Posted: 12/09/18 | December 9th, 2018
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 some simple post-processing techniques that you can 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!
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.
Post-processing is the equivalent of the darkroom from the days we shot in film.
In today’s post, we’re 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.
Editing Photos: 7 Editing Tips for Your Travel Photos
1. How to Crop Your photos
The 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.
Let’s take a look at the first photo from this post, a lightning shot I took on a recent trip to the Florida Keys. Here’s the original version without cropping:
And the edited version, post-crop:
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.
You might wonder why I didn’t 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’d be able to crop the shot appropriately after the fact.
Let’s look at what cropping looks inside a couple of the tools available.
Here’s an example of cropping in Snapseed:
And the same thing in Lightroom:
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 voilà, your new cropped image is ready to go.
As you see from this and later examples, the tools look similar across different platforms, so it’s easy to apply the learning you have from one tool to another.
2. How to Level Your Travel Photos
One of my personal petty annoyances in photography is when the horizon line in a photo isn’t level. Sometimes when we’re caught up in the moment, this basic compositional rule is forgotten — but the good news is that editing your photos to make them level is also very easy.
I’ll use the lightning shot as my example again. Balancing the camera on the edge of the pier meant that the shot wasn’t level — this is particularly noticeable to the eye when the image has a clearly defined horizon line, such as the sea.
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’s not level — the line is closer to the horizon on the right-hand side than the left.
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’s a screenshot of that in action in Lightroom.
And here’s the same procedure in Snapseed, where the level tool is called “Rotate”:
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.
3. Vignetting Your Photos
Vignetting 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.
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 — you don’t need to restrict yourself to the corners.
Taking the lightning shot above, let’s load up the vignette tool in Snapseed.
Here we have options for how big to make the “center size,” 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.
Let’s apply the vignette tool to the lightning bolt, to give you an idea of the effect:
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.
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.
4. How to Change Shadows and Highlights in Your Photos
Sometimes 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.
We can fix this by changing the brightness of the shadow and highlight areas specifically, using either the “Shadow” or “Highlight” 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.
Let’s take a quick look at adjusting shadows and highlights using Lightroom. In Snapseed, shadow and highlight adjustment can be found under the “Tune Image” setting.
Here’s a shot of a couple enjoying a bonfire and fireworks display in Edinburgh during Hogmanay:
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’s adjust the settings and see what we can get.
In this version of the image, the couple is much more visible, as is the hill the fireworks are on and the surrounding crowd.
To achieve this I increased the overall exposure of the image, making the whole image brighter, including the shadows and the highlights.
Then, as the shadow areas were still a little dark, I increased those a little more.
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.
Shadow and highlight adjustment is useful in a wide range of scenarios to help balance the image out — bringing overexposed areas down in brightness, and helping to boost the shadows. Just be aware that a light touch is recommended — increasing the brightness of the shadows too much can result in a lot of noise being revealed, which might look unnaturally green or purple.
5. How to Adjust the Contrast
Contrast 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.
Let’s take a look at a shot of people jumping against the sunset in the Sahara, for example, which I’ll be editing in Snapseed.
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.
Using the contrast tool, we can make the dark areas stand out against the bright areas.
And here’s the result:
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.
6. How to Adjust Colors
Color adjustment is another important piece of the editing toolkit. We can adjust image color in all sorts of ways, from changing the overall “warmth” of the image (how blue or yellow it appears), to individually changing the hue and saturation of specific colors inside of an image.
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.
The fastest way to adjust an image’s color is with the “Saturation” 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:
Or we can go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, and make the color incredibly saturated:
As with many edits, the key is to find a good balance — 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.
Saturation is adjusted on a sliding scale and is on the basic adjustments panel in Lightroom or the “Tune Image” option in Snapseed.
7. Blemish correction
The last area I’m going to touch on today is blemish correction, or “image healing.” Sometimes there will be something in an image that you really don’t want to be there, like an inconvenient pimple on someone’s face. This is easy to remove in all the major editing tools.
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 based on the surrounding area.
For this example, I’m going to show how Snapseed can be used to replace an object in a scene. Here’s a group of people sitting on a sand dune in the Sahara:
Let’s 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.
In Snapseed, we load up the healing tool, then we zoom in on the object to be removed with the standard “pinch to zoom” gesture.
Next, we use our finger to draw the area to be removed. It’s important to be as precise as possible because the tool is most accurate with small objects.
Once we have drawn the area, Snapseed will edit it out, replacing it with the best guess of what is behind the object.
As you can see, the result is impressive, with no real evidence that there was anyone standing there at all.
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.
Best Photography Editing Software
Here is a list of the best editing tools out there:
- Adobe Lightroom (PC or Mac) – Lightroom is the industry standard tool for photography professionals. But this post is not going to focus on Lightroom, nor cover everything you can do in Lightroom, as it’s a massively complex tool, covering both photo management and photo editing.
- Photos (Mac) – I list iPhoto here mainly because it’s a commonly used tool among Apple users. However, I personally never recommend using it. While it will let you do everything that I cover in this post and is better than nothing, the way it manages your photos makes it hard to migrate to a more sophisticated system further down the line if you choose to do so.
