There’s another, One Click Wonder sort of image editing app offered today, so I thought it would be a good time to see if I could finish and post this. Now there’s nothing wrong in my opinion with auto-editing apps if one or more of them happens to make you happy. But being a human with your own likes and dislikes and preferences, you can do better, and in just one or two steps. The software you use is up to you – you’re not going to find a huge difference, outside of special FX, when it comes to results, using one good editing app or another. To me, and the work I’m doing restoring a bunch of old photos, the Lightroom Photoshop duo is worth the price, but I’d have a hard time justifying Adobe software if I was just editing shots that I took today and tomorrow.
A lot has changed in the 3+ decades since Windows brought Paint to PC’s, but the basics of photo editing remain remarkably the same. It’s often said that the best camera is the one that you’ve got with you, and for most people, worldwide, that’s their cell phone. Cell phone software can go a very long way towards fixing things, sometimes before the image is even captured, and there are loads of camera apps that let you make adjustments &/or add FX right from the start – little or no editing needed. And once you’ve taken the shot, besides any photo editing apps on your phone, it’s usually painless to upload it – not to mention necessary given the limits of cell phone storage – with more tools and options available in the cloud. For most people, the only time their photos are in Windows is when they’re being viewed. They don’t want/need Windows editing software, and that shrunken market is why you see the limited number of choices in image editing software, including some questionable apps, that you see today.
Regardless, the same basics apply, whatever camera you use, wherever you choose to edit your pictures, whatever tools you choose to edit them with. And the editing should start before you reach for your camera. It gets forgotten often enough that I think it bears repeating – take better pictures, so you have fewer problems to deal with in editing. The easiest, perhaps best way to take better photos, is to take lots of pictures that you don’t care too much about. You’ll develop a feel, maybe an instinct, of what shots will work, and what won’t, so that the shots you really care about come out as nice as you’d hoped. I’m Not saying don’t shoot what might be a great image when there’s a good chance it won’t work – sometimes it will – but put your experience to work when you can. Maybe you can change your position, or your subject’s. Maybe it’ll work better in another room, or outdoors. You don’t need to get serious about photography to benefit from a bit of experience and forethought.
Another thing you need to think about is the White Balance – set it beforehand if your camera or cell phone software will let you. It’s a fact of life that your camera doesn’t know what white is. Another unfortunate fact [at least from a photography perspective] is that light comes in an almost infinite number of colors & tints. With a digital image, the White Balance is the center of the universe as far as color goes, so try to make sure it’s set as accurately as possible when you shoot, and as needed, set it in editing software to get the overall colors looking like they’re supposed to [or at least as close as you can]. It’s Not a cure-all, but it is a very necessary step.
Your camera, cell phone camera software, and/or editing software might have pre-programmed White Balance settings for different types of lighting, like outdoors, and outdoors when there’s snow on the ground, as well as things like fluorescent and maybe incandescent lighting. Some cameras let you set the White Balance manually, basically taking a picture of a white or gray card in the same lighting. Some software lets you use an eyedropper tool that you use to click on something in the photo that you know should be white. Simply do the best you can with what you’ve got, but don’t ignore White Balance.
That out of the way, all cameras have a limited range of light, from lightest to darkest, that they can capture. The photos you take however, will usually not make full use of that “Dynamic” range. That should be your first task editing. The most important, & maybe the easiest thing to do to improve your picture is to adjust the levels, opening up the image’s full dynamic range. There may be an auto option, and it may work quite well, but I’ve found personally that you can always do better on your own.
Normally you’re shown a Histogram, which is a sort of graph, with the lightness range from black to white across the bottom. Top to bottom shows the range from the maximum number of pixels to none at all, so a pure black image would have one full height bar at the leftmost point, and a pure white image would have one full height bar at the farthest right. You want to see the bars in a histogram evenly distributed between those 2 extremes. [Note: you might be able to see and monitor a histogram before you take the shot, letting you make adjustments to improve the picture before it’s taken.]
To set the levels, do any cropping first, since you don’t want data in the histogram that you’re going to remove anyway. Normally you can set the levels for RGB separately, and that’s what you want to do, since that might influence tint or color cast. You’ll usually see 3 sliding adjustment handles, one at each end, & one in the middle – move the left handle to where the bars in the histogram start, move the right handle to where the bars end, and move the middle handle to adjust the overall lightness/darkness [gamma]. Then once you’ve got all 3 set [R, G, & B separately] you can tweak individual settings if you want, to get the image that looks best to you. It’s really hard to get individual settings perfect until you get everything in the ball park, which is why I suggest a sort of two-step -- get it close once, then get it right.
