Better Images Guaranteed
There are millions of books, videos, and training services promising to make you better at making images.
Most of them are inspirational – they are designed to make you feel like you can be a success. I call these materials entertainment, because they are filling an emotional need rather addressing a technical issue, or knowledge gap.
Don’t get me wrong, these are fun, and serve an important purpose – motivation! You can learn a lot from them, but it is mainly the same things, taught by different people, in different ways.
So, what are my editing tips?
Tip One
”Leave everything for a day” before you share an image. Nothing looks the same the next day. Sleeping on it is always good advice 🙂
Tip Two
This follows hot on the heels of tip one – ”Never make destructive edits”. Because when you look at something a day later, you will probably want to turn some things down, and maybe some things up. So layers and sliders are your friends, flattened images are not.
Tip Three
”Have a good look at your image before you start”. A good long look will save you editing fails. Sometimes an image looks good initially, but has a terrible flaw that does not become apparent until after you have wasted time editing it. This means starting again with a different image, or more editing. Little things, like eyelashes coming unstuck, weird hand placement, and men urinating in the background, can all “appear” after an edit. Save some time and look closely.
Tip Three (B)
Don’t edit sequentially – 2 images that look similar are not as good a use of your editing time as 2 different images. You can always come back to editing any you skip over, but don’t take a chance of getting “bored” with your subject before you get an edited image from each “look”