PHOTO EDITING FOR BEGINNERS – 9 Simple Steps to Improve Your Photos

hi guys anthony turnham here if you're new to photography and photo editing this video is for you i'm going to share with you a nine step beginner photo editing workflow that's going to be easy to implement and it's going to get your photos looking really great in no time at all through a couple of decades of photo editing i've learned there's certain fundamentals that need to be followed for pretty much any genre of photography to process those photos and get them looking great and it's these fundamentals i'm going to share with you here the software i'll be using here is what i consider to be the best photo editor for beginner photographers if you're using something different that's absolutely fine because these are principles and fundamentals and they'll translate pretty much any good photo editing software before we get into our nine steps of photo editing i've just got a couple of things that you need to consider so the first point is when you start editing it's good to have a goal have an idea of what you're wanting to portray through your image what are you wanting to portray to your audience when you have that in mind it's easier to create that vision because you're guided by an idea in your mind of where that photos headed and the second point i want to just raise is when you're taking your photographs if your camera supports it shoot in raw at the most basic level a raw photo is going to hold more detail that's going to allow you to push your photograph in the direction that you want it to go so in this video we're going to look at our nine steps and i'll take you through each one after that i'm going to show you one example and take you right through from start to finish so that you can see how all of that stuff kind of knits together on one image and consolidate that learning at the end of that i'm going to show you a really great hack which is going to save you all the trouble of all of those steps but having said that i encourage you to learn the steps they're fundamentals you need to know them and then once you understand them you can take a shortcut using ai that's built into this software which is so cool and if you do like the look of this software is really good for people just starting out it's a one-off payment unlike a continual subscription like for lightroom or photoshop so i've got a link in the description and also a discount code for you as well so you're welcome to that so with that being said guys let's get straight in to point number one okay guys we're going to start with the most basic principle of improving your photos when you're doing photo editing and that is correcting your exposure that refers to how bright or dark your image is and as you can see in this photograph of my son competing in his triathlon he's very very dark we've got an acceptable exposure on the background but that's not the important part of the photograph so we ask ourselves what is important in this photograph and it's the boy here so let's increase the exposure by just grabbing that exposure slider and as we brighten it up you can see that we get a much better image on my sun here but then we start to lose detail in the background but if you just wanted to make a basic adjustment just with one slider exposure is going to correct that very nicely sometimes your images may be too bright and you need to bring the exposure down but in this instance we're too dark so we're bringing it up you can either use your eye to gauge how bright the photograph should be or if you want a more accurate way to do it you can use what's called a histogram it sounds scary it really isn't it's just a representation of dark and light within your photos the further the curve is towards the left-hand side the darker the image the further is to the right-hand side the brighter the image and anything in between it's just showing you that distribution between your blacks your mid-tones and your highlights so if i move the exposure slider to the right you'll see that our histogram jumps to the right and it's a lot of information is just falling off the end here which tells us that we've got a lot of whites going on there if we take it to the left you'll see that the histogram comes all the way down to the left hand side so that's a good visual representation that you can see as i start to move that up you start to see how the representation of light through dark shows up on this histogram but as i say just when you're starting out if you want to just do it by eye just go yep he looks about bright enough and move on my recommendation for the second part of your photo editing process is to control what we call the dynamic range and again it's a scary sounding term but all it's referring to is just making sure that you've got details in your shadows and details and your highlights and as you can see in this photograph we now have no detail on the path here we have nothing on the grass either it's what's known as blown out and we don't want that so what we can do to correct these bright areas is if we actually just bring our exposure down a little we can start to see the detail there again if we bring our highlights down you can see that we've controlled all of that area and we've got detail once more but we've lost a little bit of information on my sun here so what we can do is just grab the shadow slider because we know where all of that information is in the photo it's in the shadows and as we move that from the middle up we can see we're brightening him up now where how far you take these sliders in is entirely up to you i like to try and reach a nice balance between keeping things looking natural and also keeping the attention where i want it in the photo for the third component of photo editing i'd recommend we look at contrast so let's suppose that we've adjusted the exposure slightly and by playing around with the shadows and highlights we're not really able to get the level of contrast we would like we've got this slider here