Whether you’re into digital or analog photography, your pics will never turn out perfect without some skilled photo editing. Regardless of the camera quality and the photographer’s talents, if you need professional photos that make the subject pop and grab the viewer’s attention, you need a good editing software on your computer and a person who knows how to use it. So, let’s take a look at just some of the benefits of image editing, examine a few basic editing steps, and see which software is best suited for your needs.

What You Get from Editing Your Photographs

Editing your photos offers several benefits when done right. Even the most mediocre of photoshoots can deliver stellar end-results after a few touch-ups and a few clicks in your favorite photo editor. Whether you want to make your products stand out or drive website traffic through imagery and visual content, the only way to do it is through skilled editing.

Better Models

Unless your goal is to promote natural beauty, the chances are that your models will never be perfect. They’ll have blemishes, wrinkles, acne, eczema, and other imperfections that can take away the viewer’s attention from what you’re trying to convey through your photography, especially if you’re marketing beauty products. So, a little bit of airbrush magic and retouching can provide you with a perfect model to successfully market your product.

More Appealing Product Image

You don’t have to be in e-commerce to benefit from editing your product images. If you have a website (which any business should) and feature your products on it, they need to look flawless. And you can’t achieve perfection without editing. To make your products pop, you’ll need to adjust and enhance their color post-shoot. You’ll need to master your gamma correction to ensure that your product doesn’t appear too dark or washed out. You might need to change the background, clean up the photo, resize it, optimize it for viewing across devices, and more. None of this can be achieved without editing.

Reuse Old Photos

Product photography can be an expensive endeavor, and if you’re running a small business with a limited budget – chances are you won’t be able to invest in repeat photoshoots. If you need new images but don’t have the budget for them, it can be more affordable to invest in editing services. With the help of a magic wand tool in editing software and selective color change, you can update the colors of your product to display new color options, for example. You can rely on image masking to modify an area of your image or replace the background, making the photo seem brand new. If you have a good base photo, you can manipulate it in countless ways to get a unique and authentic result. You can then reuse and recycle old images as much as you want.

The Impact of Photo Editing on Your Brand

The aim of photo editing is to create appealing images that draw attention. And this will have an immense impact on your brand. Over a third of marketers state that visual images are the most important content for their business and their social media strategy. With properly edited photos, you can improve your social media presence and increase your brand awareness, drawing in followers, and generating leads. Instagram and Pinterest, for example, are social networks with the highest focus on visuals, and you cannot hope to be noticed there without some eye-catching photos. Professional editing enables you to develop a unique brand image that lets you stand out from the competition. It allows you to make use of your photos in any format – on your website, in print, on T-shirts, billboards, and everything in between. You’ll get photos of the highest quality and drive engagement through visual content.

The Basic Steps of Image Editing

Image editing and enhancement can be as simple or as complex as you need. You can dabble in photo manipulation and create abstract art that’s truly out of this world, or you can just take advantage of red-eye removal and make your photos slightly better. However, to stand out with photo editing, you’ll need to follow at least a few basic steps. Let’s take a look.

Crop, Resize, Clean up

Cropping and resizing an image are often the first steps of photo editing. They allow you to remove any distracting elements around the edges, place a better focus on the subject, and improve the overall image composition. Once you’ve adequately resized the photo, you can do the basic clean-up, such as straightening the horizon and spot-cleaning. Uneven horizons can be distracting and make your photos appear like they’ve been taken by an amateur, so you’ll want to straighten the horizon to achieve the optimum visual appeal. Spot-cleaning is almost always necessary if you’re shooting outdoors. Dust and dirt often end up on the camera lens without you even noticing, but as soon as you open the image on your computer, you’ll see the annoying spots they left behind. All photo editors have a spot-cleaning tool that will help you locate and remove the spots from your images.

