Better Photos
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This episode explores essential photo editing techniques, from basic adjustments like white balance and exposure to advanced styling with Lightroom and AI tools. We discuss useful apps, the role of presets, and offer insights into the evolving landscape of photography editing.
• Understanding basic editing principles like exposure, contrast, and white balance
• Explore free and premium editing apps for different skill levels
• The importance and effective use of presets in photo editing
• Introduction to AI editing tools that streamline the editing process
• Encouragement for listeners to engage and share their photography learning preferences
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Hey, mama, whether or not you're trying out your camera for the very first time or you've been doing this a while and just looking for some creative inspiration, I've got all that and more. I'm here to help you see your world differently, challenge you creatively and find your passion for photography. Welcome back to Better Photos Podcast. How have you guys been doing with your challenges? Last week we talked about creative shots and I am going to make such a great resource. I'm going to take our composition podcast and our creative shots and I will have a shot list for your phone so that you can download it. And every session you can make it like a checklist of getting each shot. So, whether it is framing or leading lines or a GIF or um movements and getting blur, it will all be in a list form that you can download to your phone. So check the show notes that will be coming out this week.
Speaker 1:So this week I have had some mommy and me studio sessions and I brought my client closet there and this was a new studio. It was in Concord, new to me. It's been around for other photographers, um, and it has the perfect lighting, the perfect beige platform background that I love with this, like cute fireplace and, um, like fake fireplace thing. Um, and then this perfect, like nude blush wall, and so I had a couple of moms meet me there and with their kiddos, and we got some of the most adorable photos, um, so I just posted those on my Instagram at be posh photo um for you to check out, and I will hopefully be doing more as we get closer to Mother's Day and things like that. But it's nice to have something to do in the winter when it is unpredictable with the weather. You can always schedule an inside shoot so that you don't have to cancel or reschedule. So that's what I love about indoors. I also love being able to manipulate the light a little bit more, and it's definitely helpful in a studio that they've already put um, some uh filter things on the windows so that you can get some of that good light, that filtered light, um, and so that is what I like, um. Also, what else do we have coming up? Superbowl is tonight, so obviously I'm recording this podcast the day before it comes out, but I've learned last week I recorded it the morning of, and that was just too much. So here I am recording this while everyone else is watching the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:But we had the cutest Valentine's Day slash Galentine's Day party today for my girls and their friends and their moms and we got all this like jewelry making stuff and we got charm all these different charms and everyone brought some charms. Then I bought these necklaces off Amazon and so they all got to decorate their own charm necklace. I love that because it's so fun. It gets to show their personality and things they like. Then I got this vintage heart cake because obviously I needed one of those from Wildflower Bakery in Charlotte and it was just a fun time. So I made a board on my Amazon storefront that is Galentine's and it has like all the stuff that I got for the party in there. So I will link that in the show notes in case you're hosting something. It was really fun, it would be great. I'm going to do it again for mom's night.
Speaker 1:So for today we're mostly going to talk about basic edits talking about our white balance, your temperature, your tint adjustments, exposure contrast, your highlights, shadows, whites, blacks and saturation, vibrance and a couple other more advanced editing skills and the apps that you can download for free, the ones that I use, and then some fun things to just excite you about your editing processes, so let's dive in. This is the point. If you haven't realized already why it's hard to be a photographer by hobby, why it's hard to be a photographer by hobby, once you start getting into these things the cost of equipment and the cost that you will pay for apps and for more involved features, and you'll get hooked on presets you'll just start realizing that it is a very expensive hobby. So if you're like me, I started kind of like hobby and then I was like, oh, my goodness, this stuff costs so much, so let me start charging um for some things and start making money to pay for this um hobby. So then it grew and then you have to pay taxes. So, yeah, all right. So creative editing or just editing in general, let's talk about that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you have some features on your iPhone if you are taking pictures like that. So if you went into your iPhone photos and you clicked on the little sliders at the bottom, you would see adjust, and so the first one is going to be like an auto adjust and then you're going to get a plus and minus for exposure, which means that you are going to kind of like on your camera when you are doing the exposure there. This is just going to happen after and making your image brighter or darker. That's probably one of the things that I'll mess with. But you don't want to go too much because you're going to get. It just is not that great on a phone.
