Edit a Photo Like a Pro

Editing a photograph like a professional can take a lot of work, trial, and error. There are plenty of programs that allow you to edit photos in varying degrees of complexity. Adobe Photoshop is the most widely used software by professionals, but other applications exist, like GIMP, which are free and offer many of the same tools. The trick to editing a photo like a pro is knowing what aspects of your photo to play with. You don’t necessarily need a specific program to make most adjustments. By editing color, hue and saturation, levels, and retouching blemishes on any program, you can turn that decent photo into a great one.

Steps

Choosing a Photo editing Software

  1. Obtain a suitable digital photo editing program, or use an online site for editing. You have a near endless list of options when it comes to your photo editing software. If you’re serious about being a professional photo editor, then you should look into the Adobe Creative Suite which offers several programs like Photoshop, Elements, and Lightroom. These programs work in tandem and offer the largest toolset for photo editing. However, you can find plenty of less expensive or free alternatives.
    • Before you spend a lot of money, download a free program or use a trial version of a paid software to see if you like it and to get the hang of basic photo editing.
    • Editing a photo to look like it was done by a professional doesn’t always involve fancy software as the basic elements are the same. Adjusting white balance, fixing color, reducing noise, and playing with levels are techniques that can greatly enhance your photo and can be done on most photo editing software.
  2. Start with free software. If you’re new to photo editing, or just need an application to touch up the photos you’ve taken, don’t jump right into paying for expensive software. There are plenty of free options that will still give you plenty of tools to edit and touch up your photos like a pro.
    • Picasa is a quick and easy to navigate photo organizing tool that also comes with plenty of non-destructive editing features. Picasa is created by Google, so you can easily save and share your edits. The non-destructive editing means that you can add or undo edits easily, and your original photo is never changed.[1]
    • Mac users can try Apple Photos. Your photos and edits can sync with iCloud, and there are plenty of options to edit your photos in terms of color, noise, retouching, temperature, and more.[2]
    • Fotor offers a wide array of tools and effects to turn your photo into a professional grade work of art. Fotor will also let you import raw files and even add layers, like Photoshop.
    • On1 Perfect Effects is like a free version of Adobe’s software. With over 150 one-click photo effects, brush tool, and quick mask tools, and more, On1 Effects allows you to manipulate your photos extensively.
    • GIMP is an open source photo editor. It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. GIMP offers a lot of the same features that a paid software like Photoshop would offer such as painting tools, color correction, cloning, selection and enhancement.[3]
  3. Pay for software. If you are serious about editing photos, and may even make a career out of editing, consider paying for software. Paid software typically gives you more tools to use, has better support, and allows you to edit your photos more in depth than a free editor. The Adobe Creative Suite is the most popular software for creating, editing, and illustrating all kinds of digital art from photos to movies. However, other, less expensive options exist that give you plenty of tools to edit your photos like a pro.[4]
    • Photoshop is typically the software used by professionals as it allows you to manipulate one or many photos in almost any way you can imagine. However, the learning curve can be steep, and it is expensive.
    • Adobe Lightroom is an alternative to Photoshop that also works alongside Photoshop. Lightroom is a bit easier to use and allows you to backtrack on your edits much easier than Photoshop.
    • Phase One Capture One Pro is an alternative to Lightroom that is less expensive. Like Lightroom, PhaseOne allows you to upload your photos into a library and make non-destructive edits easily without modifying your original image.[5]

