Learn basic photo editing

Basic photo editing has an unusually good effort-to-result ratio, because roughly five adjustments account for nearly all the visible improvement. Exposure, contrast, white balance, crop, and one selective adjustment. Learning those five on your own photos takes an hour and permanently changes how your pictures look.

Why learn basic photo editing is worth an hour

Cameras make deliberate compromises when they process an image, particularly in tricky light, and those compromises are exactly what the basic sliders reverse. Editing your own photos also teaches you to see what was wrong at capture time, which gradually improves the photographs themselves. The editing skill quietly becomes a shooting skill.

How to learn basic photo editing step by step

1. 1

   Pick a mediocre photo you like

   Good subject, poor execution. Editing an already excellent image teaches you very little about what the controls do.

2. 2

   Fix exposure and contrast first

   Brightness overall, then the separation between light and dark. These two do more than everything else combined.

3. 3

   Correct the white balance

   Push the temperature warmer or cooler until the whites look white. Color casts are the most common invisible problem.

4. 4

   Crop for the subject

   Remove everything that is not helping. Cropping is the most underused adjustment and costs nothing but decisiveness.

5. 5

   Make one selective adjustment

   Brighten a face, darken a distracting corner. Local edits are what separate an edited photo from a filtered one.

Tips to get more out of it

• Always edit a copy or work non-destructively. Overwriting an original is a mistake you make exactly once.
• Compare against the unedited version regularly. Editing drifts, and heavy edits look normal after twenty minutes of staring.
• Free tools handle all of this. Paid software adds convenience and speed, not fundamentally better results.

Ways to mix it up

If you shoot in RAW, spend the hour on what RAW recovers that JPEG cannot, particularly in blown highlights and shadows. If you mostly post to phones, edit on a phone with a calibrated eye for small screens, since detail that reads well on a monitor often disappears entirely.

Learn basic photo editing: frequently asked questions