How to Transform Ordinary Photos into Professional Images: The Art of Photos Editing
- Oct 16, 2023
- 522
Professionally produced images on the internet have almost always been digitally manipulated. It might be as simple as adjusting the exposure or as dramatic as distorting components inside the photo. If you've never had your photos edited, you now understand why even the finest of your shots never seem to compare to the photographs taken by your favorite photographers.
With just 8 easy editing steps, you'll discover how to take ordinary photos and turn them into stunning ones in this article.
1. Find your individual style
It's a common saying that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." This also holds true for each person's chosen editing approach. Some people enjoy taking timeless black-and-white photos, but others would rather go for a more contemporary look that has more contrast and color. They eventually come up with a unique style that defines them. The best way to hone your style is to start by copying the photographers and artists you like. What appears to be the overarching theme? What exactly about their work appeals to you? How does it affect the way you take pictures?
2. Get proficient with photo editing software
Gaining confidence as a photographer can be greatly enhanced by learning the ins and outs of an editing application. A decent picture editing app or application will have many features and convenient tools that will allow you to enhance, change, or turn your shot into something beautiful and strange. Don't be scared to try new things!
There are a ton of excellent applications and programs for altering photos available. Numerous of them offer highly functional free versions. You may get the most out of your photographic abilities by becoming proficient with an editing program. To keep your workspace organized, it also helps if the program provides file organization tools.
3. Experiment with filters and presets
This fresh introduction to presets will save you time if you're not familiar with them.
Presets are these cute little formulas for picture editing that combine settings to get the desired effect. To create a moody, cinematic aesthetic, consider making a specific adjustment to temperature, brightness, saturation, and other aspects. After that, you may copy it to other pictures and save it.
When dealing with huge batches of photographs that need to seem coherent, presets come in rather handy. For instance, to make an album look decent, every shot from a wedding photo shoot should have been taken with a preset that is comparable, if not the same.
Online, a plethora of free presets can easily downloaded. There are a lot of photographers and artists out there that sell
4. Employ the crop feature
Cropping an image allows you to focus more on your main subject by removing unwanted edges. Amateur photographers frequently overexpose their main subject, detracting from drawing the viewer's attention to it.
All of your phone's photo-editing apps have the crop feature. If it's feasible, remove anything that detracts too much from the main topic. On the other hand, avoid cropping away someone's limbs as this could look unnatural in the picture.
5. Straighten the line
One simple yet effective approach to make a photo look more professional is to straighten it. Furthermore, it's largely disregarded in the context of photo editing. An image that has been inadvertently skewed is an obvious indicator that someone is inexperienced.
Most photo editing software comes with an auto straighten feature that automatically straightens any crooked lines it finds. Some even include more sophisticated tools that can correct distortion or straighten lines.
When taking architectural or urban photos, for instance, you might see that the lines of highways or buildings have converged or skewed. To straighten those lines, sophisticated photo editing tools like Pixlr's Transfer Tool will be helpful.
6. Recognize white balance
White balance is adjusting artificially bright colors to create a more realistic image. A photograph's white balance can be influenced by the various lighting situations in which it was shot. For instance, if an image was taken indoors or under an overcast sky, the results might have a colder color temperature.
To put it another way, white balance can impact an image's overall mood. Gaining control over an image's white balance would enable you to get the desired outcomes.
How can you improve your image using a warmer or colder color temperature? Will it instead make the picture worse? Try photographing the same subject with several white balance settings for practice to discover what effects each option has.
7. Understand the triangle of exposure
The three main parts of the exposure triangle are shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. These are the primary factors that will impact an image's exposure, as the name suggests.
Finding balance amongst the three elements is the exposure triangle's most crucial guideline. Every time you change one component, you'll need to make adjustments to the other component or components to balance the exposure.
To compensate for the reduced amount of light entering the lens (resulting from a quick shutter speed), you must, for instance, use a wider aperture or raise the ISO if you desire a faster shutter speed.
8. Remove any unnecessary clutter.
In photography, the finer points are crucial. Photographers must always be aware of what is going on behind their subject. Reposition to conceal any distracting objects that may be behind your subject.
Naturally, though, not everything can be taken out while filming. In certain circumstances, this can only be done in post-production. This is where unneeded elements can be removed from photos with the aid of editing tools like Pixar's Magic Wand. Your shot will look a lot better after this editing step, with the subject receiving less emphasis.
Go shoot, edit, and get out there!
Going back to the first point made in this post, beauty is subjective. When editing a photos, there is no right or wrong method.