8 Quick Photo Editing Tips for Beginners

a big thank you to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video if you need a website or a domain go to squarespace.com forward slash james for 10 off your first purchase hello everybody i thought i'd do a quick mid-week video today some editing tips i've not done that for a while these are fairly basic so they'll probably be more applicable to you if you've not been editing for that long but in any case hopefully they're helpful they're starting with cropping [Music] now i have spoken about this one before basically i think when you're editing a photo you need to crop first now obviously for most of us our hope is that we absolutely nail our composition in the field and we don't need to do any cropping when we get home if you're anything like me you often don't and therefore you need to do some cropping and it's vital you do it before you do anything else because if you're hoping to make changes to the exposure then the best tool that we have to judge that is the histogram and the histogram changes every time we crop and i've spoken about this before but basically if you look at this image and watch the histogram when i let this go it changes based on what is in the frame uh now this probably isn't the best example to be honest it's quite a foggy scene as you can see and therefore there aren't really dark shadows or really light highlights but the point is those shadows and highlights as far as the histograms concerned change based on your crop and so if you're hoping to use the histogram to make judgments based on your shadows and your highlights you need to make sure the crop is right first also the kill your darlings thing that's popular term you might have come across in writing if you're into writing and basically it means get rid of unnecessary words and stuff and i think it applies to cropping in photography as well get rid of unnecessary stuff and uh not quite the point i'm really making with this this thing i'm more talking about the histogram but cropping nevertheless is really important i'll maybe do an entire video on cropping at some point but uh not today [Music] now after cropping the most important things that we need to look at are exposure and white balance now we don't necessarily need to make changes to these things but we need to assess whether or not we want to make changes and that's because these two things have by far the biggest impact on how our image will look so if we take a look at this image that i shot last year i can make this image really quite cold and feel yeah cold or i can make it feel lovely and warm like so i mean obviously that still looks wet but it's warm now similarly with exposure i can make the image all about the trees and the foliage in the road by making it really nice and bright or i can make it all about the fog by making it dark and as i say the point is that these two things alone will have a much bigger impact on your image than anything else and often when i see people who are new to editing start and edit they'll just go down to the vignetting and they'll look at that first or the clarity or the noise reduction or any number of things that aren't these and they will not have as big an impact on the image as these things and you should definitely start with the stuff that has the biggest impact so cropping white balance and exposure and it's no coincidence that these things sit right at the top of the lightroom adjustments panel is it called an adjustments panel no it's the develop module isn't it i don't know where i've got adjustments panel from suppose it is an adjustment but it doesn't matter [Music] now if you've watched any other editing videos and chances are you have you'll have probably heard people talk about editing locally and in which case you'll probably know what that means is taking specific parts of an image and editing those rather than just the whole image now the reason for that i can demonstrate with this image that i took in antarctica a couple of months back so let's say that i want to make an adjustment to the brightness of the hut and i can do that by adjusting the luminance of the orange as you can see but if you look closely what i'm also doing is making adjustments to the bellies of the penguins are they called bellies i don't know if they're called bellies that they probably have a proper word i don't know anyway in this example i don't want to make changes to the penguins all i want to adjust is the hut now to do that what i need to do is edit locally now there are a number of ways to do this in lightroom and probably any editing tool to be honest but particularly in the newest version of lightroom with all the new masking features and the select subject i find to be particularly useful with images like this so if i do that then what we'll see is that it's probably selected the hut yeah i think it has but we just can't see it because i've not got show overlay and even when you do the color demonstrating that is exactly the same as the hut so let's pick blue instead and now what i can do is i can just raise the exposure of the hut as i see fit now with all editing tools there's usually more than one way to do something and that's definitely the case here i could go to color range and select color just show the overlay and extend the range there to get all of the orange and then i can make my adjustments from there loads of ways to do it but the point is editing locally or finding a way to edit locally will pay off massively now as important as it is to edit locally while we do edit locally we need to also think globally now what i mean by that is if we spend loads of time on a specific part of an image we can sometimes forget about the impact that that has on the rest of the image and sometimes if we're not careful it's easy to miss things getting a bit odd now i can show an example of that with this image and i'll purposefully take it too far i took this photo at the start of the year i think on angle c here in wales and when i got home and edited it i was quite happy with it but i remember thinking i wish i could make the sky a bit more blue so let's try that let's go back up to the the masking tools and let's select the sky now that looks horrible but that's just the overlay being blue let's change it back to red and let's play with the saturation let's do that we could even maybe bring down the temperature touch let's bring down the exposure a little bit too get rid of the overlay let's take the temperature back up and something like that is sort of how i envisaged the sky looking so in this case i've edited locally exactly how i want but if i'm thinking globally and looking at the image as a whole that looks horrific simply because the tones and the colors they don't match between the sky and the rest of the photo and keeping that in mind while we edit locally is even more important than editing locally itself so if you're new to photography you might not know this but every single lens that you use chances are even if it was super expensive it will have floors and those floors will show themselves particularly their wide-angle lenses or perhaps if you're shooting wide open so if you're often shooting wide open at the widest apertures you might notice vignetting around the corners of the image if you're using a really wide angle lens you might notice lots of distortion and it's important that we correct for those when we are editing let me show you an example so this is an image i shot in iceland a few months back and if i untick profile corrections enable profile corrections you can see that there is quite a lot of distortion and that way i mean you can't see vignetting because of the nature of the image but vignetting is there now