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9 Photo Editing Tips to Make Your Photos Look More Professional

Have you looked at the photos in magazines and other editorials and wondered why they just don’t look the same as the photos clicked with your camera?

Of course, those magazine pictures are clicked by experienced professional photographers who use cameras that sometimes cost more than a car, but the professionals also have a secret that makes their photos look that way.

And today, we’ll be revealing those secrets to you, through which you will also be able to make your photos look more professional. We here at Spyne are Photo Editing Service Providers in the United States and in this blog we are going to share 9 powerful and effective photo editing techniques. That will help you turn your average-looking photos into stunning professional-looking images. We know that these tips are very effective as we ourselves use the same technique while working on your image editing projects from all across the United States.

And when it comes to the secret that professionals have, it is simple, they don’t publish their images without post-processing. This is one of the main reasons that their photos look so amazing.

But if you manage to look at their photos before editing, they look very different, one can even argue that they look just like the photos clicked with just any other camera. And here is an example:

You can see that the original photo is just fine, but once we change the white balance, contrast, vibrance, and other tonal adjustments, the second photo turns out to be far more dramatic and pleasing to look at. And the best part is that image editing doesn’t even take much of your time and still gives you some stunning results.

So if you are someone who is looking to get the same great quality results that professionals get by making a few tweaks and adjustments to their photo in post-processing, all you have to go through these 9 effective and efficient photo editing tips.

1. Crop and Straighten Your Photos

You might think that this is something very simple as you already know about this one by let us assure you that the photo editing tips get more complex and Cropping and Straightening your photos have a drastic effect on their look, as it dramatically improves their composition. Cropping and straightening are such important aspects of photo editing that they have to be covered first. So let’s take a look at an example:

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It might not seem like it but the first photo has some serious problems. The image has a lot of unwanted elements. Hence through the power of editing, we have cropped the image to get rid of all parts with unwanted elements. You need to crop everything out that doesn’t really add to the story. The cropping is a really great feature, it helps us make up for the composition in photo editing mistakes that we make at the time of clicking the image. Once you have cropped out all the extraneous elements, you are now left with a very strong image that tells the story better.

And as now you recognize the importance of cropping let us look at another example to understand straightening:

As you can see in the first picture, the horizon in the photo is not straight which doesn’t seem much at first but it takes away a lot of the photo’s impact. This is a very common problem that is even faced by professionals as it is not that easy to capture a straight horizon. But with the help of straightening, we can align the horizon with an imaginary horizontal line across the photo, to get a really strong and professional look from the end result.

2. Fix Unnatural Lighting

This next technique will help you transform your unnatural-looking images taken in artificial lighting into professional stunning night shots.

Let’s take a look at an example:

You can see that the first photo is filled with unnatural-looking colours. This is due to the fact that only artificial light was involved in capturing this image. And this happens quite often as most of the city lights give a very strange colour to the image. And as you can see in the second image, we corrected the colour so that the image doesn’t appear unnatural. As a result, you have a more realistic and natural-looking picture that is more pleasing to the eye. This can also be achieved by correcting the white balance of the images.

3. Remove The Unwanted Elements

In this technique, we help you get rid of all the unwanted elements in the photo so that you can push all the attention to the main subject in the photo. So let’s see an example:

We come across many photos like these. Here, the sunlight on the desk is not such a great element, but it is also not contributing to the image. To emphasize our main subject, i.e. the laptop, we can get rid of the light on the table’s right side. Once the unnecessary elements are gone, you can see that the image automatically becomes way more impactful and starts looking professional. Most people get overwhelmed when it comes to removing such unwanted elements from the image, but with a little practice and some simple healing brushwork you can remove any unwanted element from your photos

4. Increase The Clarity Of Your Portraits

This is one of the coolest and easiest techniques that you can use to make your portraits look more dramatic and impactful. You can look at the example below:

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The first portrait looks good but the second portrait is more stunning. A little tweak, or a lot in this case, in clarity, can make your photo look more striking. This technique makes your images look like movie posters. This technique is loved by everyone on social media. The contrasty look can help you get more followers on your Instagram. So whenever you post a portrait, don’t forget to increase the image’s clarity.

5. Make Your Black and White Photos More Dramatic

You might have seen that the black-and-white filters do an amazing job of adding drama and mood to images. And to do the same and recreate such images, applying a black-and-white filter on your image would not do the trick. Let’s see an example:

The first photo just shows you the black-and-white version of a coloured image that we had. The picture looks okay but it doesn’t have the drama and mood that we were looking for. So to fix that, we went to the original coloured image and made an adjustment to the blue sky to make it look darker. So as a result, applying the black and white filter to the current image will give us a black sky which is perfect for the mood that we were going for.

6. Add Drama To Your Image

In this technique, we will tell you how making adjustments to the shadows and highlights can make your photo look esthetic and way better.

You can see that the dark areas of the first photo are really pixelated and they have a lot of noise that doesn’t look really professional. And to fix that all you need to do is make adjustments to the “Shadows” and “Blacks” of the photo. Just by reducing the Shadows and the Black you can see a drastic improvement in the image. Now there is no more noise and distortion in the picture.

Let’s take another example:

The first photo that we have is great, but it has a lot of overexposed as well as underexposed areas. So to fix this, we have to correct the highlights. And highlights basically mean all the areas that are brightly lit in your photos. All we did was turn down the highlights a bit and the bright areas of the photo automatically came down to a proper exposure level to make the photo look way better.

7. Remove Haze From Landscapes

In this technique we will show you how removing haze from your landscape shots can have a drastic impact. The haze that we see in images is the result of ultraviolet light and it can really make your landscapes appear dull and lifeless. Let’s see an example:

As you can see, the first image looks good but it still doesn’t have the drama that we were looking for. So to make the image more striking, we reduced the ultraviolet Haze of the photo. This is such a simple adjustment that it can be done with the movement of a slider. This also takes care of the slight bluish softness that is caused by ultraviolet light. Once the haze is corrected, you get to see the accurate colours of the image. The colours really start to show when you remove the gaze from your pictures.

8. Adjust Colours To Make Photos Look Lively

In this technique, we will show you how you can bring out the blue in the sky so that your overall image looks more vivid as well as vibrant.

So let’s take a look at this example:

While the photo would have been okay as it is, we felt adding blue to the sky would liven up the sky. So, we selectively adjusted only the blue in the picture, so that the adjustments would unnecessarily affect no other element. This is also very helpful when you take a photo of a building. The building is exposed properly but the sky is overexposed to a point where it just starts to appear white. You can apply the same selective color adjustment to achieve stunning photos.

9. Make Landscapes Look More Vivid

This technique makes your landscape photo look more vivid and vibrant just by using Selective Colour Adjustment. To understand this better let’s see an example:

The first image looks good, but we know we can improve it. However, changing the saturation or vibrance of the whole image is not a great option. Instead, we need to adjust the color of the sky, the water, and the grass. And that can be done by manipulating the colors of just these 3 elements through selective color adjustment. The final image has a more accurate depiction of the green and blue colors in the photo.