I thought it might be fun to take a look at some before and after editing of photos. I don’t always do a ton of heavy editing, but I do like to remove tree branches or other items if it’s possible to make a cleaner looking photo. A lot of photographers frown upon using AI tools in Lightroom and other programs such as Topaz, but I am of the opinion that if you’re only improving an existing shot and not altering the subject matter in such a way that isn’t natural, then what’s the harm. Everyone is striving for that “perfect” photo and if you can remove a tree branch to make it so, go for it. It’s still photography, and photography is art. Not everyone will agree with my thoughts or how I edit my photos, and that’s okay. At the end of the day they are mine to enjoy.
I’ll use this photo of a rabbit as my first example. The rabbit was hunkered down by a house, and the houses air conditioning unit. I first cropped in the photo slightly, then used the remove tool in Lightroom with the generate AI option on to remove the unit and it made the area just look like the rest of the leaves already in the photo. I also love using presets to enhance coloring and eyes, and bring out the texture of fur or feathers. I personally love how this photo looks after editing.
Very often with bird photography, you’re photographing the birds in trees, and with trees, comes wayward tree branches. I’ve had many photos I didn’t keep because I thought it was “ruined” from too many branches, or the bird had part of its face covered. Removing the branches is really easy to do and when done correctly you can’t even tell they were there to begin with. There’s going to be a limit on what can be removed and still look natural, but if there’s a lot to work with that isn’t really an issue. So here again I cropped in the photo to get a closer look at the bird, and she has a branch across her face so I removed that as well and applied the preset. This was a more simple edit, and I think it made a good photo that much better.
This next photo is a bit more drastic of an edit. I removed a lot and I feel like it really makes the eye focus that much more on the cow. I started by removing the hind end of the other cow, and I probably could have left the branches in, but with the blur I thought it was too distracting. I really love applying dark and moody presets to cattle, and like I mentioned before, it can really bring out texture in fur. The first photo you can see that the cows fur has speckled brown spots on it, but the preset really deepened the color a bit and brought them out.
