Finding Hidden Color Through Photo Editing

Why did I take a picture of a mud puddle? That is the question I asked myself as I looked through my photo gallery. I pulled up the photo in my new photo editing app and began adjusting the saturation and contrast. Out popped all this color! Oh yes, I thought, that is what I was taking a picture of, I remember now. Many times, I have felt frustrated that my photo did not capture the vividness of the scene I was trying to portray. That changed when I found the Polish Pro app.

Polish Pro

Originally, I downloaded Polish Pro from the Google Play store to work with my Lensball photos. But when I saw how beautiful those photos turned out with basic editing, I quickly became obsessed with the app. Over the course of a week, (maybe less), I went back and edited over 1,000 of my old photos. I just couldn’t stop! One of the things that drove me to continue was finding surprising hidden color in my photos. I just never knew what was going to pop out. It was fun!

If you are an amateur who is afraid of more advanced photo editing software, like me, then you might want to check out Polish Pro for yourself. It is ridiculously easy to use. All of the editing I have done so far, can be done with the free version of the app. However, I purchased the app for a one time fee of $15 just to get rid of the annoying ads. With this app, I can take photos, edit, and upload them all from my Samsung Galaxy S7 Smartphone. Easy peasy!

How It Works

To edit a photo from the app’s home screen:

• Tap “Photo”
• Select the album and the photo you want to edit
• Tap “Adjust”
• Select what you want to adjust (Sharpness, Brightness, Contrast, etc.)
• Use the slide bar to make the adjustment
• When you are happy with how it looks, save your work

Finding Color

Usually, I make only basic adjustments to brightness/contrast/sharpness/saturation/warmth. Sometimes I will adjust shadow/highlight or add vignette. When looking for color in a bland photo, simply adjusting the brightness and contrast can make a big difference. Beyond that, saturation will highlight the colors in the photo and warmth will bring out either the blues or the yellows. I take photos of reflections on water. For these photos, adjusting the warmth to bring out the blue in the water helps create contrast in the image.

Let’s take a look at some more before and after shots.

The photos of dried wildflowers are some of my favorite. Taken in early winter, they seemed kind of bland. When I took the photos, I was trying to capture the early morning sun shining on them. Editing the photos brought back the image I was intending to take.

This is another one of those images I looked at and thought, "why did I take this?" That was until I ran it through the photo editor and all this color popped out!

In these photos, editing brought back the color of the fall leaves and shed light into the dark cave so that we can see the ice formations hiding in the back.

With this image, I did two separate edits, one to highlight the ocean and the other to highlight the cliff. With fancier software, I could probably highlight both at the same time, but I am happy with how these turned out.

This was a fun one. The original image is of a natural oil slick on the water. I was surprised to see how much blue turned up in this photo. I assume it was a reflection of the sky. I cropped the image to get a close up.

If you would like to see more images, visit me on Picfair.