there are a couple of places i would recommend correcting this and you can either bake in profile corrections to your presets which is exactly what i do because every single image that i edit i apply a preset to or if you're not the sort photographer who enjoys using presets i would recommend that you do your profile corrections on import and that just means that every single image that gets imported to lightroom or whatever editing software you use the profile correction will be applied at that point which means there's no risk of you forgetting to do it because often what's happened to me is if i want to do a quick edit and i've not used a preset i might adjust some of the stuff up here but i won't get all the way down to profile corrections and that will mean the image will just stay uncorrected so it's important i think that somewhere in the process profile corrections are applied automatically whether that's in presets or on the import itself i'm going to stick with this image and we're going to talk about the histogram again of this next tip so if you've watched other editing videos there's a good chance you've heard people talk about how you need to make sure that you don't blow your highlights and you protect your shadows and what that basically means is that you don't have your histogram bunched up in the corners like we do in this image i mean it's not too bad in the highlights i am protecting the highlights this block of white isn't quite white it's not all the way to the right hand side of the histogram but the blacks i mean you can see an image there's no detail in this part now in many cases people would say that that's a flaw for the image you want detail everywhere but i would massively disagree with that now if i raise these shadows what you can see is lots of detail in the cave i mean it's super noisy because this isn't what i've exposed for but nevertheless if you look past the noise you can see lots of detail in the cave now this regardless of the noise is what some people would probably refer to as a correctly exposed image i've not lost any detail in the blacks and i've also retained all the detail in the highlights perfect however from my point of view the image is an awful lot more impactful if we don't see all this detail in the shadow so again if we put it back to this so my point here is that often you will hear people talk about how you need to make sure that you keep all of your shadow detail and similarly you need to make sure that you keep all the detail in the highlights too that is only the case if you think it's the right thing for your image and often what you're trying to do places like this for example is you're trying to frame a waterfall and a bird and the valley and the most impactful way to do that in this instance i think is to not have any detail or distraction in the shadows and i say all that to say that ultimately it's your decision how much detail you retain in shadows and highlights and you don't just need to worry about the histogram being correct you need to worry about what is best for the image [Music] next up i learned this one the hard way if your photo doesn't look particularly good after one minute of editing there's a good chance that it won't look very good after an hour of editing now of course there are exceptions to this sometimes you'll spend a minute editing a photo in a really horrible disgusting way and you'll find out after that that you could have taken it in another direction and it works much better but for the most part if you're doing fairly conventional things in that first minute and the photo just doesn't look very nice then in my experience it's a waste of time going any further with that particular image and this one is a case in point uh this is from the ogwen valley on a particularly lean photography day i don't get any photos this day really and i got quite excited on the way down back to the car when i spotted this little pony and i thought oh that's that's quite a nice photo but the trouble is there's no detail in the eye because well there's this strand of hair in front of the eye maybe not the end of the world but i didn't particularly like it and i could have spent i don't know 45 minutes trying to clone this and fashion some sort of detailed eye but you get to a point where that's just manipulation that's not photo editing that's something entirely different and in any case i still don't think it's a particularly engaging photo after all the horse isn't looking at me which i think would have been a lot better so yeah sometimes you get quite excited about a photo but then you get home and start editing and you realize well it's not that good and the thing is no amount of editing can make a bad or an indifferent photo good editing just makes good photos a bit better it can't do anything else so yeah if you sit down to edit an image and you do all the conventional things and you still don't like the photo then don't spend any more time on that photo in my experience because chances are you're not gonna be able to make it good by pushing sliders around and the last tip is one i've spoken about loads i mean i've not done loads of lightroom editing videos on this channel but the thing that i have spoken about the most when i have is that you need to edit a tiny bit leave the image and then come back to it later so often we'll spend loads of time on an image and think oh that looks fantastic and then we'll stick it on instagram or twitter or our website whatever only to look at it a couple of days later and go oh i don't really like that edit and basically what we need to do is get the image to somewhere that we think is quite good go away for an hour have some lunch whatever and then come back to the image with a fresh pair of eyes and see what we think and even now i've been editing photos for a long long time it's amazing how many times i'd say more times than not i come back to an image and think oh no not sure about that yes that concludes some quick editing tips which which are hopefully useful uh now a big thank you to the sponsor of today's video squarespace now as many of you know i have been using squarespace for years as my my solution for my online portfolio and i started off using squarespace as just that really somewhere to have my images live online uh fast forward four or five years i now use it for my online store for my presets my prints my books and i also use it for my newsletters too and if you want to sign up to my newsletters there is a link in my description and actually if you do that you get access to uh a free preset so if you're interested in that check it out anyway yes if you're looking for somewhere to showcase your work online then i wouldn't look any further than squarespace there are countless templates to choose from you don't need to be technically savvy in any way to get a website that looks fantastic and the analytics features provided help you to keep track of your traffic and see what's working and what's not it's brilliant so if you've got some photos that you're proud of and you'd like to make a website then go to squarespace.com and you can start a free trial and after that if you'd like to make a purchase then just go to squarespace.com forward slash james and you'll get 10 off of that first purchase and a big thank you to squarespace for the continued support this channel and for making fantastic products which enable me to have a good website and everyone else that has a squarespace website as well right thank you for watching i'll see you next time cheers

Channel: James Popsys

Views: 214,951

Keywords: lightroom, cropping, photo editing, james popsys, edits, white balance, exposure

Id: tz8OXNSp9Fk

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022