one is harder. Pushing the slider too far turns the photo into a waxy, unnatural mess. The point I'm looking for is where the grain softens but the feather detail stays sharp.

Sometimes I leave a little grain in. It's the texture of twilight, and it can add to the mood.

A lot of my noisiest files come from shooting in the rain, where I push the ISO to keep working in the gloom. A little grain is a fair price for the shot.

Finding Your Own Story

When I think back to waiting for that envelope of photos at the chemist, I remember the helplessness when my pictures came back blurry or badly exposed.

Digital editing changed that. It isn't a magic bullet, as my buzzard story shows, but it does give me a second chance.

The real lesson isn't about sliders and settings. It's about learning to see and evaluate. Do I need to crop this image? Is it worth spending time on, or destined for the bin? How far should I go? Will pushing further spoil the moment I captured? Does the edit look honest, or does it look artificial?

Take my approach, play with it, and find your own way through your images.

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