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

• Eliminate distractions. Try to crop out large and/or bright things that otherwise distract from your subjects. Alternatively you can burn them in or blur them.
• Dimensions. Crop to relatively standard dimensions if you plan to print your photos; otherwise your crazy extended vertical panoramic dimensions of every member of your family will simply be distracting. Only use wildly non-standard dimensions as a last resort.
• Flattery: Portrait ratio. Cropping to a portrait (as opposed to landscape) ratio can make your subject appear slimmer.
• Flattery: narrowing. Making your photo, say, 3 percent narrower (by changing the aspect ratio, not by cropping) can make your subjects look even slimmer.

Rotating

• Make the horizon level. If a horizon isn’t visible, you can rotate the photo to make vertical lines (e.g. corners or edges of walls or furniture) truly vertical. In cases where lens distortion prevents you from aligning both horizontal and vertical lines, you’ll have to make a judgment call on how to align the photo.
• Make people upright. If your subject is leaning in one direction in a distracting manner, rotate the photo a few degrees so they are more upright. If that throws off the horizon in a distracting way, try cropping the photo so the horizon doesn’t show.

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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