White Balance

While many people confuse white balance and exposure, these are two different things. White balance refers to the overall color tone of your image, which is often dependent on the environmental lighting and overall photoshoot conditions. If your photo has an unnatural tint to it, adjusting the white balance will often help to solve this problem. Most commonly in indoor lighting, you’ll see that the picture tends to be too yellow or too blue. You can adjust this by playing around with the temperature and tint settings. If your photo is too yellow, you’ll want to correct it by upping the blue, and vice versa. Keep in mind that calibrating the white balance can be impacted by your photo file. JPEG format and PNG format are very limiting as they only capture a small amount of data, so you won’t adjust the white balance perfectly. CR2 format, or RAW format, captures more details (and is therefore much heavier). It can be easily adjusted and calibrated for white balance while you’re editing.

Contrast

Contrast plays a crucial role in making your images crisp and clear, as it can help you adjust both light and dark tones. Low contrast can make your images look flat and dull, while high contrast will make every color pop. As a general rule of thumb, you don’t want to make the contrast too high or too low.

Saturation

Saturation allows you to enhance the colors of your photo even further. It enables you to make the entire photo more vibrant and dramatic and can help you adjust the colors if they’ve been washed out due to white balance. However, it’s crucial to practice caution when playing around with saturation. You don’t want to have your photos seem unnatural or too edited. Saturation should only be used to have the colors pop, not to have them scream!

Sharpness Adjustment

Finally, sharpness adjustment will give you a clear image that stands out. If you’re planning on printing your image on T-shirts or displaying it on billboards, adjusting its sharpness is critical. Otherwise, your photo will seem blurry and flat. Again, don’t go overboard. Adjusting the sharpness should keep your photo looking crisp, with perfect edges and visible details. If you go overboard and up the sharpness to the max, it will look unnatural, and you’ll notice the dreaded halo effect and have more problems with edge detection.

Vector vs. Raster Graphics

Depending on what you want to do with your photographs, you’ll rely on either vector or raster graphics. In most instances, you’ll use the raster format, aka files such as .JPG, .TIF, .GIF, and .PNG. Raster format uses bitmaps to store the images, and the larger the bitmap, the larger and heavier the image is. Larger images will contain more pixels and be clearer, providing excellent resolution. However, since they’re composed of individual pixels, they’ll lose their sharpness when you zoom in. The more you zoom, the more individual pixels and grids you’ll see. Therefore, these images won’t be ideal for printing and displaying on larger surfaces. Vector format with files such as .AI, .DXF, .SVG, .PDF, and .EPS doesn’t rely on the pixel grid. Instead, it uses mathematical statements to create lines and curves to form polygons. As a result, you’ll get impeccable resolution and a crisp image regardless of how much you enlarge it. Vector format is best used for printing, as it will deliver the clearest image. It’s essential to keep in mind that most computer editors are designed for images in the raster format. If you want to use vector format, you’ll need to see whether your editor allows for it.

Popular Photo Editing Software

You can use many different photo editors to enhance your images and get them ready for printing or use on your website. Two of the most popular ones are Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw.

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is one of few editors that support vector files, making it a highly sought-after solution. It comes with all the bells and whistles, allowing for a seamless editing experience and giving you the freedom to perfect your photos any way you see fit. It’s user-friendly, and you can find all the necessary tools for alpha compositing, dynamic blending, introducing layers, adding special effects, and more in the tool panel on the left-hand side. Its most affordable subscription option comes at $19.99/mo, or you can get a bundle plan with Illustrator and all Adobe creative apps for $49.99/mo.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the go-to editor for many photographers, designers, and artists. It has extensive photo manipulation features, excellent tools for both mobile and web design, and top-of-the-line 3D design options. It easily handles RAW files and boasts a wide array of features that can make virtually any photo look professional. One of Adobe Photoshop’s biggest drawbacks, however, is its complexity. While the interface is easily customizable to suit your needs and preferences, Photoshop beginners often have a hard time wrapping their heads around this editor. It features a steep learning curve, but once you’ve mastered it, you can handle almost any editor. Adobe Photoshop comes at $20.99/mo.

Final Thoughts

Photo editing is an essential aspect of photography. It will help you create perfect photos that attract audiences, boost your brand awareness, help you establish a unique brand image, and more. Photography and editing simply can’t go without one another. It’s in your best interest to hire professional photography and editing services to get the best results that make an impact.