The best photos aren’t always raw. Often the use of post-processing tools and techniques can turn an average picture into a stunning one.
Many photographers and enthusiasts often underestimate the role of processing, but it’s the ultimate way to make an ordinary photo extraordinary.
So do you take picture after picture and still end up with mediocre photos?
This guide will help you learn simple editing techniques to make ordinary images look absolutely stunning.
4 Simple Steps For Stunning Photo Editing
Step 1. Crop, straighten, and align
Let’s overview three basic photo editing steps and their differences.
Cropping is one of the most basic photo editing techniques out there. It involves removing objects that you don’t want to be included in the photo and leaving only the necessary elements. Cropping can be very useful when highlighting certain parts of an image and improving its composition.
A good crop will do wonders for your photo and make it much more interesting. If something doesn’t add anything to a picture, take it out. This will help you eliminate unwanted elements and emphasize a specific part of the image, focusing on what matters most in your photograph.
Whether your image is crooked or not, it’s always a good idea to straighten it up before moving on to other editing steps.
There are several reasons why you might want to straighten photos. The most obvious reason is that when you take photos or screenshots on your phone, they tend to be at an angle because your phone is tilted. This means they’re not perfectly level and need to be rotated to be straight. AI photo editing tools can help you quickly and accurately make these adjustments.
Most computer programs have built-in tools for this purpose. If yours doesn’t have one, you can use tools like Perspective Transform in Photoshop or free apps such as PhotoGrid or TouchRetouch that allow you to straighten up photos quickly and easily. Just upload your photo and click “Straighten Image” at the top left corner.
The straightening feature will ensure that all of your edits are even and accurate and no photos are crooked or slanted. This simple step can make all the difference in how professional your images look!
Alignment is the process of ensuring that one object is aligned with another. This can be used to make a photo appear more aesthetically pleasing and to make it easier to edit.
Alignment is important because it helps you achieve symmetry in your images. Symmetry is an essential aspect of design because it balances your photos and makes them look more professional.
For example, if you want to cut out someone’s head from a photo and place it on another body, the head needs to be perfectly symmetrical so that it looks like it belongs there. When you align a photo, you can choose to align only its center point or its corners.
Step 2. Adjust
There are different parameters you can adjust and various ways to do it. Let’s list the major ones.
- Brightness. Adjust the brightness of your image. If you want to brighten a dark photo, drag the slider to the right; if you’re going to darken it, drag it to the left.
- Contrast. Adjusting the contrast creates a crisper image look, making it easy to see details and shapes. If your photo has too much contrast, drag the slider on the left or right side until your image gets clear and well-defined; if it doesn’t have enough contrast, drag it upward toward “high” until it does.
- Saturation. Saturation refers to how vivid colors appear in an image (or how faded they seem). A highly saturated image will have rich hues and strong contrasts between colors; a desaturated image will look dull and washed out with muted tones and less color contrast between tints or shades of one hue. To increase saturation, drag your slider toward “high”; to decrease saturation, drag toward “low” or even below that mark if you want things washed out! If you want to create a cartoon-like effect with your image, you can also try using a Picsart cartoonizer tool, which can give your photos a fun and unique look.
- White balance: This is where you can correct the temperature of your image. It’s like adjusting the color balance on a TV or monitor. You can fix color temperature using the white balance tool in Lightroom or by clicking on an area of skin that should be neutral (like the inside of your wrist), then dragging over the photo until it looks right.
- Exposure: Exposure refers to how bright or dark an image is. If there is too much brightness in an over-exposed image, drag it down until it looks better. If you have an under-exposed photo (too dark), you can drag the exposure slider up until it gets lighter.
Step 3. Sharpening and noise reduction
Photo editing software like Photoshop can help you turn your blurry and noisy photos into something that will make you proud through sharpening and noise reduction features.
Whether you’re a professional photographer or just someone who likes taking pictures on your phone, the sharpening process is one of the most important steps in post-production editing. Sharpening is a technique that makes images appear crisper and clearer by enhancing edge contrast and increasing the local contrast between adjacent pixels.
The best way to sharpen your photo is by using the Unsharp Mask filter inside Photoshop or any other editing software that supports this feature. This filter allows you to adjust how much sharpening should be applied based on three different settings: Amount, Radius, and Threshold.
- Reduce noise in your photos
Noise refers to unwanted variations in brightness within an image caused by random fluctuations in pixel values (lightness or darkness) during the capture or processing of the image file.
Sometimes these fluctuations occur due to high ISO settings, long shutter speeds, or digital camera sensors with small pixels — all of which can make photos appear grainy or blotchy when viewed at full resolution on screen or in print. To reduce noise in a photo, you need to apply some special techniques.
Step 4. Retouch
Retouching removes or enhances any unwanted elements in your image, such as skin blemishes, stray hairs, dirt, etc. It can also be used to change backgrounds, remove backgrounds or objects from an image.
The process involves using different software tools, including Freepik Image Enhancer, Clone Stamp Tool, Healing Brush Tool, Spot Healing Brush Tool, and Patch Tool.
Conclusion
Different photos require different filtering. If you want to achieve perfect editing, you must learn this stuff to apply it to your pictures quickly. Also, it would help if you better understood how photo editing software works, potential issues you might run into, and how to avoid these mistakes.
You can use these basic tips to create high-quality photos for free. Editing images is undoubtedly not an easy task, and there are many principles that you need to follow before you can create your ideal image. Although there are many free photo editing software, their output will depend on the skill level of the person operating it.
Nevertheless, this is a great start for amateur photographers looking to improve their editing skills or have fun with friends through photo editing competitions.
Author Bio
AJ Lloren is a loving mother of three. She is passionate about writing, traveling, public speaking, and digital marketing. She is a self-proclaimed funny woman and a daydreamer who dreams of publishing a book one day. She is currently working as a freelance Outreach Specialist and SEO writer for a top SaaS company.
