{"id":53,"date":"2018-12-09T15:00:32","date_gmt":"2018-12-09T15:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nomadicmatt.com\/?p=38212"},"modified":"2018-12-09T15:00:32","modified_gmt":"2018-12-09T15:00:32","slug":"7-editing-tips-to-improve-your-travel-photographs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ourfunjourney.com\/index.php\/2018\/12\/09\/7-editing-tips-to-improve-your-travel-photographs\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Editing Tips to Improve Your Travel Photographs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Blue
\nUpdated:<\/strong> 12\/09\/2018 | December 9th, 2018<\/p>\n

Today, professional photographer Laurence Norah of Finding the Universe, finishes his five-part series on taking better travel photos. In part five, Laurence is giving\u00a0some simple\u00a0post-processing\u00a0techniques that you\u00a0can use to make your travel photos wow your friends and family! Editing your photos is just as important as how you compose them, so I hope you’re ready to take some notes!<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the most misunderstood parts of digital photography is what happens after you take the shot: editing your photos, aka post-processing. This is where you edit the images you have taken, to create the final product.<\/p>\n

Post-processing is the equivalent of the darkroom from the days we shot in film.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s post, we\u2019re going to be covering some ideas for editing your photos, from the basics (cropping and leveling), through to more complicated actions like recovering shadow and highlight information.<\/p>\n

Editing Photos: 7 Editing Tips for Your Travel Photos<\/h3>\n

1. How to Crop Your photos<\/strong>
\nThe crop tool allows you to change the size of your image, and also to change the aspect ratio. For example, you can crop an image from a rectangular shape to a square shape. There are many reasons you would want to crop, including for publishing in different formats and aspect ratios.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a look at the first photo from this post, a lightning shot I took on a recent trip to the Florida Keys. Here\u2019s the original version without cropping:<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

And the edited version, post-crop:<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

Compared to the original, I have cropped the image to remove the dark part of the pier on the right-hand side of the image and recomposed using the rule of thirds, so I have one-third land and two-thirds sky. This makes the lightning bolt more the focus of the shot.<\/p>\n

You might wonder why I didn\u2019t just compose properly when taking the shot. Well, in this case, I was doing a long-exposure shot without a tripod, so had the camera balanced on the edge of the pier for stability. That very much limited my ability to perfectly frame the moment, so I just shot wider, knowing I\u2019d be able to crop the shot appropriately after the fact.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at what cropping looks inside a couple of the tools available.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an example of cropping in Snapseed:<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

And the same thing in Lightroom:<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

In both cases, cropping is very simple: it just involves you selecting the crop tool and then selecting the area you want to keep with your mouse or finger. Then you apply the changes, and voil\u00e0, your new cropped image is ready to go.<\/p>\n

As you see from this and later examples, the tools look similar across different platforms, so it\u2019s easy to apply the learning you have from one tool to another.<\/p>\n

2. How to Level Your Travel Photos<\/strong>
\nOne of my personal petty annoyances in photography is when the horizon line in a photo isn\u2019t level. Sometimes when we\u2019re caught up in the moment, this basic compositional rule is forgotten \u2014 but the good news is that editing your photos to make them level is also very easy.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll use the lightning shot as my example again. Balancing the camera on the edge of the pier meant that the shot wasn\u2019t level \u2014 this is particularly noticeable to the eye when the image has a clearly defined horizon line, such as the sea.<\/p>\n

If we look at a zoomed in version of the image in its original form, with a line overlaid near the horizon, we can see that it\u2019s not level \u2014 the line is closer to the horizon on the right-hand side than the left.<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

In Lightroom, the level tool is part of the crop tool, and you can just rotate the image to suit. When you use the level tool, a grid will appear to help you get the alignment correct. Here\u2019s a screenshot of that in action in Lightroom.<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the same procedure in Snapseed, where the level tool is called \u201cRotate\u201d:<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

Leveling an image is a really simple task that will take just a few seconds of your time, resulting in a much more visually pleasing image.<\/p>\n

3. Vignetting Your Photos<\/strong>
\nVignetting is about making parts of the image darker or lighter than other parts, in order to make it clearer what the subject of the shot is.<\/p>\n

Some tools restrict your vignette to the corners, but in applications like Snapseed and Lightroom you can selectively darken and lighten areas of the image \u2014 you don\u2019t need to restrict yourself to the corners.<\/p>\n

Taking the lightning shot above, let\u2019s load up the vignette tool in Snapseed.<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

Here we have options for how big to make the \u201ccenter size,\u201d i.e., the area to be edited. Inside this area, everything can be made brighter (inner brightness) and everything outside the area can be made darker (outer brightness). We can also do it in reverse, making the inner darker and the outer brighter.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s apply the vignette tool to the lightning bolt, to give you an idea of the effect:<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

Above are the settings I chose for outer brightness and inner brightness, while below is the size of the vignette itself, which is based on the center size setting.<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/p>\n

Vignetting is particularly good for portraits, and anywhere where you really want to make the subject of the image more clearly obvious to the viewer.<\/p>\n

4. How Change Shadows and Highlights in Your Photos<\/strong>
\nSometimes when we take a photograph, parts of the shot might end up being darker or brighter than we want. We refer to the dark areas of the shot as shadows, and the bright areas of the shot as highlights.<\/p>\n

