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5 Easy Editing Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Photos

Enhancing detail and recognizing symmetry

By Walter RheinPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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Image by Walter Rhein

Great photos aren’t taken, they’re made. When you look at your pictures through the tiny viewscreen on your camera, sometimes it’s impossible to get a real impression of what you’ve actually captured.

Even compositions that contain certain faults can be very useful for a variety of projects. For example, the clouds in the top third of the above image are rather bleak and boring without any texture to catch the eye.

However, that blank space makes this image ideal for overlaying text when creating a flyer, poster or book cover.

Don’t be too quick to hit “delete” on an image that doesn’t quite live up to expectations. With decent editing software, you can often dig into a photo and uncover amazing details.

Cameras and software

I shot the above image on a Pentax K200 DSLR and I enhanced it with Lightroom. You can enhance a photo from any camera, but I find the superior optics of a DSLR always captures more than a cell phone camera.

I would suggest that anyone with any interest in photography familiarizes themselves with both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. These two tools are related, but they have very specialized features.

Lightroom is designed to provide you with tremendous control over your images while Photoshop is designed for creating posters, adding text, or combining images.

Although you can enhance a photo in Photoshop, the process is much easier and more intuitive in Lightroom. For most of the work I do, I start with Lightroom and then import the final Lightroom product into Photoshop.

Start with cropping and rotation

Image by Walter Rhein

Lightroom makes it very easy to crop and rotate your images. This is important because it's very difficult to make lines perfectly vertical when you're taking a picture.

It's far more pleasing to the eye if lines are perfectly vertical in a finished image. You don't want to see people tilting their head sideways as they evaluate your work.

The rotation tool on Lightroom provides you with guidelines to make it easy to adjust your image. Some cropping will occur as you work, but the loss will be minimal.

In this picture, I elected to use the structure in the background as a guideline. I'd initially considered using the horizontal line of the steps, but the rocks are too uneven to make that an effective option.

Clarity

Image by Walter Rhein

When I start to work with a new image, the first thing I do is play around with the clarity. The clarity slider sharpens the image and helps to bring out the texture.

For this image, I wanted to enhance the stonework, so I used the maximum clarity setting. It's unusual to use a maximum setting on any enhancement option, but it was effective in this case.

Sometimes the clarity slider will pull out texture in the clouds, but this was a low-light day so that wasn't the case with this image. You can sometimes use exposure or contrast to get something out of your clouds, but that can have a detrimental effect on the rest of the image.

In the majority of cases, I'm able to enhance my foreground with the clarity slider and then use the highlights slider to coddle something interesting out of the sky.

Contrast

Image by Walter Rhein

The next thing I did was to experiment with contrast. Contrast enhances the difference between your light and dark areas.

I wanted to get some more out of the stones in the foreground, but I quickly discovered that maximizing contrast was not the answer. Too much contrast can erase the interesting things that happen between the light and dark areas.

To get the effect I was looking for, I reduced the contrast from +100 to +10 and then made further adjustments with some of the more specific sliders.

Other adjustments

Image by Walter Rhein

I used the vibrance and saturation features to enhance the coloration of the stone and moss. Vibrance and saturation both deal with color, but the one you select will depend on the specific image.

In this case, I got the effect I was looking for by increasing vibrance to +2 and saturation to +19.

I wanted more emphasis on the stones, so I increased whites to +31 and adjusted shadows to +12 to improve the contrast. These tools provide a more precise effect that is similar to what you can achieve with the contrast slider.

Finally, I added +7 to the highlights slider for a subtle but noticeable enhancement.

Vignette

Image by Walter Rhein

My final step on almost any image I edit is to add a post crop vignette. A vignette is just some shading on the edges and corners that helps draw your eye to the center of the image.

You can choose either a white or a black vignette. In this case I made some shape adjustments to the vignette which changed how the shadow fell on the image.

Golden ratio

Image by Walter Rhein

Symmetry is always important when you're creating an image. After working on this photo, I noticed that the buildings and the stone pathway line up relatively well in a golden ratio.

How those elements work together represent the essential focal point of this image.

The final result

I find this a pleasing composition because of its emphasis on empty space. The colors are soft which is a nice contrast to the sharp detail of the stone.

I've often used this as a background image for posters advertising presentations I do on Peru and the Inca Trail.

In some ways, this image breaks a lot of rules. The elements are inverted from what you'd normally expect in an image, and I think that's exactly what I find captivating about it.

Image by Walter Rhein

Final thoughts

There have been a lot of times when I've dismissed an image only to extract something interesting out if it when I started editing in Lightroom.

It's always valuable to experiment with the creative process even on images that you might not feel are worth the effort.

Sometimes you'll make great discoveries. There have been many occasions where I've dismissed an image initially, only to find that it fulfilled the requirements of a project I'd taken on at a later date.

Always give yourself permission to experiment. Even if you ultimately can't figure out how to make an image work, you always pick up new skills that will help you in the future.

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About the Creator

Walter Rhein

I'm a small press novelist. Shoot me an email if you want to discuss writing in any capacity, or head over to my web page www.streetsoflima.com. [email protected]

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