Photograph - editing

During my time in France, I have shot so many photos. I'm now working my way through all of these, but I'm stuck at one thing: editing.

I used to change the contrast and the brightness and I sometimes added a "orange" layer (set to overlay with a low opacity). I know work more with curves and still with the contrast and brightness, but the results aren't how I imagined in my head or seen around.

My question to you is, how do you edit photos and what kind of settings/textures/whatever do you use? I really want to improve in my editing skills to make my photos more attractive.

- In case you're wondering, I do remove stuff every now and then. I only do it when I feel like the photo needs it (i.e. when there's a big fly that take attention from the horse).

I'd love to see your examples :D

I use Lightroom. I always have a slight blue tinge set to reduce the orange/yellow glare from sunlight (unless I want a warm glow, then I play around with the reds and yellows until I get what I want).

I also crop, rotate (if necessary), fiddle with the shadows/blacks if the photo was taken at the end of the day (I do racing photography so can't change my angle much to avoid shadows from a setting sun).

Obviously if you're doing artsy photos you can really play around with colours and angles and crops to make something really spectacular. I'm pretty limited with action shots haha.

Examples of my stuff:

Action
Action blur
Sunset headshot
Sunset clerk of the course
Just because I find it hilarious

When I do phone photography I use Enlight. It costs to download but honestly it is SO worth it. I really enjoy using it and get some stunning photos with an iPhone 6s camera (12mp) and Enlight.

Filly nose at dawn
Dawn at work
Why I don't mind getting up before the sun on weekends

Of course, ideally you want to get so good with your settings and ability to predict/set up a shot that you need to do minimal editing later haha.

Honestly I don't really play with contrast and brightness. I prefer using the exposure scale and deepening my blacks/lightening shadows.

Those last three pictures is something that I want to achieve with my photos. I never achieve that in my photos haha.

I work with GIMP. I have looked to buy Lightroom, but I felt that it was too expensive for now.

I of course crop, rotate and stuff, but besides that I work with what I have written above.

My photos (with editing) look now like this:
Click 1
Click 2 (I now see that it's not fully sharp x])
Click 3
Click 4

I feel like that photos miss the "Wow" factor and that's what I want to achieve someday.

They're not bad at all :) you just need to work on your exposure a little with the last two. And the top one would have looked much better from a lower angle facing up. Horses always look better from a low angle.

For those last three photos I added the purples, pinks, vignettes and other small tweaks to get them that way. It took a fair bit of fiddling, but you can absolutely create that with yours if you play around with all the elements.

They're beautiful!

I don't edit a lot, but I do edit the lighting and usually make the photo more "warm" as well. If you want the subject to pop more, try adding a vignette or focusing the light more towards the front of the picture. I use BeFunky photo editor for the Fill Light feature.

Adding sharpness (but not too much) can enhance a photo, as well as adjusting curves to a slight S shape to add dynamism to contrast, and playing with the color balance can really make your photo pop. Be sure not to go too heavy on any one color though, because it can be easily overdone.

I looove Lightroom! I tend to be pretty good about my settings, but sometimes if I think a photo needs a bit of editing, I'll usually turn to Lightroom. Especially if it's not a particularly sunny day when the photo is taken, if I like it enough I'll stick it into Lr and work on it. I don't really have a "go to" setting for editing, I kind of just play around with everything and see what looks best for that particular photo.

For quick edits I use/used Picasa. Its a program made by Google but they've discontinued support for it this year. Not sure if you can still get it somewhere online? Quick and simple to use. I do find that with Picasa there's a little bit of quality lost when saving... Very little though.

Here are some examples of the two programs - pretty ponies, incoming!

Lightroom:
- Before & After - this was a cloudy day but I still liked the photo so I decided to see if I could improve it
- Played with this to bring out the trees a little more, so it wasn't like a blinding mess of sun
- This before & after is obvious lol
And here's another couple of before and afters

Picasa:
- Boosted a little so the green was nicer


I clearly edit a lot more on Lr than Picasa xD (it's really just bc Picasa doesn't really like to load nowadays, sad). I've still got some stuff to improve on though :3

**Please don't download or save these photos in any way. They are not for use, and are not stock

EDIT: also omg yes, Enlight, I love that also. It's become my go-to app for editing. Sometimes I'll even save photos I've taken on my camera to my phone so I can edit them on Enlight. I actually got it for free during a promo on the app store, but I think it's well worth the purchase.

Last edited on 2016-08-20 at 00:18:00 by tolarie

Enlight is life < 3 haha my Instagram has improved ten fold with it.