By all means do some minor cropping to tighten up composition or framing, but be careful about going too far - you're just throwing pixels away.

When I import photographs to Lightroom (this is where the vast majority of my image editing work happens) it automatically applies a preset that I have installed – basic adjustments that I apply to all my images, like colour luminance, noise reduction, colour profile, lens corrections and so on. You can see that there’s not a huge difference at this stage.

Now there’s a much bigger change. I have set a black point and a white point so that there is a full range of tones, opened up the shadows and added a small bit of vibrancy to brighten the colours.

The work on this pic is all about separating the subject (the darter) from the background. This adds depth to the image (giving it a sort of 3D quality) and concentrates the viewer’s attention on the bird. Adjustments include cropping in slightly to tighten up the composition, vignetting the image a little (darkening the borders), adding some negative clarity to the background, some contrast to the wing feathers and a little lightening and sharpness of the face and beak. Yes, we could take it a little further, but at some point you have to call it a day – and in any case, the last thing you want to do is ‘overcook’ the pic, particularly with regard to sharpening and saturation.

This pic of an African Darter is straight out of camera. Keep in mind that it’s a raw image and no in-camera processing has been applied, so it’s a little flat. If you shoot jpegs then there will always be some image processing profile applied before the pics are saved to the memory card. You can select which profile you’d like – camera standard, camera portrait, camera scenic, black and white, and so on.