In this instructable I'll go over how I edit my photos for my instructables and for the products in my Etsy store. There are quite a few quick and easy ways to edit your photos and make them look great!
Whether you're using a cellphone, a point and shoot or a DSLR camera, it's always a good idea to edit your photos. Just a few simple tweaks can take your photos from meh to amazing! With the amount of projects we get posted on the site every day, basic photo editing will help your projects stand out and get noticed. This is especially important if you want to get your project featured to the front page and end up in contest finalists.
Are you using a smartphone to take photos? Curious about how to make a collage of images for Pinterest or other social media sites? Before you start photographing a project, make sure you think about how you want to photograph it.
If you take bad photos, it will be harder to rescue them during editing. While you can always tweak the brightness, contrast and saturation, you probably won't be able to fix blurry photos, extremely dark photos or photos taken with a bright flash as easily.
There are several tools I've used over the years to edit my photos! Nearly all of these are free. Mac: iPhoto - This was my primary way to edit photos for years. I'd been using it for-ev-er. A dependable but super basic photo editor - but great for color and brightness correction and other simple edits.
Has stylistic features like adding text and overlays. Has a great batch resizing tool and other neat features. Adobe Lightroom - This is my new favorite. Lightroom is absolutely amazing. All sorts of advanced editing options, and even the filters and overlays are fantastic. Lots of creative frames. A Color Story - Fantastic presets and a huge range of editing options.
You can even edit video! I cannot give this enough thumbs up. Comes in three flavors: Pixlr Editor an Adobe photoshop style editor , Pixlr Express make edits to color and brightness and also add frames and text - I use this the most! Let me know in the comments if there are other editors you like! PicMonkey recently went paid and I've stopped using it. Cropping your photos is a really fast way to improve them. You can crop out distracting items around the focal point of the photos or use it to zoom in on whatever you're photographing.
It can even be used to completely change the composition of the photo! When cropping, keep in mind that you don't want to make the photo too small.
Try to keep it at least px wide. Since most of us make things inside, it can get pretty dim. I like photos that are nice and bright but not neon or to the point of being so bright they go pastel. When increasing the brightness, beware of blow-outs, which is what I call those huge white spots that can appear if there was anything shiny, light-colored, or metallic in your photos.
Don't take it that far. Some photo editing programs like iPhoto and Afterlight have options to reduce the shadows - I highly recommend using that along with increasing the exposure if there was direct and strong light source around. It'll make the finished photo softer to look at. If your photos looked more washed out than you remember or if upping the brightness made them go pale, saturation will fix that! I always up the saturation in my photos - even for photos taken outside!
Saturation deepens the colors in photos and makes them look more vibrant. This is another part of the process you need to be careful with because it's easy to go nuts with it. I always try to remain faithful to the original colors especially when photographing something I'm selling and keep it from turning into a Dr.
Suess book. Sometimes photos can have a strange color cast to them. This often becomes much more obvious after upping the saturation - if you have a problem, you'll see it! Yellow and blue are the most common and are caused by indoor lighting. If a photo is looking yellow, up the amount of blue in the photos and vice versa. This can be tricky to entirely correct in more basic photo editors, but it can be improved quite a bit! Contrast is not something I use all that often often, but is extremely useful for black and white images as well as adding a bit of drama to color images.
A higher contrast essentially means that the dark colors are darker and the light colors are lighter. In some cases, adding text to your photos is a great idea! It's huge on sites like Pinterest and Buzzfeed - it's hard to find a tutorial without flashy text on the photos. If you think you'll want to add text to the photos, keep that in mind while taking the photo and cropping it. You can also add contrasting text on top of a fairly busy photo - it's just trickier.
One thing that you can do if you really want to add text but don't have the clear space you need is add a slightly transparent overlay! PicMonkey has a good selection of geometric and more complicated shapes. Both Pixlr Express and PicMonkey have some great text options - I use them exclusively for adding text. You can also add text using Picasa, but I found the interface to be really frustrating to work with.