Some software will give you the option of 3 eye dropper tools, one for black, one for a neutral gray, and one for white. Because the software’s probably more accurate than your monitor [what you see as black may really be a dark gray], I think the middle one, to set gray, is probably the most useful – you should see the effect as you click on different points in the image, so you can try this one as many times as you want until you’re happy.
Once you have the levels set correctly, you may “Optionally” want to go a bit further, making some areas darker, and some lighter to make a better picture. Setting the Gamma &/or using the gray level eye dropper tool adjust the overall mid-range, but you may want to lighten some dark areas to make details more visible or darken bright areas for the same reason. Do note that this will only work if the data is there in the first place – if the highlights are blown out, and/or the blacks are crushed, there’s no helping it, no way to make up for data that simply isn’t there. All you can hope to do is learn from it, maybe paying more attention to the lighting when taking similar photos to avoid this in the future. [I’ll explain more on this later.]
The reason I paid so much attention to White Balance earlier, is that a color cast or tint can be terribly hard to correct, and in some cases, you might not be able to fix it. Adjusting the Red, Green, & Blue levels individually using the histogram often makes a difference, but if you still have a problem, depending on the software you’re using, you can usually adjust the overall tint, but you’re only given a few colors to work with, usually Red, Blue, & Green. Software like Photoshop will give you more colors that can be adjusted, but it still can be frustratingly hard to get skin color correct [when and if you can manage it].
Note that more than one color model may be available, and you might find better luck adjusting hues for example. Some editing software lets you work with curves, which can deservedly appear a bit daunting at first… you adjust the levels of individual colors [or all colors at once] at points from black to white, sort of like an equalizer but for colors instead of sound. In some cases, e.g. when a flash was used, pointing at a person head-on, skin tones may be blown out in their face, then to a varying degree on their arms & legs, so you may have to select & work on different parts separately.
And as far as the basics go, that’s it – you should now have an image that’s improved and done, ready to be shared, printed etc., or *Optionally* you can use it as a solid foundation to build on, going further.
An Optional 3rd step, fixing – or enhancing -- photos with uneven lighting...
When you’re painting a wall in your home [or painting a car], you mask off the parts, like maybe the trim, that you don’t want to get any paint on. In editing software, masks do the very same thing. Masks are based on selections, which are one or more shapes really, and there are all sorts of ways to create them – your options depend on the software you’re using. You generally create a selection, by tracing the edges of an object for example, and the mask can apply to the area inside the borders, or everything else. There’s a special sort of mask that uses a [normally linear or radial] gradient – it will completely block everything at one end of the gradient, and block nothing at the other end.
A common problem with landscape photos is either the sky’s too light or everything else is too dark. You can take 2 [or more] photos, creating an HDR image, or you might use a special ND [Neutral Density] lens filter to darken the top half, or in software, you can use a linear gradient mask. What that does is let you darken the photo, with the full effect at the top, gradually decreasing to no effect at the bottom of the mask.
Another common problem is when a photo’s taken using a flash aimed directly at the subject(s), so that the center is well lit – sometimes too much – but the further you get from that center, everything else is increasingly dark. You could use a diffuser with the flash, to soften & spread the light, and/or point the flash at an angle towards the ceiling, so that the light bounces over a larger area. Or in software use a radial gradient mask, darkening the center as you brighten the rest
Sometimes the areas you want to brighten or darken are irregular, so a gradient mask won’t work. That’s where the Dodge & Burn tools come in, lightening or darkening as needed to correct lighting, and the same techniques can also work very well to enhance your image. The names themselves can make little sense today, coming from the darkroom and working with film, but it helps to remember that burned toast is black, so Burn darkens, & Dodge lightens. Colin Smith [photoshopcafe[.]com] teaches an alternative to the regular Dodge & Burn tools featured in most editing apps… he adds an Overlay layer with a 50% gray fill – you paint on that layer with black to Burn, and white to Dodge.
