Learning Photography: Editing

This is a continuation post about learning photography (Intro, Exposure, Focus, Changing it up).

As I said previously, editing photographs is a crucial aspect of photography. Most of the time, I aim to recreate my photos as I see them in real life. Editing does not mean that I'm changing the objects in the image in any way; 99.9% of the time, I'm only doing basic edits like cropping, exposure, and tone.

If you shoot RAW, you HAVE to edit those photos; they look bland otherwise. You have to edit the photos in order to take full potential of your camera (e.g. dynamic range).

I use Lightroom to catalog and edit my photos. You can organize photos in Lightroom with titles, keywords, ratings, color label, and so much more; but I must admit, I'm not very good at organization of my photos. I do go through photos and rate them and mark the unusable photos as such.

As with any tool, the best way to learn is to use the tool and get comfortable with it.

In the Develop module, play around with the various editing settings you can adjust and see how they change the photo. This includes white balance, tone, hues, sharpening, noise reduction, transform, and vignetting.

One of the most important features is lens correction; based on your camera and the lens you used, the program will adjust the photo to reduce vignetting, distortion, chromatic aberration, and other things.

Then you have other useful tools like cropping and leveling. Cropping is an essential way of processing an image to express what you want (underutilized in my opinion). Also, depending on where you plan to print or share your photos, they may be required at a certain ratio (e.g. Facebook cover photos are much wider than other photos).

Other useful tools to learn are the spot removal tool, graduated filter, and the adjustment brush.

You've probably heard of presets and I would stay away from presets (littered all over the internet, sometimes costly). But if there are presets you like, study what elements make the preset look that way. Presets are just edit "settings" (think filters).

There is a ton to learn and it can seem overwhelming, but there is no better way in learning than just using the software. I would recommend learning basic editing settings than slowly learning more advanced settings and tools.

Some features I use almost every time I edit photos:
"Previous" button: Applies the settings from the last photo I edited to the currently selected photo
Select multiple photos->"Sync": Syncs all selected photos to the current settings
Transform: Allows to straighten out lines/level the photo
Plug-Ins: I use the SmugMug plug-in in order to publish my photos to my website. This allows me to essentially push one button to get my photos on my website. This saves me tons of time! I also have smart galleries based on keywords; photos are automatically added to certain galleries if they have certain keywords.

I love discussing photography with others so let's chat!