- Snapseed (iOS or Android) – Another free Google tool, Snapseed is the best mobile image-editing app for both iOS and Android. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that, while simple to start using, has a great many features that take time to fully master. I use it for 95% of my mobile editing needs.
Editing your photos is a crucial step that far too many people skip. As you can see from this lesson, there is much more to editing your photos than just picking a filter and posting your picture on Instagram. By incorporating some of these tips and techniques into your post-processing routine you’ll be able to improve your travel photography in leaps and bounds.
So get out there and start taking pictures!
Laurence started his journey in June 2009 after quitting the corporate life and looking for a change of scenery. His blog, Finding the Universe, catalogs his experiences and is a wonderful resource for photography advice! You can also find him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Travel Photography: Learn More Tips
For more helpful travel photography tips, be sure to check out the rest of Laurence’s travel photography series:
- Part 1 – How to Take Professional Travel Photos
- Part 2 – How to Shoot the Perfect Travel Photograph
- Part 3 – The Best Cameras & Travel Photography Gear
- Part 4 – How to Take the Perfect Photo: Advanced Techniques
- Part 5 – 7 Editing Tips to Improve Your Travel Photographs
Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks
Book Your Flight
Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines because they search websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is left unturned.
Book Your Accommodation
You can book your hostel with Hostelworld. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com as they consistently return the cheapest rates for guesthouses and cheap hotels.
Don’t Forget Travel Insurance
Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. I’ve been using World Nomads for ten years. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are:
- World Nomads (for everyone below 70)
- Insure My Trip (for those over 70)
- Medjet (for additional repatriation coverage)
Need to book your trip?
Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel. I list all the ones I use when I travel. The are the best in class and you can’t go wrong using them on your trip.
Anne
Thanks for the tips. That might have to be my new year resolution to play around with my photos!
Prachi Sharma
Fantastic tips! I like the way you have kept it like really basic and still gave away some easy ways to enhance a picture.
Also, i swear by Snapseed, it is one hell of an app. especially for people like me, who are into mobile photography!
Vanessa
Thanks for sharing his tips, I now have a place to start!
Dre
This is a dead useful tutorial – thank you for sharing your expertise on photo editing… ^_^ The landscape shot is beautiful as it is. . .
Wesley
Blemish correction is a great tool. From pimple to person I’m surprised how good it works sometimes. Thanks for the great tips
Robb Keele
Thanks for the great tips! I’ve been using Photoshop for years as a Web designer, but found that I was not getting the results I wanted when it came to post-processing. I moved to Lightroom just a month or two ago and haven’t looked back. I keep finding new features and new ways to tweak my photos, and they keep looking more and more professional as a result. And I will definitely be checking out Snapseed. Really helpful… thank you!
Laurence
Photoshop is obviously hugely powerful, but not really oriented around the needs of a photographer, which is why I always recommend Lightroom. Snapseed is fantastic for mobile use 🙂
josh bornstein
What an odd comment. I have used different versions of PhotoShop for close to 2 decades. It absolutely is focused (heh) on the needs of photographers . . . although the program does have significant downsides (learning curve, very expensive, etc). It is the industry standard–by far!!!–although for beginning photographers/retouchers, Lightroom will probably be more than enough for your post-processing needs.
Stanley
Oh really really new approach…
After a trip, I had to spend a lot of time on Photoshop to illustrate my photos.
So surprised with Snapseed. It is great…
Vid
Nice tips Laurence 🙂 Have you tried Lightroom on mobile? It\’s free now, at least for iOS and does pack a punch!
Laurence
It’s free for Android too, and quite useful, but I just love Snapseed so much, particularly the transform crop tool, which isn’t possible with Lightroom 🙂
Daphne
Never imagined that so much could go into the photos you share! Blogging has inspired me to take up the craft, so thank you for sharing these tips and tricks. (=
Ankita Miharia
This is a great article. I am learning how to edit images so this is very useful. However, I think some of your images are not loading up. I see their names instead of the image. It will be great to see the actual images 🙂
Laurence
Hi Ankita – this could be a connection problem – have you tried refreshing the page? They look ok from here 🙂
Avery
Oh my goodness, that blemish tool works like magic! Thanks for the tips 🙂
Laurence
It’s pretty cool 🙂 My pleasure, pleased you found them useful!
Zascha
I’m starting to focus more on more on taking and editing pictures – it’s not something I’m best at. Thanks for the tips and for recommending the editing tools. Gonna try and download Picasa – don’t know why I haven’t done that ages ago!
Anita
I like using Snapseed.
Samantha @ Our Traveling Blog
Hi Matt. thanks for the great suggestions and info. I have a lot of issues with silhouettes. I have tried quite a few and they never come out quite right. I will have to keep trying and maybe check out Snapseed. Thanks again. Enjoy your blog!
John - Wheelchair Travel
Thank you – this is great, and helpful. I have been working to improve the image quality on my own blog.
