With the huge range of online learning resources available these days, teaching yourself how to take a better photo has never been easier. Learn a little bit of the rule of thirds and how to frame correctly, and your pics will already look considerably better. However, not enough attention is paid to how much even some slight editing can transform your images. Forget Instagram filters and relentlessly cropping those photos. No matter what you’re planning to do with your pics, from posting for likes or selling them on, here are some essential photo editing tips that could turn even the most basic selfie into an image that blows people away.
Get Some Presets
It can take a lot of time to edit an image, especially if you have an entire folder full of them. Before you start learning the basic editing techniques, it’s a good idea to check the photo editing software that you’re using. Software like Adobe Lightroom can make it much faster to make essential edits to your photos, and you can even use presets to quickly edit images that mean you can race through your editing and still end up with those pics that pop. Don’t spend whole days on a single image when you can get incredible results by instantly applying the presets that you’ve set up. When it comes to photo editing, presets are a game-changer that you should get used to using as early as possible.
Desaturate Distractions
If your photos are over-saturated, then the colors are going to be distracting and unnatural. When you first start out with photo editing, it’s very easy to over-saturate simply because making the colors appear more vivid can look fantastic. That vividness quickly becomes unnatural if you got too far, though, and too much saturation can make even the most high-quality image look unnatural and ugly. You want your photos to look vibrant but going too far will distract from the image itself, and the end result will be an image that is just a confusing mess. There is a market for this kind of photo, but it’s very niche and not for everyone. Use saturation tools very carefully, and don’t let bright colors weaken your great composition.
Learn to Crop
Modern cameras (and even smartphones) might have made it all too easy to crop images, but it’s very common to see people crop their photos in the wrong way. This will come down to your awareness of composition. Once you’ve worked out how to take photos using techniques like leading lines and symmetry, your cropping should be used to enhance those images rather than ruin them. If the photos that you take in the first place have followed the composition basics, then you should consider editing as the surgical approach that makes those choices clearer and more impactful. Don’t spend time taking the perfect rule of thirds photo only to zoom in on a face and crop out the parts of the image that will stand out.
Taking up photography has never been easier, and with the many platforms that you can use to share those photos, you can quickly establish yourself as a photographer of exceptional skill. Don’t limit yourself to the basic editing that you’ll find on social media. Learn a bit more about how editing can transform your images, and you’ll never take a bad photo again.