[Part ten of the Photography Fundamentals series, be sure to check out all 10 posts!]
I saved editing until last because it’s the least important factor in creating great images.
Take good pictures and you get to cut way down on the amount of editing you have to do. In fact, photo editing as we know it today wasn’t even possible until 20-30 years ago.
Crop:
Even some of the best photographers do a little composition work in post. It’s a great chance to make sure your framing, layering and rule of thirds are all correctly implemented. It’s good practice, but not crucial, to try to keep your photo at a typical aspect ratio or size. Keeping images 4:3 or 3:2 isn’t technically necessary but these are the traditional photo sizes.
Correct:
This is your chance to correct any of the mistakes you might have made in your original picture, things like white-balance and exposure. You can even correct your dynamic range a little by adjusting brightness and contrast. Don’t do anything artsy here, just try to make it look like the perfect image you intended it to be.
Relight:
If you aren’t very experienced with whatever editing software you are using, I would skip this part.
Often in photography, the light you had in your favorite shot was exactly the light you wanted. Sometimes the background is too bright or the subject too dim. If this is the case you can use some of the tools in your editing software to “relight” the scene. There are two main ways to do this: one is the “Dodge/Burn” brush which lightens or darkens selected areas of your image.
Another method is the vignette. A vignette is typically a feathered or softened shape which either adds or subtracts lightness from the area inside your shape. There are probably a dozen different methods for vignetting just inside Photoshop. Google “vignette” and whatever editing software you are using to find a billion tutorials.
Color Balance:
Here’s where the artsy editing can really kick in. By adding or subtracting certain hues to or from your image you can give it a specific feel. There are a plethora of methods for shifting your image’s color, but my go-to correction is the “color” balance option.
In color balance, you get to shift the colors in your image based on lightness. You can shift your shadows, mid-tones and highlights (dark, medium and light) of your picture towards a specific hue. Typically I like to add some red and yellow to my highlights and some blue and green to my shadows. This helps in limiting the color palette of the image when the subject is a person.
Saturate:
The final adjustment I often make is saturation. Saturation refers to the intensity of all the colors in your image. A completely desaturated image is black and white. Hyper saturated images can give your pictures a surreal feel. It’s easy to experiment and see what level of saturation accomplishes the look you had in mind.
Start Over:
A lot of times, all of the adjustments of an image just make it look like crap (or at least that’s how you’ll feel). Sometimes the best option is to start over from the original image and try again. If you’ve spent all day tweaking an edit, take a break and do something else for a while. Sometimes coming back to an edit after a couple of hours can give you a fresh perspective on your work.
Editing should be the least of your concerns when you’re starting out as a photographer. Focus on getting a perfect exposure and amazing composition. Then you’ll hardly have to do any photo editing at all.
Remember, the most important rule of all: if it looks good, it is good. Stop worrying about rules. Get out there and shoot.
[Part ten of the Photography Fundamentals series, be sure to check out all 10 posts!]
Kevin says
Thanks for all the photo tips!
My open source tip is that you don’t have to drop a chunk of change to be able to digitally edit your photos. Gimp and several other free and open source image editors have wonderful and easy to use tools to do all of the above plus a whole lot more. There’s also a couple free, open source digital dark room apps if you really want to rework the images in RAW format.
You really have no excuse to start learning and doing more with quality cameras so cheap and free software so available!
Kevin
http://opensourcechurch.com
BrianNotess says
I agree. I use GIMP for editing all the time!