A similar technique that works in Photoshop, and may or may not work elsewhere, depending on the software, uses 2 copies of the same photo, one at normal levels, and one that’s lighter or darker. That 2nd copy [that’s lighter/darker] can come from a 2nd photo taken with different exposure settings, or you can simply copy the original onto another layer, then adjust the exposure related settings – Photoshop’s Camera Raw works well. With the 2nd image layer above the layer with the image at correct levels, add an inverted mask to that second layer, which will make it transparent, having no effect. Painting on that black mask with white lets the 2nd image show through – setting the opacity of the brush to less than 100 lets you control just how much it shows through.
Photos are all about light and lighting, and adding a touch of shadow to the outline of a face, or removing a touch of shadow around features can make a difference. Darkening a sky, or increasing shadows can make a photo more dramatic. Brightening some areas can increase the drama. And of course, you can always go as crazy as you want with filters and FX, which I didn’t mention until now since they’re so often destructive, altering the basic pixels in ways that we’ve so far avoided. We’ve changed their brightness, and possibly their tint or color, but until now the pixels themselves haven’t been harmed. That’s about to change when filters are introduced, and the changes that they make can cause unpredictable, usually undesirable side effects if you apply them before this point in editing.
A *Possible* exception is the *Careful* use of noise reduction, if the noise in the photo isn’t too bad, and if the tool you use is very good. Noise reduction, dust and scratch filters, healing tools [like P/Shop’s], and a great many FX all cause pixels to blend together, in more extreme cases turning groups of pixels into blobs. I like to minimize the loss of detail by applying the filter to a top layer, then use an inverted mask as with my earlier example. That way I can add the filtering when/where it’s most needed, but keep it away from any faces.
Photos in RAW format…
If you can save your photos in a RAW format, that means that you can save most of the data the camera’s sensor captured. Electronics & software in the camera [or cell phone] process that data, making pre-programed decisions [Guesses] to *develop* that raw data into a jpg picture you can view, share, and optionally edit. The reason for saving your photos in RAW format is that you can probably do better making your own decisions if you develop your pictures yourself. If you don’t want to bother, that’s perfectly fine, but don’t use the RAW format because it means needlessly bigger files, and needless processing [& delays] when you open your photos in whatever editing software. Besides, most editing software that can open RAW files will automatically develop them using its own generic code – your camera has been designed around its own characteristics, so it’ll probably do a better job. If you want to develop your RAW files yourself, use Lightroom or similar software, e.g. Corel AfterShot.
HDR – High Dynamic Range…
Some software, like that from Franzis, would have you believe that HDR is all about more vivid, perhaps even garish colors – that’s not HDR at all. If part of the shot is too bright, if it’s so light that it overwhelms the camera’s sensors, the darker portions will be compressed into near-mud, and/or the bright portions will all be recorded as pure white, with neither extreme having much recorded detail. HDR means taking multiple photos at different exposure settings, so you’ll have at least one with shadow detail, and at least one with highlight detail. Then in software you combine them into a sort of super image. Then when you’re done editing you export a normal image file – the light and dark restrictions are a fault of the camera sensor, not the software, the file format, or the display. Put another way, you’re not doing anything extraordinary with the image – you’re just making up for the inadequacies of the camera. If you want to go for wild coloring Please feel free, have fun, but that’s not the essence of HDR.
Lighting…
From a technical perspective, photography is all about light, and that’s what you need to pay attention to – light, and of course, shadows. Now, there are college courses on lighting, and loads of books & info on-line – there’s far too much to talk about for me to say more here, but I do want to emphasize that improving the lighting for your photos doesn’t have to be tedious or hard or expensive. It can be as cheap and simple as using a sheet of poster board as a reflector, or changing out a light bulb for a daylight LED version.
Color Spaces…
Be aware of, and careful about color spaces. It’s complicated. The [very] short version is that specs for different color spaces have been created, each color space has its own range of possible colors, and not every device can work with every color space. You can normally easily convert your image to another color space, usually in the image editing app that you’ve been using so far. You may be able to save your image with its color space, or choose not to embed a color space. You Cannot just open your image in another color space without [sometimes very] bad effects. You Cannot use your image with a device that does not support its color space without effects. Lots of hardware and software will not tell you what color space they use or can use, so you only know there’s a problem when it doesn’t work. And when it doesn’t work, color space is something to look at.