Photo editing is a method of tweaking an image to make it more crisp and clear. Whether you decide to take photos on a professional DSLR camera or on your 12-megapixel cell phone camera, it is a good idea to edit your pictures. By fine-tuning the elements of your photograph you can make it go from ‘meh…’ to ‘wow!’
Photo editing is not always done for just professional touch-ups of pictures but it can also be done for personal use, for example, to upload it to your Instagram feed.
Listed below are the basic steps you will need to know about editing your pictures:
- Starting with a Good Base Photo:
Indirect sunlight makes a huge difference to your pictures, not only does it add natural brightness and contrast, it also makes the need to enhance the picture quite minimal. Before you start clicking your photograph, make sure you have made up your mind on how you’re going to photograph it. No matter how much you edit, bad photos cannot be salvaged. While brightness, contrast, saturation can be altered, it is hard to rescue a picture that is blurry, or taken in a dimly lit room with a little or too much flash. Indirect sunlight is the best, try to take pictures during the day. If not sunlight then make use of a lightbox. Clean up the area you are shooting in and have a good tripod handy when clicking in low light areas.
- Photo Editing tools:
- Picasa: Clunky to use and has a lot of features to play around with.
- Afterlight: This app is available for iPhones, it has various editing options and the overlays are fabulous.
- Adobe Photoshop Express: This app is available for Android and iPhones and does a great job when the editor wants to adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation.
- Pixlr: This is very handy in context of, browser editing.
- Cropping a photo:
By cropping out distracting elements from your photos you can bring focus on the focal point. It can be used to completely change the composition of your photo. When cropping always keep the photo at 600px wide and never make it too small. if you wish to have intro to photo editing, visit the site.
- Adjusting Brightness and Reducing Shadows:
Making use of brightness and exposure is the first step to correct an image. Since most pictures are taken indoors the pictures can appear dim. While editing pictures be careful of blowouts, this occurs if there are any shiny or metallic objects in focus and it may appear quite jarring.
- Saturation:
If your photos look plain and washed out, increasing the brightness alone will make it look pale. This is where saturation comes into play. Even while taking outdoor photos it is advised to up the saturation level as it makes the colors more vibrant and striking.
- Using fewer photos:
Always try to whittle your projects down, it’s always best that you choose one or two best pictures to showcase your work, then, many blurred pictures.
So now that you have understood the basics, get yourself a camera and some good editing tools and snap away. All you need are a few good pictures to get that portfolio started. So, snap away!