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7 Post-Processing Tips to Improve Your Travel Photographs

December 21, 2015 / By NomadicMatt

Blue pink photo of lightning at dusk
Today, professional photographer Laurence Norah of Finding the Universe, finishes his five part series on taking better travel photos. Photographs are an important part of the travel experience and, with so many of you being budding photographers, Laurence is here to help you improve your photography skills. 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!

One of the most misunderstood parts of digital photography is what happens after you take the shot: the 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 post-processing, from the basics (cropping and leveling), through to more complicated actions like recovering shadow and highlight information.

Before we get into editing, let’s start by taking a look at some different file formats and software options for post-processing — on both mobile phones and computers — and then dive into some real-world examples.

File formats

Every single photo that is taken is digitally edited in some way. When you press the shutter button, the camera saves the image data onto your memory card. If you’re shooting in RAW, the camera records just the image data onto the memory card, meaning that you are going to have to “develop” it yourself. Think of a RAW file as a roll of film — you can get images from it if you develop it, but you can’t flick through the images as they are.

If you’re shooting in JPG, then the camera will process the image for you, based on pre-defined profiles. Your camera will let you define these profiles — changing things like contrast, saturation, and sharpness, and will apply them to the JPG.

This is why I always recommend shooting in RAW — it’s more work after the fact, but it puts you firmly in control of the image editing process, rather than letting your camera make all the decisions for you. RAW files also contain a lot more data about the image, giving you much more control over your finished image.

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.

iPhoto (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.

Picasa (PC or Mac) – Picasa is a free desktop photo editing application from Google. It’s very simple, but it allows you to do everything I’m going to cover in today’s post. If Lightroom is a bit overwhelming, Picasa is a great, free place to start.

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.

Let’s take a look now at what you can and should be using these tools for with your images.

Editing photos

1. Cropping
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:

Blue dark pink nature photo of lightning at dusk

And the edited version, post-crop:

Blue pink photo of lightning cropped

Compared to the original, I have cropped the image to remove the dark part of 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:

Blue pink nature photograph of lightning cropping mask Snapseed

And the same thing in Lightroom:

Blue dark pink photo of lightning lightroom cropping mask 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. Leveling
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 a photo to make it 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.

Blue pink nature picture of lightning at dusk leveling mask

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.

Blue pink nature photo of lightning straightening mask Lightroom

And here’s the same procedure in Snapseed, where the level tool is called “Rotate”:

Blue pink nature photo of lightning rotate feature snapseed

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
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.

Blue pink nature photo of lightning outer brightness vignette

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:

Blue pink nature photo of lightning inner brightness vignette

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.

Blue pink nature photo of lightning vignette center point

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. Shadows and Highlights
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:

Contrast tutorial with fireworks at hogmanay in Lightroom - before

As you can see, the fireworks and bonfire are clearly visible, as are the torches the couple are holding, but the rest of the shot is dark. Let’s adjust the settings and see what we can get.

Contrast tutorial with fireworks at hogmanay in Lightroom - after

In this version of the image the couple is much more visible, as are 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. 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 is 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.

Girls jumping on sand dunes - original photo

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.

Girls jumping on sand dunes - contract tutorial photo

And here’s the result:

Girls jumping on sand dunes - after photo

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. 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 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:

Photo of orante building and waterfall - black and white - desaturated

Or we can go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, and make the color incredibly saturated:

Photo of orante building and waterfall - neon - 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.

Photo of orante building and waterfall - normal

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 with 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:

People sitting on a sand dune in Lightroom 1

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 healingtool, then we zoom in on the object to be removed with the standard “pinch to zoom” gesture.

People sitting on a sand dune in Lightroom 2

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.

People sitting on a sand dune in Lightroom 3

Once we have drawn the area, Snapseed will edit it out, replacing it with a best guess of what is behind the object.

People sitting on a sand dune in Lightroom 4

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.

**********

And we’re done! This five-part series has touched on a wide range of photography aspects. Of course, the reality is that photography is a complex and deep subject, and in this series I was only able to touch on some of the basics but this series will give you plenty to think about, and lots of ideas for getting out there and actually improving your photography!