The upside to Picasa is that you can use fonts installed on your computer, while PicMonkey and Pixlr have a smaller selection to choose from. A word on choosing a font - keep it easy to read! If you can't tell what it says immediately, pass. Have a ton of teensy steps in one big step? Want to add lots of detail shots?
Multiple shots of one item? Use a collage! Above is an example from my double Rainbow Loom bracelet tutorial - using a collage with numbers or extra info is great for trickier projects. Making collages is really easy with Pixlr, Picasa or PicMonkey! You might need to crop your photos into squares, depending on the collage.
Sometimes that makes it easier! This comes with practice, but ultimately it's best if you can convey your project in a few really good and clear photos instead of eight million slightly blurred ones.
Almost every professional photo you see online has been digitally altered in some way. Sometimes the photos are completely changed to create a unique world.
But mostly the photos are tweaked to fix errors or make them more visually appealing. I took the original photo in Venice. The photo is a bit dark and the colors are faded. My image after post-processing is quite different. In fact, you may only need to do a few of these steps to get your photos looking professional. Professional photographers vary widely in how they edit their photos. Some photographers like to play with the vibrance and saturation of the colors while others prefer black and white photography.
Some like high key photos lots of light and whites , others like their photos low key dark and moody. To start defining your style, look through social media and other photography portfolios to see what catches your eye. Try to identify what you like about the images. Is it the composition or is it something about the look of the photo? But the first step is finding out what you like. When I edit a photo, I ask myself what I want. For example:. Once I know what I want, I find a way of making it happen using a photo editing program.
Editing digital photos has never been easier, as there are now many photo editing programs to choose from. Some are simple and allow for basic tweaks, while others are more advanced and let you change everything about an image. You can try out these programs for free and if you like the results, you can buy the program.
Adobe products are available as a subscription service, with the photography bundle including both Lightroom and Photoshop. I use Lightroom for most of my photo editing.
In addition to its editing capabilities, it also helps me keep my files organized. The editing tools are in the Develop module in the right-hand window.
There are also many free photo editing software programs available. Your computer and phone likely came with built-in photo editing and photography apps. Macs include photo editing tools as part of the Photos app. The equivalent for Windows is Microsoft Photos. These programs include most of the standard photo editing tools. Last, but not least, social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook also include photo editing tools to tweak your images before posting.
Many photo editing and social media programs include filters. Also known as presets, filters are like photo editing recipes that mix up a combination of settings to give your photos a certain look. Open a photo in Wix or Lightroom and click through the different built-in filters. Notice how your photo changes automatically and see which filters you like the best. Many professional photographers offer free presets or preset packages for sale. Look at how this sunflower photo changes depending on the preset.
Filters can make your photos look more professional without needing to have too much technical knowledge. If you want to be a bit more hands on with your editing, move to the next step. As photo editing programs improve, so do their algorithms for automatically post-processing images. These allow the program to analyze an image and make suggested changes. And you might be surprised at the results.
The auto option is usually marked with a symbol that looks like a magic wand. In the Wix Photo Studio, this option is called Enhance. Most professional photographers by-pass the auto tool on their photo editing programs.
But a few admit to letting programs like Lightroom do the heavy lifting. Cropping is removing the unwanted edges of an image, making the image smaller and allowing the main subject of your photo to take a larger portion of the frame.
This practice is one of the most valued photography tips for beginners , as amateurs tend to leave too much space around their main subject. To crop the image above in the Wix Photo Studio, I clicked on the corners and pulled in the top, the bottom, and both sides of my frame.
I cropped in close. Then I cropped in a little closer. I took out the sky and a lot of the pavement. I wanted my subject to be the main focus of the image. Cropping is especially important when posting to social media, as many people look at images on small phone screens. You want your subject to fill the screen. While they are important for printing, digital images can be any size you want.
Even Instagram now allows you to vary your images from a ratio.
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