II have always loved photography and it is part of the reason that I did a degree and then a masters in Digital Media Production. My favourite module through my whole university career was Applied Photography. Therefore I thought i'd share a few basics for photo editing. The below photo I took at a county park near me with a Nikon D3100 DSLR camera with the kit lens.
The first thing I do is always resize the image, this would either be for a blog or social media there for 4000 pixels is way too large so I half it.
This makes the image a more manageable size and also helps Photoshop run faster as it doesn't have so much data to deal with. Next I edit the Hue/ Saturation, I like my images to be fairly vibrant so I up the saturation but don't touch anything else. (the short cut on a Mac is command U)
Next I edit the brightness and contrast, again I like bold colours and lightness so both go up for my image.
At this stage I decide to crop the image, one side is bordered with a tree which to me makes the image feel a bit closed, draws the eye away from what I want to focus to be on (the mountains)
A vital tool for any photo edit is sharpness, this can be done with a sharpness tool or a filter, I always apply a filter so the whole image is sharpened.
I then go in by hand to add more to the areas I want. For this image I sharpened the edges of the mountain
Next is the dodge and burn tool, dodge is for lightning and burn is for darkening areas. I wanted this image to have a mysterious look as the mountains are so looming so I used the area of the image that was already lightened by the sun coming in from that side. I increased this lightness as you can see below
I then applied the dodge tool to the trees and across the face of the mountain to make them darker and more imposing.
Below is a side by side view of the before and after.
Much improved i'd say, and it only took 10 minutes. Do you use any of the same methods as me?
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