Make your pictures pop with a bit of post production

Let’s be honest — we don’t always get things 100 per cent right when we take pictures. The exposure might not be quite right, the horizon may be bit crooked, and the picture would look much better without the ugly-looking sign in the side of the frame.

Post processing is one of the most overlooked aspects of photography for many of us. But it shouldn’t be, because if you spend just a little time tweaking a few things post capture, the results will look so much better.

It’s super easy to do on your smartphone. We press the magic wand icon and, like magic, the picture gets an instant makeover. The colours are cleaner and crisper, it has better contrast and it really pops compared to the original. Adding a filter or converting the image to black and white and cropping unsightly objects is equally easy.

It’s a slightly different story with the pics we take with our cameras because we need to download them to our computer first but once that is done it can be just as easy as on a smartphone.

Take Google Photos for example: it is free, and if you already use Google Photos to backup your smartphone images, you can easily add your camera images to the same cloud and edit them in the same simple intuitive manner as you do on your phone. The only downside is that any adjustments you make are global, meaning they affect the whole image. So, if you want or need to make detailed editing to a particular part of the image you will need to look at other options.

The good news is that there are several good free options if you want to take things up another notch. A quick search for free photo editing software will reveal a host of options. But think carefully about your needs and wants . . . there is no point in getting bogged down learning the features of a new complicated photo editor if all you want to do is change some of the basic settings mentioned above.

I had a play with a highly rated photo editor called GIMP which offers some amazing features similar to those found in full-fee editors like Adobe Photoshop. It is powerful and very customisable, including layers, masks, custom brushes and smart selection tools for detailed editing. It works really well but it can be a bit of a steep learning curve to get your head around all the features — particularly if you haven’t used a powerful photo editor before.

General tips and tricks

As part of my daily work I use the powerful Adobe Photoshop suite. It offers an amazing amount of advanced features but I generally don’t do all that much to the images you see here in our pages. It is part of our code of ethics that what we publish is an accurate representation of both the subjects and the places we visit. We won’t alter the integrity of the image but we will make small adjustments to the brightness and contrast and crop a little tighter if that improves the look of the image.

I always begin with a critical look around the frame. I might crop to straighten the horizon or crop out an unsightly object or distraction if it is at the edge of the frame. Then I’ll get on with the overall (global) adjustments. I check the exposure and colour balance and adjust them a bit if I think it is needed. Then I’ll play around with small adjustments to the contrast as well as the vibrance and the saturation until I’m happy with the overall look of the image.

The next step is to look at the highlights and shadow areas to see if they can be improved. If there are any adjustments needed, I usually do them to specific areas of the image using the dodge and burn tools or select an area with the lasso tool. Once I’m happy with all that, I’ll cast a close eye over the image one last time to see if there are any dust spots from the image sensor that may need cloning out.