How To Become Better With EDITING PHOTOS In Just 10 Minutes

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Editing is essential to give your photos a unique look and achieve a personal style in your work. This can be accomplished by any means, including how you edit them, to what software you use to edit them with. This quick guide will go through various points that will set you up to start editing your photos like a professional.

Photoshop & Lightroom 

Lightroom is a program created by Adobe that allows you to edit your photos. It allows you to adjust settings such as temperature, exposure, colours in the image and allows you to change the aspect ratio along with many other things. The special thing about this software is the fact you can put your images into Catalogs. From various shoots you can have specific catalogs from these sessions, so you can stay organised with your files. Personally, I begin my editing process with Lightroom, I then use the software starring system, which allows me to give my image a star rating from 1-5, based on whether the image is worth editing or not. After I have found the images I like the most, I always start with exposing my image correctly. As you will find out shooting yourself, you will not get exposures right every single time, so they will need a bit of playing around with. As long as you’re shooting raw, it can be alright to shoot a tad underexposed, seeing as you can bring that brightness back to the image with Lightroom without losing any detail. 

After I make my adjustments with exposure and colour in my image, I will open up Photoshop which is another program by Adobe. The reason I use this program, as well as Lightroom, is the fact Photoshop is a non-destructive way of editing. It has an infinite amount of layers you can work on, so for each stage of your edit, you can have a separate layer. If by chance you make a mistake you can just delete that single layer rather than restarting the whole image. When it comes to editing portraits, I always use photoshop, It comes in handy editing skin texture and tones. I use a technique called dodge and burn to edit my subject’s skin, this involves lightning and darkening areas of their skin to balance the light out to make it look like a cleaner image. This process is also a non-destructive way of transforming your portraits to that next level (this technique is something I will do a whole post on this as it is a large subject to cover). When editing skin tones or just a tone in an image In general, I would suggest starting with using a gradient map, by selecting a new adjustment layer, then gradient map. This will give you a sort of filter for your image with tons of colours and tones to choose from. When you first apply it, it will look a bit crazy but if you bring the opacity down between 2-5% you will achieve great results. You can play around with a lot of effects on Photoshop but remember if the effect looks too much, reduce the opacity for that specific effect and you will create some interesting photos. 

Don’t over-edit

While editing your photos and experimenting with new techniques it can be easy to get carried away with what you’re doing. When photographers first start out using software like Lightroom, they over-saturate their images. Another common mistake is seeing a lot of work that is underexposed or overexposed. Errors like this will solve themselves over time and experience with your camera, you will realise from seeing other photographers images whether you’re on the right track or not. My advice would be for landscapes to try not to saturate the image to the point it's not realistic and for portraits try to do the same but also keep the skin texture intact as possible. If you blur the skin as you would see on certain Instagram posts, it looks amateur and if you want to progress in that field you will never get any work. These are just things to keep in mind when editing.

Inspiration from other photographers

There are a lot of styles of editing you can choose from. Every style you see from photographers is not truly a unique style. They have been influenced by other photographers in some shape or form. I am not saying you should completely mimic someone's work but you can take what they have made and bend that style into your own, whether it be their colour grading, skin retouching, or compositions. In the images above the first one is the inspiration from Instagram I had and the second image is from a shoot trying to recreate this image but put my own stamp on it. I personally think it worked out really well and it went on to be published in a fashion magazine. It just goes to show not every idea has to be completely unique and you can take inspiration from anyone as long as you put your own stamp on the images and this is what will truly build you up to your own style.

Conclusion 

To conclude, make sure you experiment with the software but don’t get too carried away to the point where the image doesn’t even look real anymore. Also, make sure to look at a variety of photographer’s work, take inspiration, and create your own artwork. Most importantly keep shooting and practicing your editing technique and you will get better and better and you will come a long way in a short period of time if you put the work in.