With high-quality cameras now standard issue on every smartphone, photography is something of a hobby for everyone. Selfies, anyone? Of course, it’s a hobby that offers some benefits, such as expressing your creativity and helping you lock in memories.
Once you get past the novelty of taking pictures for their own sake, you’ll likely start frowning at a lot of your pictures. Maybe they aren’t as bright or tight as you want. If you want to up your picture game, keep reading for five key editing tips that will help take your photos up a level.
Table of Contents
Cropping
One of the most common problems in photos is that someone you don’t want turns up in the background. Maybe you didn’t notice when you took the picture or maybe someone walked into the frame.
Cropping is an image editing technique where you pull in the borders to remove things you don’t want in the background. If you only want one thing in the photo, you can take this up a step with a background eraser.
White Balance
Ever take a picture and then discover it’s saturated with a color you don’t especially love or one that doesn’t mimic what you actually saw. This is where white balance adjustment comes in. As you move the white balance up or down, it changes the colors in your image.
Just a note, though. It’s less effective on jpeg images than RAW image files.
Saturation
Depending on the time of day and lighting, you can take a picture of something colorful that looks dull in the final image. For example, that floral dress your friend wore that popped so much at the wedding looks lifeless in the picture.
You can boost the intensity of the color by adjusting the saturation of the image.
Sharpness
Another common issue with photos is that they lack a certain crispness. That doesn’t mean out of focus, because nothing can really fix that, but just not as crisp as you’d like. That’s where sharpness adjustments can save the day.
As a general rule, this tool highlights the edges of things.
Get Better Editing Software
For simple photo touching, you often rely on whatever software came on your computer or with your camera. If you want to get serious about photography, though, you will eventually need better editing software. A couple of more popular choices are Adobe Spark or Adobe Photoshop.
Photo Editing and You
Photo editing is one of those skills that you can take as far as you want. For some, it just means making their pictures look a little better. For others, it means making the leap from enthusiastic amateur to pro.
Like most things, though, start with the basics. Learn about cropping, white balance, and saturation. Play around with sharpness.
You’ll likely find these fix a lot of the problems you see. If you’re still not happy, up your game with more powerful editing software.
Looking for more personal tech tips? Check out the posts in our Personal Tech section.