Be sure to check out the rest of Laurence’s photography tips in this series:

  • Part 1 – How to Take Professional Travel Photos
  • Part 2 – How to Shoot the Perfect Travel Photograph
  • Part 3 – Camera Gear: How to Not End Up With the Wrong Equipment
  • Part 4 – How to Take the Perfect Photo: Advanced Techniques
  • Part 5 – 7 Post-Processing Tips to Improve Your Travel Photographs

If you are looking to really get into photography and want to master your camera and take amazing photos when you travel, Laurence and I have developed a comprehensive photography course that will get you out of auto and have your friends go “Wow! That’s really breathtaking!” in no time. Click here to learn more about it.

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, and Instagram.

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32 Comments
  1. Anne

    December 21, 2015 at 5:40 pm

    Thanks for the tips. That might have to be my new year resolution to play around with my photos!

    Reply
  2. Prachi Sharma

    December 22, 2015 at 5:06 am

    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!

    Reply
  3. Vanessa

    December 22, 2015 at 9:58 am

    Thanks for sharing his tips, I now have a place to start!

    Reply
  4. Dre

    December 22, 2015 at 1:30 pm

    This is a dead useful tutorial – thank you for sharing your expertise on photo editing… ^_^ The landscape shot is beautiful as it is. . .

    Reply
  5. Wesley

    December 22, 2015 at 3:24 pm

    Blemish correction is a great tool. From pimple to person I’m surprised how good it works sometimes. Thanks for the great tips

    Reply
  6. Robb Keele

    December 22, 2015 at 3:30 pm

    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!

    Reply
    • Laurence

      December 28, 2015 at 10:10 am

      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 🙂

      Reply
  7. Stanley

    December 22, 2015 at 8:48 pm

    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…

    Reply
  8. Vid

    December 22, 2015 at 9:46 pm

    Nice tips Laurence 🙂 Have you tried Lightroom on mobile? It\’s free now, at least for iOS and does pack a punch!

    Reply
    • Laurence

      December 28, 2015 at 10:12 am

      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 🙂

      Reply
  9. Daphne

    December 22, 2015 at 10:10 pm

    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. (=

    Reply
  10. Ankita Miharia

    December 23, 2015 at 1:00 pm

    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 🙂

    Reply
    • Laurence

      December 28, 2015 at 10:12 am

      Hi Ankita – this could be a connection problem – have you tried refreshing the page? They look ok from here 🙂

      Reply
  11. Avery

    December 24, 2015 at 4:24 am

    Oh my goodness, that blemish tool works like magic! Thanks for the tips 🙂

    Reply
    • Laurence

      December 28, 2015 at 10:11 am

      It’s pretty cool 🙂 My pleasure, pleased you found them useful!

      Reply
  12. Zascha

    December 24, 2015 at 7:53 am

    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!

    Reply
  13. Anita

    January 3, 2016 at 6:43 am

    I like using Snapseed.

    Reply
  14. Samantha @ Our Traveling Blog

    January 4, 2016 at 11:45 am

    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!

    Reply
  15. John - Wheelchair Travel

    January 18, 2016 at 8:19 pm

    Thank you – this is great, and helpful. I have been working to improve the image quality on my own blog.

    Reply
  16. Paul

    January 24, 2016 at 7:24 am

    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?

    Reply
  17. Manjusha

    February 8, 2016 at 2:24 am

    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.

    Reply
  18. Bob

    April 6, 2016 at 9:02 am

    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.

    Reply
  19. Anu

    July 18, 2016 at 1:46 pm

    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.

    Reply
  20. Anila Jain

    September 7, 2016 at 3:47 am

    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.

    Reply
  21. Sue

    January 26, 2017 at 8:33 am

    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!

    Reply
  22. Monica

    June 21, 2017 at 3:43 am

    If you want to improve your knowledge only keep visiting this website and be updated with the most recent news update posted here.

    Reply
  23. Mark Winder

    July 15, 2017 at 12:56 am

    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.

    Reply
  24. Nataly Malcon

    September 21, 2017 at 8:40 am

    Awesome tips! Everything is written in detail and understandable. Thank you, I will use.

    Reply
  25. ronald

    October 31, 2017 at 7:00 am

    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.

    Reply
  26. James W.

    November 9, 2017 at 10:11 am

    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.

    Reply
  27. John

    November 10, 2017 at 12:50 am

    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?

    Reply
  28. Mark Davis

    January 21, 2018 at 5:34 am

    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.

    Reply

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