Paul
Hi Matt, Thanks for all the tips. I’m new to blogging, and I would say an intermediate traveler. Usually I would take photos on my iPhone because it was just for my own memories. Now I would like to share them with the world. Would you say its the processing that gets you better photos or does the camera outweigh that?
Manjusha
Your tips are quite useful to me. I rarely edit photos for the simple reason that I lack the skills. Also editing takes a lot of time. I do have some experience playing with Picasa, but other tools are new to me. Planning to check them out sometime soon.
Bob
You’ve done your job elegantly. This kind of editing skill is really amazing. I am not much skilled at image editing but i love your works.
Anu
Good and a practical post, Laurence. I now understood how to properly use the “vignette” feature! I’m hooked to your photography related posts. Could you also write about your photography workflow? Wondering how you are managing tonnes of RAW files, processed images, storage, etc.
Anila Jain
Nothing can be a better choice than Photoshop in editing photos. But its true that, those who are not expert in Photoshop for them all available online editors can help. I have used SnapSeed and its pretty good editor for the usual editing task.
Sue
My son and daughter are always encouraging me to give editing a whirl. I’ve resisted because it seems like a daunting task. Thanks for making it seem a bit more accessible, I promise to give it a try!
Monica
If you want to improve your knowledge only keep visiting this website and be updated with the most recent news update posted here.
Mark Winder
These are great tips! In my humble opinion, the most important tip here is to shoot in RAW. When it comes to colors and lighting, you can pull almost anything off quickly in post-production if the color data is there. RAW gives you that extra boost in color data that you might need when you get back to your desk and are working in your photo editor of choice.
Nataly Malcon
Awesome tips! Everything is written in detail and understandable. Thank you, I will use.
ronald
I swear by Stellar Phoenix JPEG Repair! The software fix blurred, grainy or any unwanted line from an image and restores its originality without any compromise in the quality.
James W.
These all tips are fabulous. I will definitely apply this when I capture photos. I liked the “tip #4. Shadows and Highlights”. This is a very important factor when editing an image. Most of the time this is the huge problem as well when you don’t know how to balance it. I shared your post as well with my friends. Thank you so much for sharing huge things. I will surely visit in your blog again soon.
John
I was actually searching tips for editing travel photos using mobile phone and got this one. All the tips you added are really helpful. Do you have any suggestion for mobile? I meant to say that any app?
Mark Davis
Hi, What a great tips! Absolutely fantastic. I appreciate your post. As a graphics designer, I personally like to use Adobe Lightroom. This app is designed for iPad and is only available for Apple products. It is a photo editor with capabilities for saving to Adobe Creative Cloud. The only unique function of this app is the ability for advanced edits, including a tone curve for adjusting color, exposure, tone, and contrast.
Thanks.
John Santana
Technology has been reached to great heights and usually people underestimate what these Softwares can do the already clicked pictures. Even I didn’t cared for any Post Click editing, until the say my Son showed me the magic Adobe Lightroom can do. Cheers
David White
Amazing post, after reading this post it’s too easy for me. Thanks for sharing. Hope in your next post I found a lot of information.
Yousuf
I love this article. As a professional photographer for many years I have seen an increasing dependency on over editing vs learning the craft of photography to start with a beautiful base to build from. Thank you for this article!
Linda
Thanks for your informative article. Unfortunately, Picasso is no longer available. The replaced it with Google-something which didn’t impress me. I tried to get Snapseed for my PC but had to download Bluestacks first because it’s an Android emulator (I think that’s the right term.) I’m not too happy with that because Bluestacks is a large program and takes a long time to load. Then Snapseed seems slow, too and not easy to save photos from. I wish Picasso would be brought back!
uma
I’m on the fence about this, while more customization is good, I have a feeling this is a “in-progress” update, it just feels incomplete and half-way there.
We use badge layout for apps on design approvals (visual projects), so the image being displayed is important. Old layout “feels like” it had larger images,
maybe because the images were cropped more loosely so it’s easier to tell which project it was at quick glance. Now the image is cropped closer, making it
harder to scan thru at quick glance. I find myself needing to click into the project more often than usual. Which makes the whole user experience less
efficient.
I have a couple suggestions that might make it work better:
1. Increase the height of the window the cover image is being displayed.
2. Let us to choose which image to be displayed as “cover” (like how Pinterest handles cover images of each board, was hoping for this for a long time)
3. Let us adjust which part of the image to show and how tight or loose the crop is (with a fixed window, let us move the image around and maybe enlarge or
shrink it to control what shows thru the window. Pinterest does a limited form of this, which is very useful in making the cover image relevant)
4. Allow Cover Image to be ordered in different hierarchy (currently every element can be ordered differently except the Cover Image, it seems to be stuck
in the 2nd spot, would like the option to set it on another spot in the layout. This one seems like an easy fix, since you guys allow that for every other
element already)
Hasibur Joy
In my opinion color correction is an important part of photo editing. Color correction helps by smoothing out the color of images and giving the image a more contiguous feel, allowing the viewer to fell the depth of the image.