Editing Photo's and avoiding the pitfalls.

Editing Photo's and avoiding the pitfalls.​

Editing photo's is a necessary part of digital photography (DP), DP has many shortcomings and does not (yet) capture as well as film used to but every year its getting better as the DP sensor's improve. Sure, the overall look of a digi photo can look good, but thats far from the truth.

The scenario

Its normal and very very easy for those new to editing photographs to go over the top, you press a button here or move a slider there and the contrast will increase and impress your eyes, or the colours will saturate so much you could almost need sunglasses. Or they can be overly sharpened which really ruins a photograph. The impact of this is that there are many many badly edited photographs that can be viewed on the internet. This is very bad of course as it fools those new to editing into the thought that extreme is correct or that scraping the eyeballs of the viewer is perfectly ok. Simply put, it's not. There are literally 1000's of ways to edit a photo, some are simple, many are complex but without a cool head and restrained hand, your ruining your photo right from the start.

Some examples

Here are some examples of what editing can do, to the detriment of your photo.


1. Normal - Below is a photo of the river at the bottom of our village that I took the other day. It has no editing at all except for resizing and the "black box" that I have added.


In the following five images I have zoomed into the black box.

2. Zoom normal (Control) No editing whatsoever!



3. Zoom contrast - Below I have given the shot some contrast editing. Note the colour shift from the unedited control.



4. Zoom saturation - Below I have given the shot a saturation edit, again, note the colour shift!


5. Zoom sharpen - Below I have given the image a basic sharpen, note how the edges have either been darkened or ligthened.


6. Zoom Contrast, saturation and sharpen. Below I have applied all three of the above adjustments one after the other. Sunglasses on!


7.Zoom normal (Control) No editing again on this one below.


Ok, we can see (when zoomed in) that in all edits that there are quite unfavourable changes to our photo, lets see how they affect the whole photo now.

Once again, below is the unedited full size photo.
8. Once again, below is the unedited full size photo.


9. And here is the edited version, its been saturated, contrasted and sharpened so three edits in total, you can just see the photo has changed slightly for the better as it looks richer, slightly more vibrant and a little clearer/sharper. It's had the same edits that shot number 6 above has had where sunglasses where used.


So to recap at this point, we have an edited image that looks reasonable BUT we know how significantly the colours have changed within the photo because we zoomed in, and this is the real point.

99.9% of people editing a digital photograph NEVER zoom in to see what they have done or how edits have affected their shot. They work or edit on the full size image only and want to see significant changes at that size, this is why their photo's can look god awful because they over indulge in the ammount of every edit they make, not realising what they are actually doing is destroying their photo.

In time of course, they do eventually realise and start to tone the edits down but by then bad habits have set in and its very hard to reverse them.

So, looking to the future for people new to this, I have a few tips for you when editing.

1. Keep it realistic (Does the overall Photo look realistic, do you need sunglasses)
2. Maximum 2 edits (Try to keep edit numbers to a bare minimum)
3. Zoom when editing. (See what is actually happening to your photo)
4. Back off (When making an edit adjust the ammount up to where you think its correct, then back off a little)
5. Keep it realistic (As 1 above)

And always remember, less is more.

Steve...