Making Basic Adjustments

  1. Create new layers. If you have a software that can create new layers, it’s always a good idea to create a new layer for each type of edit. A new layer will allow you to make edits and changes without disrupting the original layer. This way, if you mess up, you can go back without having to start over.
    • Not all programs let you create new layers. However, these programs usually offer a way to undo the effect easily so that you can backtrack a step or two without starting over.
  2. Adjust your white balance. Getting the right white balance can be one of the best improvements you can make to a photo. Sometimes, you might not even have to do much else if you adjust your white balance correctly, especially on your camera when taking the photo. Start by adjusting the temperature of your photo, then adjust the tint for smaller corrections.
    • If your photo is too cold, showing more blues than you would like, bring the temperature up to counterbalance those blues with more red tones. If your photo is too warm, bring the temperature down.
    • The tint slider controls your magenta-green shift. If you need to cool your photo, bring the slider higher into the magenta range. If your photo needs to be warmer, lower your tint to the green spectrum.
  3. Edit your photo’s color. Certain colors pair well together, others do not. There are several types of color, but a basic understanding of how these types work together can help you immensely in the editing room. In the real world your primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. You mix these colors together to get other colors. However, on a computer, we deal with red, green, and blue (RGB) as primary colors.[6]
    • Start with a curves layer. Your curves will adjust your color by making your photo warmer or cooler. There’s no set answer to playing with color as each photo will require something different. Using a midpoint grey eyedropper tool, you can click on an area of your photo where the color seems off. The tool will change the color balance of that color or area so that balances with the rest of your photo.
    • Adjust your light and color with a color overlay channel. Take a single color channel, red, green, or blue, and create a new layer with that channel by copying it over your original photo. Then, adjust the opacity of that layer to find a nice contrast.
  4. Reduce the noise in your photo. Sometimes you’ll notice that your photo has a lot of grainy colored dots. This is known as noise. It’s easiest to adjust and lower the noise before you make most other adjustments, other than playing with white balance and color. One of the most effective ways to reduce noise in your photo is to sharpen the image. However, too much sharpening can bring back more noise.
    • Certain photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom provides a “Detail” panel that provides options for both sharpening and noise reduction. These two tools work together because reducing too much noise alone can make your photo blurry and you have to sharpen it. On the flipside, too much sharpening can cause more noise.[7]
    • If you have a noise reduction option, start with that and increase the luminance level. Adjust the slider and pay attention to how far you can go before the photo gets too soft or blurry.[8]
  5. Enhance your photo by adjusting levels. If your photo looks like it was shot with an old camera or has a lot of flash, you can adjust the levels of the photo to make it look much more polished. Adjusting levels will counteract the exposure from the camera. Whether your image is underexposed and too dark, or overexposed and too light.
    • The ability to adjust your photo’s levels isn’t the same on every program. On some programs like Apple’s Photos app, you can’t adjust levels the same way you can in Photoshop, but you do have eight options for adjusting different aspects of your photo. Level adjustment essentially gives you control over brightness in three levels: shadows, midtones, and highlights.[9]
    • When adjusting a photo’s levels in any program for clarity, the goal is to create the widest tonal range allowing the brightest pixels in your photo to be pure white, and the darkest pixels to be pur black.[10]
    • Adjusting your levels allows you to edit your photo so that the darkest pixels convert to black and the lightest pixels convert to white. This enhances the contrast to your photo. If you have the option to adjust the midpoint, the grey area, you want to lighten or darken your midpoints based on the color of the focal point of your photo. For example, if you are adjusting a photo of someone’s face, you may want to make the midpoint lighter if your subject’s skin tone is lighter. If your subject has a darker skin tone, you want to make the midpoint darker.

