Knowing how to tinker with your photos is the basis of revealing their aesthetic potential. Getting a good picture is never enough. A good photo needs to be edited well. That’s how you transform raw images into something worth remembering. And there is no better option than for some heavy lifting. In this article, I will walk you down some of the best tricks and hacks that you can use to level up your skills or outsource image editing. From small edits like fixing the lighting to reorienting an image altogether, all of these skills are useful to have in your storehouse of knowledge.
Color Adjustments
Fine-tuning and adjusting the palette of your image is arguably one of the most powerful abilities you can hone. This is so you make sure everything in your picture is harmonious. For professional photography specifically, the balance of whist is extremely important to focus on. This requires a close adjustment of temperatures, bounce lights, and saturation. You can use HSL to fix specific hues further.
Skin Tone Fixes
Under certain lights, your skin can either get washed out and make images appear drab or look too yellow or pink. By tinkering with the CMYK color system, temperatures, saturation, and contrast, you can easily make the skin look more alive. It also helps the people in the picture appear better situated against the backdrop.
Lens Blur Effects
Lens blur is arguably one of the most artistic tools for changing the feeling of your image altogether. You can select any shape for your lens blur effect and create a sequence of bokeh around the subject. A bokeh effect makes the image look far more romantic and in tune with the theme of the professional.
Classic Black and White
Every professional photo editor needs to master black and white. Here, it is important to know things like color values. Be it by referencing an old photograph or a black and white photoshoot for that cinematic effect, monochrome can tell a thousand stories and open up the image for greater imagination.
Group Shots
You can transform any group picture into memorable portraits worthy of being a mantlepiece. Sometimes, you may have to add in people who were missing or remove some pesky objects. This is where expert editing skills come in handy.
Subject isolation
Isolating your subject involves editing the pictures so that the subject is distinguished from the background. You can achieve this by using the lasso tool to isolate the image of the couple and then apply Gaussian blur to the background.
Wrapping Up
That brings us to an end of some of the cool skills and tricks that you can leverage to make your professional photos that much more emotional and memorable. With practice, these techniques are bound to become second nature. Till then, keep on editing!
