Photo Editing Tips That Changed My Photography
Photo editing is one of the most important steps in making your final image stand out and deserves just as much time (and maybe even more) as when you’re out in the field actually capturing the photo.
When I first started as a photographer, I didn’t spend nearly as much time as I should have editing photos. And when I did, I made stylistic choices that caused a lot of my photos to be less than impressive.
As photographers, we’re always learning new ways to improve our craft and bring a sense of creativity to our photos. In this blog, I’d like to share some editing tips that I have learned over the years, which I’m hoping will help anyone who might be struggling with their editing.
Don’t Go Overboard with the Clarity Slider
In the beginning of my photography career, I prioritized getting photos to be as sharp as possible over anything else. When doing street photography at night, I would barely change the shutter speed, aperture, or ISO. When the photo wasn’t as sharp as I wanted it to be, I would just bump up the clarity slider.
To be honest, I feel like this is something that I’ve heard a lot of photographers do when they first start. And while it makes sense to want to increase clarity, I think it makes photos look really unappealing.
Below are two examples of the same photo where the only thing I changed is the clarity (you can probably guess which one has the clarity bumped up incredibly high).
Obviously which photo you prefer is completely subjective and based on your taste, but increasing the clarity creates a lot of incredibly harsh contrasts across the entire photo. For this photo in particular, I think making the image a bit more faded helps in achieving the film-style look I was going for.
If you’re wanting to focus on getting your photos to be sharp, focus on your shutter speed when you’re actually on the field, consider which focus mode you’re using, and use your aperture intentionally.
Subtlety Makes a Difference
We sometimes might feel the need to drastically change the adjustments of our images in the editing process just so we can feel like we brought something creative to the photo. When I did street photography at night, I would dramatically change the temperature and increase the saturation. Looking back at some of my photos, it looked like I had just put a strange filter over it.
Learning from other photographers, but also practicing shooting at different times of the day other than at night helped me understand how to be more intentional with how I color my photos.
Image before editing.
Image before editing.
Image after editing.
Image after editing.
Sometimes it’s good to push the adjustment features as far as you can to help you decide which direction you want to take the photo in. For example, in the photos above, I knew I wanted the photos to have cooler tones, so I was fine starting off going a bit overboard on lowering the temperature, but then I’d pull back until I felt it was at a good spot to continue making other adjustments.
In certain cases like cyberpunk images, then it’s definitely a good idea to push boundaries and manipulate the colors to achieve the mood you’re looking for. But for the images above, I wanted to add a blue tone to the image without changing the other vibrant colors (like the red lanterns in the restaurant). There are multiple ways you can make specific adjustments, but for these images, I was happy with just changing the temperature.
Using The Calibration Tool
This was a feature in Lightroom I didn’t use for a long time. There are a lot of different ways to manipulate color in Lightroom, but using this tool has helped me figure out which colors I naturally gravitate towards in the final photo.
This isn’t really a tool I use in portraits, but one I will generally play with when it comes to landscapes and street photography.
Referencing my previous point, I don’t like to try and go too overboard with the saturation on this adjustment feature. In the photo above, I really like the composition of the image, but I’m not a fan of the yellow light illuminating the store. I used the Calibration tool to change the hue and saturation of those colors. The only difference between the two photos is the adjustment that I made in the Calibration setting in Lightroom.
Keep Editing After You Export
Once you feel like you’ve edited a photo as much as you’ve wanted to and export it, you might feel tempted to say you’re done and not look back. There have been plenty of photos I will feel good about after working on it for a while, only to realize there are certain things I didn’t catch after exporting it out of Lightroom.
Of course you don’t want to fall into an endless cycle of editing one photo for the rest of your life, but I do think it’s good to take a step back after taking a long time editing a photo and approach the image again with fresh eyes.
In a similar vein, I try to keep the raw images from photos I’ve taken years ago on a hard drive. After you have gained a lot more experience in photo editing, it can be exciting to go back and edit old photos with a new perspective.
A photo I took back in February 2023 that I edited over a year later after learning about the Calibration tool.