Photos are a way to communicate and show others what is going on in your life.  From Facebook to TikTok, photos and videos are used regularly.  If you are trying to market products then you have to know how to edit out blemishes or issues with lighting.  

Now more than ever, it is important to know how you are going to edit your photos, to have an idea in place and most of all, to have a developed eye for what needs to be changed.  Much of this comes with practice, taking the time to learn your systems, and understanding how different elements of photo editing affect photos.  These eight tips are going to help you develop those skills!

1 . Know Your System

When you work with a program it is important to know how your system works.  A tool can only work as well as the master.  This is why it is important to learn your programs.

A great way to start studying your system is to go through tutorials.  Most programs are going to have a help center where you can interact with a community of people as well as staff that are very familiar with the program.  

2 . Study Photos

To get better at editing, you do have to study.  One thing that can really help is looking at photos that you like and work to mimic how the image looks with a photo that you have taken. 

 In order to mimic the way the image looks, you’ll have to really work with the program that you are using: learning the finer details of a program to achieve the look that you want is going to take up some time.  Make sure you set aside at least half an hour to work on editing images so that they look like an image that you chose to mimic.

3 . Experiment

Many people are afraid to experiment.  The beauty of working with photo editing software is that you can undo changes and save an image as a copy rather than the original.  This means that you can continually work on the same image, scrap what you don’t like, and try again.

If you are stuck and don’t know what you want to experiment with, here are a few suggestions:

• Color tone correction and changes
• Changing the focal point
• Making a day image look like a night image
• Work with removing elements of a photo
• Work on making specific colors pop

4 . Colors

This is going to sound really basic: study up on your color schemes and what colors work best with one another.  Images reproduce the colors that we see so in order to edit some aspects of a photo, you will need to understand something called color theory.  The deeper your understanding of how colors work together, the better your eye for photo editing will be.

5 . Contrast

Contrast is one one of the easiest things (alongside exposure) to learn how to edit.  It is truly a preference based upon what you see as your final product.  Contrast also requires a little bit of experimentation so that you can see what elements of the photo are affected by the changes.

6 . Exposure

Just like contrast, learning how to correct lighting and exposure of an image is going to greatly improve the way that your images look as you edit them.  Something to consider when working with exposure is how the lighting is in both white spaces and dark spaces.  

If you need to brighten darker areas, most editing software will have the option to brighten the area.  It’s the same with the white spaces and needing to darken them.

7 . YouTube

YouTube is your best friend!  There are so many people who share their knowledge about how to edit photos, videos, and more.  They will have recommendations, tips and tricks, shortcuts, and even videos that dig into the way that the programs operate. 

While you may not need to go as far as learning how the program works, it is a good idea to work through several different videos that talk about how your program processes exposure, contrast, removing background elements, how to create a specific tone, and how to edit photos based upon what someone is wearing, their weight, their skin tone and the background.

Conclusion

If you are really serious about growing your skills, you will also need to ensure that you are also using the right equipment.  One of the ways to do this is to make sure that you are using a computer designed to work with videos and video editing.

You can look for the best chromebook for video editing, the best Mac for editing, or even the best HP or Windows computer for video editing.  Make sure you do your research and practice so you have both the equipment and skills you need to improve your photo editing.