Edit Your Photos like Professional - Become a celebrity

Photo-editing could be an enjoyable process and the steps are usually hashed out a million times in the Internet. Before you reach for that given “filter” of your photo-editing software, the best practice would be to just look at your photo, and decide what you want your photo to do:

• Would you prefer to edit it such that it best mirrors what the scene looked in reality when you captured it in your frame? The camera cannot capture what the human eye sees, so oftentimes we need to change the hue, saturation, contrast, etc levels to bring it as closer to reality as we can.
• Or would you want your photo to say something different? This is often done when you want to dramatize a particular scene and could play with the shadows or colour levels. Making a photo black-and-white doesn’t mirror reality (reality is in colour) but we make it black and white to emphasize something or do something else in our photos.

After you ask yourselves these questions, the answer to which needn’t be the same for a batch of photos taken in the same opportunity, I’d start with some basic stuff as follows:

1. A good crop equates a good yield:

Look at the frame of your photo in question. Is it saying something interesting?Could it be made more interesting? Can you make a crop so as to bring in Rule of thirds? How are the spaces around the subject help (or doesn’t help) the photo?

As for example, originally I took a photo like this:

I thought I took in the evening light well; but all that space around the subjects wasn’t really helping (two people enjoying their time out). A better framing could be easily achieved with the following crop:

Also, feel free to crop out faces or anything that is traditionally taught not to do. A good rule of photography is to learn the rules well so that you can break them when you feel it’s necessary to make your photos speak. In the following photo, for example, I cropped out the face of the model, because I wanted the body posture to do the talking instead of the audience attention going to the face:

2. Play with your shadows and warmth:

The option of controlling shadows and warmth is there in any free photo-editing software and those are useful tools. If your light messes with your white balance in camera or something comes across as too washed out (with light), adding warmth helps.

For example, adding on warmth could make objects in warm colours more appealing or appetizing. The left photo includes a picture of Gulab jamun I had made, and the usual white light washed out some warm tones. Adding on some warmth (visible in the photo on right) can make the same picture stand out.

Playing with the shadow slider is also a good way to see how it helps to dramatize your photos.

In the top picture below, there is more shadow, in the bottom picture of cereals, there is more warmth. Both of these photos could be used, based on what you want to tell through them. The bottom picture looks happy and sunshiny to me. The top picture looks a bit “intrigued” or has a bit of “drama”.

Shadows are a good thing to play with. They are useful tools if you capture anything foggy, as was my luck in Hong Kong. Increasing the shadow slider or the “Blacks” slider in Adobe Lightroom, could clear out most of the fog captured by your camera. Not all, but even then, this wasn’t too bad:

Increasing Shadows is also a useful strategy when you want to focus on your subject. A lot of light-induced noise is lost when you increase shadow. A lot of shadow was added on to the following picture, which was shot during evening time, but I wanted to focus on the subject (The weed with water droplets), and the result was this:

3. Vignettes are your friend, when done right.

Don’t use strong vignettes (unless you purposefully want to do say something by the addition of strong vignettes). Use vignettes, use the “fade” slider to make it blend well with the picture, and you have a picture with its subject in focus.

In the following photo, I wanted the attention to shift to the journey (of the girl with flowers somewhere), and there were too many people in the frame. Vignettes can help:

It especially helps when you didn’t enable spot metering in your camera, or don’t have any metering control on your camera.

4. When in doubt, use Black and White

Ideally speaking, good photos happen when the light is just right, that is diffused light available on cloudy days, constructed lighting by you, reflected, filling-frame light from somewhere close, the light in early morning or late afternoon.

But not always, we can have access to the ideal lighting conditions, especially if you see something worthwhile to capture in the mid-afternoon sun. In those situations when you wonder how your photo would look in less than favourable lighting situations, you can use high contrast and shadow photos and turn them into black-and-white, and still get what you were hoping to capture:

You could add some tint onto your black-and-white, to create a difference:

5. Tinting is also a good way to cut down the glare of the sun, especially if you don’t have ND filters with you. It’s not realistic portrayal but adding on a bit of the green tint (available in free software like Picasa), can either cut down the glare as it did on the following photo:

or add something to a photo taken with a very dull lighting condition, as happened in the following scene in Vancouver on a dull, cloudy day:

6. Learn to Desaturate.

Repeat after me: More Saturation is not better.

I see most photos that saturate to the level of abuse, but the trick is not only to hit “auto-colours” every time you sit with editing your pictures, but de-saturation can also add something more to your everyday photos, especially when you can’t afford pro-level lighting equipment, or camera.

In the following picture, I had to work in the most horrible lighting conditions possible—under the neon light. And my cousin wanted some pics taken. So, when faced with similar circumstances, desaturate, and just add warmth, as I did over here, and you can have something different, with restricted lighting conditions:

Desaturation is also good to add some drama:

or when you don’t want to turn your pictures into B/W, but don’t want too much colour doing the talking. Your picture could say something when you desaturate thus:

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As well, the usual advice applies to any photo-editing task:

• increase your exposure for an under-exposed photo;
• Use “fill light” feature; use the “brightness” feature if you don’t want dark photos.
• Use the unsharp mask when you sharpen something; if you don’t have theunsharp mask, then either use the noise reduction slider or increase on theluminance slider to take off some noise.
• Check for hue and contrast saturation.
• Apply blur in the background if you want to enhance your subject in the foreground, but don’t forget to “Fade” or blend it well.
• Play with your RGB curves and see where that leads you. As a rule of thumb, a ‘S’ curve gives out a good finished look on a well-exposed picture of a landscape or a portrait. But just play with it and thereby learn it well, as to how it works.

Let your pictures do the talking.