You love taking photos—but are you always happy with the final results?
Photography is a passion and hobby for many, but it can be difficult to capture a photo just as it appears in reality. This is due to your type of camera, the sun and lighting, and the skill of the photographer.
However, if you’re trying to improve the look of your photos, one of the best ways is to edit your photos.
Once you understand how editing works and what you can do with it, you may be surprised at how it can improve your images.
To get started, keep reading for nine photo editing tips that every photographer needs to know.
1. One of Our Top Photo Editing Tips Is to Use Presets
Are you looking for a way to create gorgeous images with just one click? If so, one of our best photo editing tricks to try is Lightroom Presets.
If you’re not already using Lightroom, it’s part of the Adobe suite of photo editing software. It’s available via a monthly subscription and gives you a huge range of professional-level tools to edit photos.
The easiest way when getting started is to use presets, like Lightroom Polaroid presets. Presets are filters that can be applied to your photos, automatically adjusting the color and light.
They couldn’t be easier to use and are a lot of fun!
2. Shoot Your Photos in Raw
If you’re not already, shooting your photos in RAW mode, rather than jpeg, gives you a lot more options when it comes to editing.
RAW is a file format that captures everything seen by your camera when you take the shot, while jpeg photos are compressed, meaning a lot of the image data is lost.
While RAW photos take up more memory space on your camera, they give you more data to work with when editing photos, creating more professional results.
3. Don’t Be Afraid to Crop
The crop tool is your friend—it’s one of the easiest ways to turn an average photo into an impressive one. You can use the crop tool to improve the composure of your photo, remove thumbs or camera straps that were in front of the lens, or to focus on your subject.
When cropping landscape photos, think about the rule of thirds—it’s a way of mentally breaking up your photo so it’s more pleasing to look it
4. Bring Your Photo to Life by Adjusting Exposure
Adjusting the exposure on a photo is an easy way to make it more interesting to the viewer. It can be hard to capture light exactly as it appears in real life, so we can use the exposure tool to add more light to a photo or to tone it down.
You don’t need a complex photo editing tool to play with exposure, as it’s something that you can adjust on your smartphone.
5. Lightroom’s Clone Tool Can Fix Minor Blemishes
Do you ever take a photo and think it’s great, except for a small blemish? Something like a stain on clothing or a piece of trash in the background can take away from the look of a photo.
A simple way to edit the blemish out of your photo is with Lightroom’s Clone tool. In simple terms, it allows you to make a copy of something and use that to replace the blemish.
So, if you wanted to remove trash from a field, you could clone a part of the field that was clean and place it over the top of the blemish, removing it from the photo.
6. Only Edit Your Best Photos
After a big day of photography, you may be left with hundreds or thousands of photos. How can you edit so many photos?
When it comes to editing pictures, you want to first go through all your shots and earmark the best ones. These are the shots you want to edit—the rest can be deleted or saved for your records.
It often takes dozens of shots to get the image you want, so look for the best of the bunch and focus your editing time only on those photos.
7. Batch Editing Can Save You Time
You’ve gone through your photos and picked out the best ones, but it’s still a large number! If you have a large number of similar photos, and you want to edit them all, you can save time by using the batch editing feature on Lightroom.
This tool lets you apply the same edit to a set of photos, editing all of them at once.
8. Adjust Contrast to Make Your Image Pop
Editing the contrast on your photos is an easy edit that can make a big difference. In photography, contrast is the difference between the darkest and the lightest tone.
You can use contrast to turn a color photo into a black and white one. It’s also useful for making your image stand out more by intensifying the tones of the photo.
Read More: 6 Steps to Become a Better Photographer
9. Saturation Helps Your Subject Stand Out
Another of our photography editing tips is to play around with the saturation of your photo. Saturation refers to the vibrancy of the color in a photo.
If your image is focused on a subject, such as a red flower, increasing the saturation can make the red look more vibrant, which will draw the viewer’s eye to that part of the photo.
Try adjusting your saturation, especially in landscape photos, and watch the difference it makes to your edits.
Take Your Photos to the Next Level
Are you ready to up your photography game? If so, it’s all about the editing.
Try out some of the photo editing tips above and learn how you can use them to take your photography to a more professional level. Like learning any new skill, it takes time and practice—but soon, you’ll start to impress yourself with how great your photos are!
Get started today and try out photo editing for yourself.
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