From the Shot to the Delivered File — Post-Production for Mineral Photography

The shot is only the beginning. Accurate mineral photography post-production determines whether the image is actually useful, as the crucial decisions are made on screen rather than in front of the specimen. Here is how that process works.

Everything starts at the highest resolution

Every image is shot and processed at the highest available resolution. There is no reason to work at anything less, because resolution lost at capture cannot be recovered. While a file that starts large can always be reduced for delivery, the reverse is simply not possible.

This practice is not just a question of file size or storage. Instead, it is a question of what the image can achieve. Indeed, a high-resolution file can be cropped, enlarged, printed, and examined at a level of detail that a compressed file cannot support. For mineral photography, where the main goal is capturing fine details, this matters more than in almost any other discipline.

The workflow

The process follows a fixed order, every time.

First, the step requires downloading the files from the camera. Before anything else, before any editing, and before deleting a single frame, the files are backed up to a NAS. This happens first and is not optional. Because data loss happens more often than anyone expects, a file existing in only one place is just one hardware failure away from being gone. Therefore, only once the backup is confirmed does the memory card get cleared.

Then comes the selection process, which involves keeping what works and discarding what does not. This step happens in Lightroom, where the entire catalogue lives.

Lightroom — the foundation

Global corrections come first, including exposure, white balance, contrast, shadows, and highlights. Thus, the overall image is brought to where it needs to be before any detail work begins.

After that, we handle the dust. A black vinyl background is electrostatically charged and attracts every particle in the room, as described in an earlier article on mirror backgrounds. However clean the surface was before the shot, Lightroom’s healing and cloning tools handle what remains. Because dust on the background is a global problem, Lightroom addresses it efficiently.

When a file needs more than Lightroom can provide, the next step involves Photoshop. It opens directly from Lightroom via the “Edit in Photoshop” function. Consequently, the resulting file is automatically reintegrated into the Lightroom catalogue and linked to the original, keeping the two applications connected throughout.

Photoshop — the precision work

Photoshop handles what Lightroom cannot. This includes impurities on the specimen itself and particles between crystals, which require working at the pixel level rather than globally. This specific work cannot be rushed and cannot be approximated.

Furthermore, this stage is where most of the time goes when dealing with difficult specimens.

What cannot be fixed

A blown highlight cannot be recovered. A crystal face that has caught too much light and rendered as pure white carries no information. Underneath, there is nothing to bring back. As a result, reducing the highlights in Lightroom will darken the surrounding areas without restoring what was never captured.

For this reason, the reflections and crystalline highlights that make a mineral photograph interesting must be prepared during the shoot, not corrected afterward. The angle of the light, its distance and intensity, and the moment when a face catches it correctly rather than being overwhelmed: these decisions happen in front of the specimen, not on screen.

Consequently, this is exactly why the shoot takes time.

The exception — exposure blending

There are specimens where no single exposure captures everything. The vanadinite is the clearest example. Featuring deep red-orange crystals with highly reflective faces distributed across the entire specimen, no single setting can handle all of it, as some faces will be cramped while others lose their detail entirely.

In those cases, the solution is multiple exposures of the same frame, each optimized for a different zone of light, assembled in Photoshop into a single composite image. It is not focus stacking, which addresses depth of field. Instead, exposure blending solves the light problem. The principle is similar, but the issue being addressed is different.

This technique applies to a small number of specimens. However, for those specific pieces, it is the only approach that produces an honest image of what the specimen actually looks like.

What gets delivered

The delivered file reflects every decision made between capture and export: the global corrections, the dust removal, the pixel-level work, and where necessary, the composite assembly. It represents the image at its best, within the limits of what the shot made possible.

Those limits are set during the shoot. Ultimately, post-production works within them, but it does not extend them.