What Is Post-Production or Post-Processing in Photography and Videography?

You’ve probably heard the terms “post-production,” “post-processing,” or simply “post” about movies but they also apply—and are equally important—to photography. Let’s break down what they mean.

The three terms—post-production, post-processing, and post—are, short of Hollywood movies, basically interchangeable. The “production” is what happens on set or location; it’s what you’re doing when you’re wandering around with your camera in your hand shooting photos or video. “Post-production,” then, is everything that happens after you’ve finished shooting, “post-processing” is all the processing that’s done after you’ve finished shooting, and “post” is an abbreviation for the two.

What Is Post?

So, we’ve established above that post is everything that happens after a shoot, but what does that entail? In most cases, it involves some (or all) of the following:

Importing all the material you’ve shot and backing it up.
Going through all the material you’ve shot and selecting the good stuff.
For videos, editing together all the different clips into a single movie.
For videos, adding music and fixing any sound issues.
Correcting color, brightness, contrast, and other basic exposure settings.
Fixing any issues like crooked horizons, distortion, dust spots, or blemishes.
Applying any color toning or similar stylistic adjustments.
Prepping the photos or videos for export and printing, sharing, or posting them on the web.

How much post-processing is involved and how long it takes utterly depends on the project. A professionally shot short film will spend months in post-production with each step being done multiple times, on the other hand, I can process a few dozen photos in an hour—as long as I’m not doing any major retouching.

Here’s an example of an image I’ve taken through the steps above in about 20 minutes. Here’s what it looked like straight out of the camera (I also had another few similar photos that I rejected in post).