Making Advanced Adjustments

  1. Adjust hue and saturation. If you have a dominant color in your photograph that you really want to stand out, adjust the levels of hue and saturation. For example, to make your greens pop more, if you have a photo that takes place outside, increase the hue to add a bit of blue to make your greens pop out more and turn your saturation up. [11]
    • This will add a more vibrant color to your green. Because green and blue are primary and complementary colors, adding a hue of blue to your green will enhance the vibrancy of the green, making it richer. By saturating the hue adjustment you bleed the colors together more creating a vibrant blend.
    • To make any photo pop more, adjust the hue and saturation of the most dominant color in your photo.
  2. Use a radial blur. A lot of professionally edited photos will employ a radial blur which keeps the focal point in your photo in focus while gently blurring out everything outside of the radius.[12]
    • The radial blur is great for photos that focus on a person’s face, because it will keep the face in crystal clear focus and blur everything around it gently, creating a nice effect and professional looking photo.
  3. Create smooth skin and remove blemishes. A major factor in editing photos like a professional is editing your subject’s face to remove bumps and blemishes, creating beautiful smooth skin. There are a number of ways to do this on most programs, and not every program allows for comprehensive editing.
    • In applications like Picasa or Apple Photos, you can use the Retouch Tool. Select a radius size for your brush that is small enough so that you don’t retouch areas that don’t need it. On software like these, retouching essentially works by blurring and blending the pixels together to make the area look smooth.
    • In more advanced software like Photoshop, you can do more intensive retouching. Use a Quick Selection Tool to select the area of skin that you want to edit. Create a new layer with a Layer Mask so that you don’t affect your original layer in case you mess up. Then go to your Filter option > Blur > Surface Blur. This will smooth out the selected area much like the retouch tool works on other programs.[13]
    • Then, use a Spot Healing Brush Tool and click on your small selections of blemishes that still show up. The spot healing brush will perform a similar task as the blur, but instead of applying the effect to a larger area, you can pinpoint it to smaller, more specific areas.
  4. Use Patch and Fade Tools to fix smaller adjustments. The Patch and Fade Tools are great for fixing larger areas like bags under the eyes. The Patch Tool works by selecting one area and then another. The first area gets patched to look like the second area.[14]
    • The Patch Tool is great for skin because instead of just blurring an area of skin to smooth it out, it makes a patch that’s taken from another area.
    • To smooth out any weird or uneven edges that you may get from the patch tool, use a Fade Tool that fades a patched selection and blends the area.
    • Try to match the skin texture on an area you are working on. For example if you are patching an area around the nose, don’t draw a patch from the forehead as those areas might be too dissimilar, especially in certain lighting.

Tips

  • Editing photos like a professional takes time to get the hang of. With so many options for software and editing techniques, it can take a while to figure out what works best for you. Play around with different applications to find one that suits your needs.
  • Editing a professional looking photo can sometimes be as simple as making a few adjustments to color or exposure. Too much editing can harm how a photo looks. Don’t think that you have to make every adjustment that’s available to you.
  • Watch video tutorials online to help you edit a certain aspect of your photo. There are tons of videos that offer different advice and techniques for just about every program.
  • Keep playing around with editing photos and have fun. Even with all of the tools and techniques a great looking photo comes from having a good eye. The more you play around and even make mistakes, the better you’ll get at recognizing what can be edited and what doesn’t need to be.

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ https://picasa.google.com/
  2. ↑ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/02/editing-with-photos-for-os-x-apples-iphoto-and-aperture-replacement/
  3. ↑ http://www.gimp.org/
  4. ↑ http://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html?sdid=KKQXU&kw=cssem&s_kwcid=AL!3085!3!92419978600!e!!g!!adobe%20creative%20suite&ef_id=VYtB3wAABOKzpYzP:20151026131216:s
  5. ↑ https://www.phaseone.com/en/Imaging-Software/Capture-One.aspx?
  6. ↑ http://lifehacker.com/5620138/how-to-get-the-best-color-out-of-your-photos
  7. ↑ https://photographylife.com/photo-noise-reduction-tutorial
  8. ↑ http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Reducing_CCD_Noise/
  9. ↑ http://www.macworld.com/article/2913747/how-to-use-the-adjust-tools-in-photos-for-mac.html
  10. ↑ http://digital-photography-school.com/rescuing-poorly-exposed-photos-with-photoshop-levels/
  11. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ_xWcqOFIo
  12. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS2sc-cKBP0
  13. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmgyRK6H5wk
  14. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcd5OfI5C28
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