We can fix this by changing the brightness of the shadow and highlight areas specifically, using either the \u201cShadow\u201d or \u201cHighlight\u201d tool. This is a tool that works particularly well on RAW files as they retain more information on the shadow and highlight areas of an image compared to a compressed JPG, which discards most of this information in order to save file size.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a quick look at adjusting shadows and highlights using Lightroom. In Snapseed, shadow and highlight adjustment can be found under the \u201cTune Image\u201d setting.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a shot of a couple enjoying a bonfire and fireworks display in Edinburgh during Hogmanay:<\/p>\n

\"Contrast<\/p>\n

As you can see, the fireworks and bonfire are clearly visible, as are the torches the couple is holding, but the rest of the shot is dark. Let\u2019s adjust the settings and see what we can get.<\/p>\n

\"Contrast<\/p>\n

In this version of the image, the couple is much more visible, as is the hill the fireworks are on and the surrounding crowd.<\/p>\n

To achieve this I increased the overall exposure of the image, making the whole image brighter, including the shadows and the highlights.<\/p>\n

Then, as the shadow areas were still a little dark, I increased those a little more.<\/p>\n

Finally, as the global exposure adjustment made the fireworks and bonfire too bright, I reduced the highlights a little bit to give the final result.<\/p>\n

Shadow and highlight adjustment is useful in a wide range of scenarios to help balance the image out \u2014 bringing overexposed areas down in brightness, and helping to boost the shadows. Just be aware that a light touch is recommended \u2014 increasing the brightness of the shadows too much can result in a lot of noise being revealed, which might look unnaturally green or purple.<\/p>\n

5. How to Adjust the Contrast<\/strong>
\nContrast is about accentuating the difference between the light and dark parts of the image. Increasing the contrast of an image can dramatically improve the visual impact that has, by making the boundaries between those light and dark parts clearer.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a look at a shot of people jumping against the sunset in the Sahara, for example, which I\u2019ll be editing in Snapseed.<\/p>\n

\"Girls<\/p>\n

There is nothing too wrong with this shot, but it lacks the visual impact that I wanted. Ideally, I would want the shapes of the people to be in full silhouette against the sun, but as it was shot the camera picked up some skin tones and clothing color.<\/p>\n

Using the contrast tool, we can make the dark areas stand out against the bright areas.<\/p>\n

\"Girls<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the result:<\/p>\n

\"Girls<\/p>\n

As you can see, this made the jumping figures and the dune more silhouetted against the sky. In most shots, you only want to tweak the contrast a little bit to get the desired effect, normally no more than +20 or so, but in this case, the higher number gave the best result.<\/p>\n

6. How to Adjust Colors<\/strong>
\nColor adjustment is another important piece of the editing toolkit. We can adjust image color in all sorts of ways, from changing the overall \u201cwarmth\u201d of the image (how blue or yellow it appears), to individually changing the hue and saturation of specific colors inside an image.<\/p>\n

For this post, though, I just want to cover some very simple color changes you can use to make your images just a little more visually impactful.<\/p>\n

The fastest way to adjust an image\u2019s color is with the \u201cSaturation\u201d tool. This changes the appearance of every color in an image to make it more or less saturated. We can use the saturation tool to desaturate an image, eventually resulting in a black-and-white image with no color:<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/p>\n

Or we can go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, and make the color incredibly saturated:<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/p>\n

As with many edits, the key is to find a good balance \u2014 oversaturated images tend to look rather unnatural. Desaturated images can be very effective, and of course black-and-white is an excellent choice for all sorts of situations, in particular, portraits, architecture, and certain landscape scenes. But generally you would want to find a happy midpoint: not too oversaturated and not too undersaturated.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/p>\n

Saturation is adjusted on a sliding scale and is on the basic adjustments panel in Lightroom or the \u201cTune Image\u201d option in Snapseed.<\/p>\n

7. Blemish correction<\/strong>
\nThe last area I\u2019m going to touch on today is blemish correction, or \u201cimage healing.\u201d Sometimes there will be something in an image that you really don\u2019t want to be there, like an inconvenient pimple on someone\u2019s face. This is easy to remove in all the major editing tools.<\/p>\n

You can, in theory, remove any object from a scene, but the healing tool works best on distinct, small objects that are surrounded by uniform colors. This is because the heal tool has to replace the area you wish to remove with something else, and this works best when it has an area nearby that looks similar. So for example, a pimple on a face is surrounded by a lot of similarly colored skin, so the heal tool can easily calculate what to replace the pimple with based on the surrounding area.<\/p>\n

For this example, I\u2019m going to show how Snapseed can be used to replace an object in a scene. Here\u2019s a group of people sitting on a sand dune in the Sahara:<\/p>\n

\"People<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say for some reason I only wanted to have people sitting in my shot, and I need to remove the standing person. She is a good candidate for removal as she is separate from the rest, and the surrounding scenery is not too complicated.<\/p>\n

In Snapseed, we load up the healing tool, then we zoom in on the object to be removed with the standard \u201cpinch to zoom\u201d gesture.<\/p>\n

\"People<\/p>\n

Next, we use our finger to draw the area to be removed. It\u2019s important to be as precise as possible because the tool is most accurate with small objects.<\/p>\n

\"People<\/p>\n

Once we have drawn the area, Snapseed will edit it out, replacing it with the best guess of what is behind the object.<\/p>\n

\"People<\/p>\n

As you can see, the result is impressive, with no real evidence that there was anyone standing there at all.<\/p>\n

The healing tool is perfect for all manner of fixes, from editing out unwanted background strangers in your shot, to removing skin blemishes in portraits or power lines in landscape shots.<\/p>\n

Best Photography Editing Software<\/h3>\n

Here is a list of the best editing tools out there:<\/p>\n