Photo Editing Basics

Photo editing is a crucial skill in marketing, helping to enhance visuals for social media, print materials, and promotional content. A well-edited photo can capture attention, convey messages effectively, and maintain brand consistency. This guide covers the basics of photo editing and the best practices to follow.

1. Correct Your Exposure

Exposure: The overall brightness of your image.

Tips:

• First, it is recommended that you look at your exposure. Before you adjust it, ask yourself: "Is my photo too bright? Is it too dark? Is it just right?"
• Generally, you want to keep at least some details in the image shadows and some details in the image highlights.
• If you're not sure, move your exposure slider back and forth while watching your image - you will quickly get a sense of what looks good and what doesn't. 

2. Adjust White Balance

White Balance: The process of removing unrealistic color casts, so that objects that appear white in person are rendered white in your photo. White balance is important and helps ensure that your colors are accurate and natural. Without white balance, your photos may have a blue or yellow tint.

Tips:

• A perfect white balance shows the whites in your images exactly as they look in real life.
• Select the eyedropper tool, then click on an area of your image that should be a true white color.
• The program should adjust the image for a perfect result (if you don't like the effect, or you want to adjust the white balance further, you can always move the temperature and tint sliders until you get the look you want).

Color temperature guide in kelvin

On the left, the photo has a too-cool white balance, and the one on the right has a too-warm white balance. Do you see the difference?

3. Adjust Contrast

Contrast: The difference between the darks and lights in a photo. Enhances the difference between light and dark areas.

Tips:

• Intense darks and intense lights create high contrast.
• Softer darks and softer lights create low contrast.
• RAW files tend to suffer from limited contrast, so it might make sense to increase it a tad until you get a nice result that you like.
• Be careful not to take the contrast too far, or else you'll create a nightmarish effect.
• You will have have the option to fine-tine the contrast with Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks sliders.

4. Check Vibrance & Saturation

Vibrance: Enhances image's color intensity. Increases the saturation in the mid-tones and protects the highlights and shadows.

Saturation: The intensity of all the colors in your image.

Tips:

• By boosting your saturation in small amounts, you can add pop to your image.
• Be careful when adjusting, like seasoning a meal, it's easy to over do it.
• You can also adjust the "vibrance" instead of "saturation" if you want more of a subtle edit.
• You can also try adjusting both, the vibrance and saturation - experiment until you achieve the effect you want.
• On occasion, you should even decrease the vibrance and/or saturation. If the colors are too bright and powerful, try reducing one or both.

5. Reduce Noise & Increase Sharpening

Noise: A random variation in the image signal. Can be caused by multiple things - including poor lighting, high ISO settings, long exposure times, and heat.

Sharpening: A post-processing technique used to enhance the clarity and definition of details in digital images by increasing the contrast along edges and fine textures.

Tips:

• Most RAW photos can do with a bit of sharpening (zoom into the image to really see the effects up close).
• Not every image needs noise reduction - if you zoom to 100% and see little speckles, you'll probably want to reduce both luminance noise and color noise.
• Too much noise reduction will decrease sharpness and not look the best - so don't go overboard! Slowly adjust and fine-tune.

6. Straighten & Crop Your Images

Straighten Images: It's important to pay attention that your horizon is horizontal when you shoot, but straightening is also an easy first editing step.

Crop Images: The crop tool can improve minor compositional details - like distracting elements at the edge of the frame or repositioning your subject slightly.

Tips:

• Follow the rule of thirds to improve composition.
• Crop out unnecessary distractions to keep focus on the subject.

These are the basics of photo editing, but there are a lot more photo editing options not covered in this article. Take some time to review the Adobe Lightroom Trainings and experiment on your own! The more you practice and experiment, the more you will feel comfortable and progress.