Image Editing: Mastering Basic Adjustments

For beginner photographers, understanding the basics of image editing is crucial to enhancing your photos and bringing out their full potential. Here’s a quick guide to essential terms and techniques to get you started, applicable to any editing programme on your computer, iPhone, or Android phone.

Before we start, it’s useful to familiarise yourself with the terms “Shadows”, Mid-tones” and “Highlights”.   Shadows refers to the dark tones within your image, Highlights are the light tones, and mid tones are everything in between.

Exposure

When shooting, exposure refers to the amount of light that reaches your camera’s sensor. In editing, adjusting the exposure can brighten or darken your image. Proper exposure ensures your photo isn’t too light (overexposed) or too dark (underexposed). Adjusting the exposure shifts all the tones in your image either up (lighter exposure), or down (darker exposure).

How to Adjust: Use the exposure slider in your editing software to increase or decrease the exposure of your image. Adjusting the exposure helps you recover details in the shadows and highlights, balancing the overall luminosity of your photo.

Brightness

Brightness adjustment in post-production increases or decreases the light levels in your image, similar to exposure but with some key differences. Brightness typically adjusts the midtones of your image more than the highlights and shadows, providing a more balanced overall adjustment.

How to Adjust: Use the brightness slider to make your image lighter or darker. This is useful for making general light adjustments without affecting the dynamic range as significantly as exposure adjustments.

Brightness vs. Exposure

While both brightness and exposure adjust the light levels in an image, they do so in different ways:

Exposure: Changing exposure modifies the overall light level, impacting highlights, shadows, and midtones.

Brightness: Brightness changes the lightness or darkness of an image, focusing more on mid-tones without drastically altering the overall dynamic range.

Brilliance

The "Brilliance" adjustment is a feature found in many photo editing software packages, including Apple's Photos app. It enhances the brightness and contrast in an image in a way that is more subtle and refined compared to the standard brightness or contrast adjustments.

Here’s what "Brilliance" typically does:

1. Enhances Shadows and Highlights: It can bring out detail in both the shadow and highlight areas of an image, improving overall contrast without harshly clipping the highlights or crushing the shadows.

2. Balances Midtones: By adjusting the midtones, Brilliance can make an image look more natural. It brightens darker areas while preserving lighter areas, giving a balanced look.

3. Improves Clarity and Definition: Brilliance can help in enhancing the clarity and sharpness of an image, making it look more defined and vivid.

Overall, the Brilliance adjustment is designed to make images look more dynamic and vibrant, improving the depth and overall visual appeal without the image appearing over-edited.

Contrast

Contrast is the difference between the light and dark areas of your photo. Increasing contrast makes shadows darker and highlights brighter, adding depth and detail to your image. Reducing contrast results in a flatter image with less distinction between light and dark areas.

How to Adjust: Use the contrast slider to enhance the differences between light and dark areas. Be careful not to overdo it, as too much contrast can make your photo look harsh.

Saturation and Vibrance

Saturation affects the intensity of all colours in your photo, making them more vivid or more muted. Vibrance specifically targets the intensity of less saturated colours and protects skin tones, making it ideal for portrait editing.

How to Adjust: Increase saturation for a bold, vibrant look or decrease it for a more subdued effect. Use vibrance for more subtle adjustments, ensuring that the colours remain natural.

White Balance (Warmth)

White balance adjusts the overall colour temperature of your photo, compensating for different lighting conditions. Adjusting white balance ensures that whites appear white, rather than having a colour cast (e.g., too blue or too yellow).

How to Adjust: Use the white balance tool to set the correct temperature and tint, ensuring accurate colour representation. Most editing programmes offer presets like ‘daylight’, ‘cloudy’, ‘tungsten’, and ‘fluorescent’, which can be used to quickly adjust white balance.

Tint

White balance only adjusts between yellow and blue,  but tint adjusts the colour between green and magenta.  It can be used to make the colours in your image look more natural, or to apply a subtle tint for effect.

How to Adjust: Use the tint slider to add green or magenta to your image.

Highlights and Shadows

Use the highlights slider to reduce brightness in the brightest areas of your image, and the shadows slider to lighten the darkest areas, revealing more detail. This adjustment helps create a more balanced and dynamic image. Adjusting these helps recover details lost in bright or dark parts of your photo.

Clarity (Definition)

Clarity enhances mid-tone contrast, giving your photo a crisper, more detailed look. It can make textures stand out and improve overall sharpness without affecting the overall exposure.

How to Adjust: Increase clarity to make details pop or decrease it for a softer, dreamier effect. Use clarity sparingly to avoid creating unnatural textures.

Sharpness

Increasing sharpness makes edges more defined, which can improve the overall quality of your photo, especially when viewed at larger sizes.

How to Adjust: Use the sharpness tool to enhance detail, but be cautious not to overdo it, as excessive sharpness can introduce noise and artifacts. Applying sharpening selectively to areas of interest can also be effective.

Noise Reduction

Noise appears as graininess or speckles in your photo, often caused by high ISO settings in low-light conditions. Noise reduction smooths out this graininess, making your image cleaner.

How to Adjust: Apply noise reduction to minimize grain, but balance it to avoid losing too much detail. Some programmes allow you to reduce noise in the luminance and colour separately for more control.

Practical Tips

1. Start Simple: Focus on basic adjustments like exposure, contrast, and white balance before moving on to the more advanced adjustments. It’s easy to play with every slider, but also easy to completely ruin your image!  Make small adjustments to start with.

2. Use Presets: Many editing programmes offer presets that apply a set of adjustments with one click. This can be a great way to learn what different settings do and to achieve a consistent look across your photos.

3. Practice: The more you edit, the better you’ll understand how different adjustments affect your photos. Experiment with various tools and techniques to discover what works best for your style.

4. Compare Before and After: Most editing programmes allow you to see a before-and-after comparison, helping you track your progress and see the impact of your changes. This feature is invaluable for learning how your edits improve the image.

5. Keep the Original: Always keep a copy of your original photo. This way, if you decide you don’t like your edits, you can start over without losing the original image quality.

Mastering the basics of image editing can dramatically enhance your photography. By understanding and applying these essential terms and techniques, you can transform your photos and unlock your full creative potential. Experiment with different settings, subjects, and environments to develop your unique style.

For more photography tips and tutorials, join our community at https://www.masteryour.photography. Share your edited shots, ask questions, and receive feedback to continue improving your skills. Unlock your photographic potential by mastering the art of image editing.