which is called smart contrast and if i push that all the way to the right you'll see what a mark difference that makes so double clicking these points here will reset them so that's before slide it up that's after so currently we're adding global contrast so we're making the image look much more interesting much more dynamic by adding that contrast but another thing we can do with contrast is within structure if we push this to the right that will actually increase what's called local contrast so rather than adding contrast in the whole image it's looking at the lights and darks of individual areas and it's increasing that structure if you're using lightroom the equivalent to this would be the clarity slider but luminar does have the edge because if you're applying structure to an image and there's people in the image you don't want the skin kind of being affected by this tool and luminar's artificial intelligence engine is smart enough to recognize where people are where their skin is where their faces are and actually not apply this look to humans which is great so now we've addressed the contrast what we can do is use this eyeball tool here to look at our before and then let go for after before and after you've also got this slider mechanism here that you can take across like that but you can see by just two sliders the structure and the contrast slider we were able to really improve this photo the fourth thing we're going to look at in our processing is really important and it's to do with color and that's addressing the color balance at its most basic level having a good color balance just refers to making sure that tones that are supposed to be neutral render as neutral and getting the rest of the colors to look as accurate as they should so we can see here this photograph of my sun has a very blue cast and you can either correct that by grabbing the temperature sliders and actually moving them to a place where you feel the image looks much better or what you can do if you've got somewhere in your image that you know should be a neutral gray you can just click this little eyedropper tool here and then come over to where that is and i know i know that our walls are pretty close to neutral gray so if i click here luminar has then adjusted all of the color balance and now straight away we've got an image where the colors are representative of what they should actually be on one hand color balance is all about getting your photos with an accurate color representation but on the other hand if you want to you can use color balance for a more creative purpose and that's what i'll show you in this photograph so let me just first of all get this to a point um where i feel it's ready for a bit of editing so all i'm doing is increasing that dynamic range like we've already looked at drop the highlights increase the shadows slightly and perhaps we'll bring the exposure down just a little bit and maybe bring the highlights up just a smidge so we get a nicer transition around the sun and now what i'm going to do is just grab the temperature slider and start to move that to the right you can see if i push it all the way to the right we can have a really orangey look we can add some magenta this is too much but i'm just using that for sort of illustrative purposes but we can certainly warm this image up guys i really hope this video is helping you out if it is i'd really appreciate it if you'd hit the like button and consider subscribing to the channel with you guys supporting the video and the channel that enables me to help support these guys and that means the world to me so thank you sometimes if you push the color temperatures too far so let's take this quite far to the right you can see that it just becomes over saturated and that's where point number five comes in getting your saturation on point when i talk about color saturation it's just how vivid and strong the colors are and you can see sort of around here this orangey toning it's just just a little bit too much so what you can do is come into the color section here and you can just get the saturation slider and just reduce it just a little bit just to where you feel comfortable so if i turn that off you can see that with very very strong oranges and then if we just turn this back on again so we're reducing the saturation i feel like that's a much more pleasing and subtle image so with just a few sliders that we've already learnt we've basically changed this photograph from this into this and i prefer this much more we're up to point number six and that's to do with your cropping and straightening of the image now this shot of my daughter flying down this slide here and smashing into all the bark at the bottom i love the photo but i feel like there's far too much negative space on the right hand side and underneath her i just feel like she's getting lost within the frame and so my purpose for this photo is showing her expression showing all this bark flying up and also keeping the fact that she's come off the edge of a slide but to the right and underneath i don't need all that so let's use the crop tool which you can find up here in the canvas setting and we just come to crop and rotate and if we want to keep the ratio between the width and the height the same we just make sure this little lock icon is here on the aspect and as i move in the corners if i just click and drag in you can see that that aspect ratio how wide it is compared to how tall it is that ratio is respected so if we're happy with that we can just click done and with that small change it's a much more impactful composition now i've hunted my library for photographs with a wonky horizon but um unfortunately i can't actually find any so bear with me on this example but i'm just going to show you another great use for the crop tool let's suppose your image look like this and you've got a really nasty wonky horizon hopefully you haven't taken a photo that wonky but let's just go with that for now when you come to the crop and rotate tall and you come outside of