Photography editing is an important skill for anyone who wants to turn their photos from okay to incredible. If you are a professional photographer or you are taking photos as a hobby, mastering simple editing techniques will ensure that your images are acting colorful, attractive, and impactful. Whether it is polishing the colors or removing imperfections, a simple snap can be transformed into a beautiful artistically touching picture with some editing.
In this article, we’re going to explore the 10 basic photography editing tips and techniques you can use to improve your photo edits and streamline your workflow.
Note: While the examples here are demonstrating in Photoshop, Lightroom, or any editing application, these techniques are transferable and can be applied in different tools. So, let’s get started!
Photography Editing Tips And Techniques
Adjust Exposure and Contrast:
Adjusting the exposure and contrast is the first part of any photo editing process. Getting the right exposure is essential to getting the right amount of light in your image. When the exposure is too high or too low, it can cause your photo to be overexposed (washed out) or underexposed (too dark).
Exposure:
Exposure is the amount of light falling on the camera’s sensor and refers to how light or dark the image appears. Post-processing, exposure adjustment can save under-exposed or overexposed images. Most editing software features a straightforward exposure slider that makes the image lighter or darker.
- It overcomes ISO by darkening overexposed patches and lightening darker areas by increasing exposure.
- Lowered exposure for recovering the high-lit part of the image.
Contrast:
Contrast is what gives contrast between light and dark in your photo. With more contrast, you can add a more propulsive feel to your image; with less, you can make it feel more subtle or softer.
- Add more contrast to make her image pop, with darker shadows and bright highlights.
- Lower contrast for more flat look, helpful for portraits or softer work
- Exposure and contrast adjustments can work together to generate a more balanced and interesting photo.
Correct White Balance
One of the key things we can do as photo editors or photo editing agencies, particularly if we want to achieve accurate colors, is to edit the white balance. In some lighting conditions, a photo can appear with a yellow, blue, or green tint. Adjusting the white balance eliminates these color casts and makes sure your images appear true to life.
- In most photo editing software, the white balance is changed by using temperature and tint sliders:
- Temp: This affects the warmth in the photo. Drag the slider to the blue side for cooler tone and yellow side for warm tone.
- Tint: This slider corrects color casts due to fluorescent or artificial light sources, moving the image toward green or magenta.
- With slight adjustments of these two, you can make your image look closer to natural.
Enhance Sharpness
Occasionally, photographs can seem somewhat soft or blurry, and sharpening makes small details pop and sharper, helping the subject of your photograph look crisper and more defined.
The “Sharpen” or “Clarity” sliders available in most editing programs are for this intensity. Here’s how:
Sharpen: This makes the edges in your image sharper which helps fine details stand out: Use only sparingly to prevent items having odd hard-edge halos.
Clarity: This boosts mid-tone contrast, delivering more geometric, defined textures.
Here, use caution not to over sharpen, as this adds noise (grain) and makes the photo look unnatural.
Image Crop and Straighten
Every now and then, the details of your photo require some adjustment. You might want to crop or straighten the image to improve the balance of your photograph, drawing the viewer’s eye to the subject.
Cropping:
Cropping helps cut off any unneeded detail from around the outside of your photo so you can focus the viewer’s eye on the part of the image that really matters. It also enables you to refine composition using the Rule of Thirds, splitting your image into a 3×3 grid. By placing important parts of your photo along these lines, or at their intersections, you create a more pleasing, balanced photo.
Straightening:
If your image is a little crooked, straighten that shot so that the horizon or any vertical lines are straight. Most editing tools even have an automatic straighten tool (or they show you a grid, so you can straighten your photo manually).
Remove Blemishes and Other Flaw Like Spots
If you are into photography, one of the greatest advantages of digital photography is the capability of eliminating unwanted attributes through your images. Be it a stray hair, a pimple or distracting object in the background, retouching allows you to clean up your photo.
If you have spots or distractions to remove try using the Clone Stamp or Healing Brush tools in Photoshop or the Spot Removal tool in Lightroom. Here’s how:
Healing Brush: This tool mixes the surrounding area with the blemish or imperfection to make it disappear as if by magic.
Clone stamp: This copies some of your image, then pastes it over the blemish, resulting in a clean image.
- Because some small parts need to look seamless, make sure you zoom when retouching.
- Improve the Saturation and Vibrance.
Both saturation and vibrance are color enhancements, but they are slightly different in how they work. Saturation adjusts all colors in the photograph, while vibrance targets the more muted colors while leaving areas already color-dense alone. Which is what makes vibrance a more “subtle” way to boost colors without over-saturating your image.
Saturation:
So add in some saturation for a bolder brighter look.
Lower saturation for a more washed-out, almost black-and-white effect.
Vibrance:
Bring the vibrance up for the colors to come up but not over the top.
Lower vibrance to mute colors that seem too exaggerated.
To maintain a natural look, adjust very vibrance and then saturation if necessary.
Use the Dodge and Burn Tools
Dodge and Burn To add depth and emphasize detail, use the Dodge and Burn tools to brighten or darken specific sections of an image.
Dodge Tool: It lightens a specific area of the image and makes it pop out. That can be useful if you need to brighten up faces, or other critical elements in a photo.
Burn Tool: Darkens parts of the photo; provides contrast and shadowing to certain parts.
You can use these in an innovative manner to stress textures and provide depth and highlight important elements of your image.
Create a Vignette Effect
A vignette is where the edges of the photo are darkened or blurred in order to keep the focus centered on it. This effect is especially useful for portraiture or product images, where you want the viewer’s eye drawn to the actual subject of the photo.
To create a vignette:
Go to the radial filter or post-crop vignette tool in any editing software.
Feather it to blend (add darkness to the edges).
Just don’t overdo it; a subtle vignette usually does a better job than an obvious one.
Refine Skin Tones (when it comes to Portraits)
If you follow step 1 to make your portrait photos look their best, step 2 is enhancing the skin tones, as they are an important part of a great portrait. With some simple tweaks, you can make skin tones look smoother and more uniform.
HSL/Color Panel: Within lightroom or photoshop, you can very selectively move the Hue/Saturation and Luminance (HSL) sliders to get the skin tones just right. This allows you to eliminate unwanted color casts (red or yellow, for example) and smooth skin tones.
Use Frequency Separation: A more advanced technique that separates the texture and color of the skin, frequency separation allows you to smooth out the skin without losing detail or creating an artificial look.
If you’re after a more polished finish, you can also tweak clarity, or add some gentle skin smoothing.
Correctly Save & Export Your Image
After you finish your editing your last step is to save and export your photo in the right format and resolution. This step prepares your image for posting to social media, printing, or inclusion in a portfolio.
Print at 300 DPI (dots per inch). 72 DPI is generally good enough for web use.
[Image Quality] Save the image: Make sure to save it as the good file format. JPEG should be the file format of choice for uploading to the web, while TIFF or PNG is required when printing images.
Saving Tips:
Edit non-destructively when you can (via layers or editing in smart objects in Photoshop) so that you have the option to go back and change things down the line if necessary.
Compress your images, too – for the web, especially.
Conclusion
Photography editing doesn’t have to be complicated, but a few key techniques used to their fullest potential can make a HUGE difference in the finished product. In addition, you can boost your photos by changing the exposure, contrast, sharpness and colors. Removing distractions and correcting skin tones and adding vignettes effects etc.
As you practice and develop your editing skills more, you can play with more complex techniques. Keep in mind, you are not trying to change the photo dramatically, which is what your editing should not be but rather enhance what you have naturally, fix what is wrong and make your creative vision come to life.
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