How to Take Great Photos (and Fix Lousy Ones), Part II: Editing and Postproduction

Introduction


Coding

Formatting Your Code
Why style matters

Universal Programmers Toolkit
Care and feeding of your code collection

Effective Proactive Debugging Techniques
It's all about the tools

Good Programming Practices
What to do (or not)

Banning Bad Bots
A short but effective script


Management

The Joy of Specs
How to (almost) guarantee a successful project

Habits of Successful Freelancers
Advice for success

How to Become a Great Programmer
One easy lesson!

Bidding on a Stranger's Project
The basics

Freelancing 101 - Don't Send That Email!
Pick up the phone instead

Ensuring Your Web Site Project Succeeds
Advice for clients


Photography

How to Take Great Photos (And Fix Lousy Ones), Part 1
Composing and shooting your photos

How to Take Great Photos (And Fix Lousy Ones), Part 2
Editing and postproduction

How to Take Great Photos (and Fix Lousy Ones), Part II: Editing and Postproduction

In Part I of this article we looked at how to take great photos. Now we’ll talk about how to edit your photos so they look great.

 

Some things to keep in mind:

 

·        Postproduction can’t always help. Editing can turn an average photo into a great one, but it usually can’t turn a terrible photo into a great one.

 

·        When in doubt, throw it out. Bad photos usually aren’t worth keeping, unless you’ve captured something particularly memorable (e.g. a celebrity, an expression, or some other priceless moment) . Hopefully you have another shot of the same scene that is worth keeping; if not, just toss it. Life is too short to slog through bad photos.

 

·        Learn the ins and outs of your photo editing software. I use Photoshop but many similar utilities are available, either for free or for pay.

 

·        At little flattery goes a long way. People are very self-conscious about how they look in photos, so if you can take photos that flatter them and their friends even a bit they will tend to like your photos.

 

·        Make your edits subtle. If you edit a photo, don’t make your edits so obvious that people can tell the photo was tweaked, otherwise people will pay more attention to your editing job than to the subject.

Composition

I’ve found that the most well-received photos often show two people smiling and interacting with each other.

 

Body language says a lot. People’s bodies and hands help give the viewer an idea of what they’re feeling. If their hands or bodies are expressive and help tell the story, leave as much of them in the shot as necessary to help express the mood. But if they look awkward, feel free to crop as much of them out as you need to.

Cropping

Rotating

Blurriness

A slight blur can add a nice effect so some scenes, but in general blurry photos are not worth keeping. You can minimize some types of blur by sharpening the photo.

 

Blurriness that appears as two superimposed images slightly offset can sometimes be compensated for by applying more blur (possibly Gaussian) and then sharpening the whole image, in an attempt to merge the two offset images into one.

 

You can reduce grain by blurring (Gaussian blur works well for this), and optionally sharpening afterwards.

Color, Brightness and Contrast

Photoshop’s Auto-Levels or Auto-Color functions often work well. In cases where they don’t you can adjust levels or color manually.

 

Many photos look better when you boost brightness and/or contrast by 10 or 15 percent.

 

For oversaturated photos (e.g. where skin tones are too red and/or blotchy) reduce color saturation by a few percent. Likewise, for washed out skin tones you can either boost color saturation or skew the color balance slightly towards red and/or yellow.

 

Digital photos often lack the warmth of film, so if you adjust the color balance to be warmer (like film) you will make your photos more inviting.

Burning and Dodging

Dodge your subjects’ eyes just a bit (especially around the eye sockets if they are in shadow) to make them pop. But be careful—too much dodging will look fake and will be distracting.

 

Burn in any glaring lights or other distractions that you can’t or don’t want to crop out.

 

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