the crop boundary you'll see that you get a funny curved arrow and if you click and drag that allows you to rotate the crop and then you've got this lovely grid on there which will allow you to basically use the closest line to the horizon and just straighten things up nicely and let's uh let's actually move this over here as well so we get our lighthouse appearing on the third line and that's a great compositional tool if you're just starting you don't quite know how to frame things up if you think about the rule of thirds this is known as if you put a point of interest like the lighthouse rather than being dead center in your frame if you put it on the third line um so if we come in just a little more just to make that evident so that's on the third line and also the horizon as well if we shift this to make the horizon on the third line and we click done that's a really nice simple way to improve your compositions it's called the rule of thirds but by no means is it actually a rule but it's there for you as a tool to guide you so let's just quickly look at one more example here i am teaching my daughter how to fish and try and catch some salmon and so what we're going to do is come to crop and rotate and i've decided that i really don't like all the grass to the left and all these this foliage up at the top as well so if i drag the top left hand corner down until that third intersection falls pretty much on on my head and then click done i think we've got a much nicer and much stronger composition there for step number seven let's take another look at this photo of my daughter on the slide it's nowhere near as sharp as i would like the image to be and that's because she was flying down the slide and the shutter speed is not quite fast enough to freeze all of that motion of her and the bark so to fix that we just need to sharpen the photograph so if we come back to our essentials tab here and within that we've got details enhancer what i like to do when i'm sharpening an image is actually push it far too far and put it all the way to 100 and then when i start playing around with the other sliders i can see much better how they're affecting the image so the next important slider i would say is the sharpening radius and if i push that to 100 it's just affecting the pixels more heavily it's taking into consideration a wider radius when it's considering the sharpening let's have a look at the bark here so we can see that it might just be a little bit too much there so let's bring the sharpening radius down and perhaps even just reduce the sharpening just a little bit if we look at our before and after by turning this off and then on you can see here we've got a much sharper image and that looks much better this is my daughter playing in the sprinkler in the summer evening sun she's having a great time and i've just done some basic corrections um nothing fancy just on what we've talked about already so i've taken the photograph from this to this just so that we've got a little bit more detail and a bit more contrast in the image but what if i want to give the image a certain look well there are heaps of ways you can get creative particularly within luminar but i'm going to suggest to you this really easy approach come to this tab here which is creative we click that and you've got access then to look up tables or luts and they've come from the movie industry to photography fairly recently but they're a great way to give your image what's known as a color grade so if i bring this drop down box here i can just mouse over these different looks you can see that it's giving the photo a different feel each time so i quite liked sepia cp is not something that would normally apply to an image but in this case i love that kind of warm look that it's giving it so i can just click that it's applied it with 30 amount which is normally a pretty good starting point you may want to reduce that or you may want to increase it depending on the look you're kind of going for but yeah that 30 mark was was bang on for me so the final part of any edit is sharing it with other people so whether that's sending it to a printer to get a lovely print for your wall or just uploading it online either way you're going to need to export your photo so i've done a whole video about exporting and what settings you should use so i won't go into too much detail here but all you do is you go to file export that's one way of doing it or you can actually just click this button here export image to and then i would recommend saving as a jpeg that's a really great format for sharing online on the web or sending to printers and change the color space to srgb that's something that the internet understands it doesn't really like adobe rgb so go for srgb and just save it to a location on your computer that you're happy with okay using this photograph let's bring everything we've learned together i'm going to show you how simple and easy it is to edit a photo and make a massive improvement to it using just those techniques we've already discussed so point number one let's come into our exposure and let's bring up because the photo was too dark let's look at improving the dynamic range by making sure the highlights don't blow out and maybe we'll add a bit of shadow detail so we can see more into the hood round here lovely this photograph was shot looking straight into a mirror and that would have done a couple of things that will have diffracted the light blurring it slightly and it's also taken away a little bit of the contrast so let's increase our contrast using smart contrast easy as that let's have a look at our color temperature and i'm pretty happy with it but if i get the eyedropper tool and just click somewhere in this sort of region here that i know should be a neutral gray let's see what it does okay so it's actually neutralized the image and this is probably more accurate color balance but i think i preferred it how it was so i'm just going to warm it back up slightly and i'm happy with that let's close the light panel by clicking on it and let's come to the color section and i'm feeling like we're just getting a little too saturated particularly in the back of a hood here so let's bring the saturation down just ever so slightly easy let's have a look where we've come from this was our before and this is our current state let's keep moving and let's look at the cropping and straightening so we'll come over here to the canvas tab and choose crop and what we're going to do is just grab this corner in the top right bring it in slightly and when we've brought that in we've we've got rid of some of the hood which i like but i don't want to be cutting off the top of her head here so i'm just going to bring that up and we can see that our eyes are pretty much falling on the third mark now which i also like and i'm happy with that let's click done i said before that the mirror will have actually softened this image slightly so if we zoom in you can see that it's definitely a soft render on her face so let's come back to our essentials tab and let's dive into the details enhancer here we're going to grab the sharpen slider move that all the way to the right and we can increase the sharpening radius just a little bit and i'll probably just ease that sharpen off just slightly so if we look at our before and thereafter or if we just turn sharpening off and on it's definitely sharpening the image i bet we'll see a big difference around the hairs so off and on so it's definitely sharpening it up but one of the problems is it introduces noise now we didn't really look at this this before so if you see all this speckled grainy kind of look on there that's called noise it's the digital equivalent of film grain now some people like it and just leave it in there i often do and if you were printing this you wouldn't even notice uh any of this to be honest but what you can do is actually just grab the luminosity denoise slider and just bring that to the right and you can see if we turn that off and back on again that it's smoothing out that speckled look which is known as noise now i think that's a little bit too much so we'll just split the difference and go there but i still think that that's an improvement now let's click and zoom out and there's one last thing we want to do before we export the image and let's give it a look so let's come over to the creative tab again and we're just going to choose a color style what we could do is click that and if we decide it's a little bit too much we can just ease that back so this is our original and then as i take the slider to the right we see more and more and more of that color punch hot um but i think again like around that 30 marks quite nice let's air on the side of caution let's go 21 and let's see our before and thereafter there's so much more that you can do within luminar which i really love but just while you're learning i'd say just keep things simple so for example mystical if we increase that that gives it a really nice ethereal kind of look so if we turn that off and on almost like a dream like quality so there's so many other tools that you can use to enhance your images and fine-tune your own look but for now while you're learning beginning photo editing just take it easy follow those steps i've shown you and you'll start to get some really great results once you feel comfortable with that that's when i'd say start introducing other looks and play around and see what else you can do now if all of that is actually a little bit too much for you to take in right now i'm going to share with you a really great hack and this is fantastic kudos to luminar for introducing this it is a phenomenal tool that is basically going to do most of what we just did for you with one slider so let's see how that works i'm going to reset this by coming to adjustments reset adjustments so we're now back to our original image with zero adjustments so instead of doing what i've shown you so far which is great to know and that's applicable to most photo editing software packages this is unique come to ai enhance and this ai accent slider and watch this if i take this to the right boom how cool is that that one slider is addressed exposure contrast local contrast and the color everything if we turn that off and on off and on i mean i don't think that's quite as good as the version that we originally created together it's pretty close we could still do it bumping the exposure i feel just a little bit but there you go two sliders and we're pretty much where we were before so if you want the easy approach to photo editing this ai enhance tool it's just insane guys let me give you just one more really quick example with this ai accent slider if i take this to the right look at brought out all the detail there so if i turn this off and on we've got much more vibrant color we've got more detail in the shadows it's it's just such a really great tool for getting quick results it's not always perfect it might not be exactly what you want but you can just ease it off and you can actually use it in combination with other things so if we wanted to increase the shadows we can just grab our shadow slider and then just those two sliders have worked together to take this image from this to this it's such a great time saver there you have it guys nine steps to help you get started with photo editing i really hope this video has been helpful to you if it has check out some of my other videos i've got a whole playlist all about luminar how you can take things just a little bit further so this is an introductory look at photo editing but man you can go so much deeper so i'd love it if you join me on the channel with subscribing and i'd love to help you guys learn more and improve your photo editing i'll see you in the next video guys thanks very much

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 78,450

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, HDR, architecture photography, architectural photography

Id: KR7L2oSRlwY

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020