Speaker 1:The highlights obviously you're putting more whites or taking down some of the whites where it's like so bright and white and you don't want it to be. It looks a little like off on your photos. You can pull that down. You can add some more pops of white with that. The shadows you can bring up the shadows a bit and you can also bring them down if you want a more contrasted image. So if you're looking at a spectrum of shadows and highlights and you pull the shadows down and the highlights up, you're going to have a very high contrast image, which most people it's not very flattering, so I think most people don't love a high contrast image. Again, then you'll have just a regular contrast and so this makes your photo not very like.
Speaker 1:Anything you're adjusting, you're affecting the quality of the image, especially in your iPhone editing. So I try not to mess too much with iPhone editing in the photo app again, so you can adjust your saturation, how much color you want to pop. You can pull it down and make it more like old timey films, I guess, or like those old timey photos when they add like sepia later. Vibrance is just going to be how I don't even know how to say it maybe how like yellow-ish is being added to your colors to make them brighter and bolder, but in a yellowy kind of way, um warmth you're going to be adding. If you add warmth, you're going to be adding like a yellows and oranges to your image or go the opposite and take those out. The next one is um tint. So that is going to be your purples and blues and greens and sliding that. And then you have sharpness, which never take a blurry photo and adds sharpness. It's not gonna help the blur.
Speaker 1:A lot of the stuff that you want to edit. It should be perfected in your camera first and then, and then tweaked a little bit with um, your edit or with your um adjustments. Okay so, and then there's noise noise reduction If you again are shooting in a dark room with a um with your ISO bumped up super high and you may have some noise um, or if you're in a dark room on your phone and then that has some noise. Um, so that are. Those are some key things that you can do on your phone without an app, all right. So if you are going to get an app, here are some recommendations for um your phone, all right. The first these are some free ones.
Speaker 1:I don't use the free ones because I already pay for Lightroom so that I can edit my raw photos and more megabytes. So I have to edit on my computer so that I have, like, enough RAM, enough memory, enough I don't even know what it's called but enough stuff to make sure that it can handle all of my photos. I put all of my photos on a external hard drive so that it can work faster. And if something happened to my computer, it's on external hard drive so that it can work faster. And if something happened to my computer, it's on the hard drive, and I normally back them up to two hard drives. Sometimes I put them on the cloud just to be extra careful. So photo apps that were suggested is Snapseed came up a lot.
Speaker 1:Um, this is for iOS and Android. Um, it is a complete and professional photo editor developed by Google, offering a wide range of tools and filters. Okay, so that is one. You can also try Pixlr, p I, x, l R that is a web-based program and iOS and Android, and now it has AI features. There's also Photopea P-H-O-T-O-P-E-A Photopea. It's free as well, and it offers advanced features similar to Photoshop, including support for Adobe file formats. And then there is Canva, and that has some things that you can do, but, again, I'm not trying to import all my photos to Canva or on my phone.
Speaker 1:Okay, so those are some free ones. I'm not sure I don't have those downloaded on my phone. I don't really use those. The ones that I use is definitely going to be Adobe Lightroom and I think that it is I can't remember which one is like 10 bucks a month and which one's like I don't know. I have Photoshop and Lightroom and I edit primarily in Lightroom. Photoshop is kind of like my tweaks, like going in and helping out skin issues or any detail work I kind of do in Photoshop. So I think it is great to have both. I used to solely edit in Photoshop and I had an action that would like do the same thing for each photo, but you couldn't see each photo at a time. So I definitely recommend Lightroom, even for on the go, I have mobile Lightroom. Even for on the go, I have mobile Lightroom.
Speaker 1:And the fun thing about Lightroom is presets. Oh, my goodness, I could go crazy on some presets. Okay, so presets for those of you who don't know, these are tweaks to all those adjustments that are already done for you, and then you just apply it to the image and then tweak it how you like it. So the one thing that I will say about presets is that just because they look good on one photographer's photos or on the photographer that's selling them or whatever, that is because they have learned to shoot a particular way that those presets will flatter their image. So I have so say that, like I shot some photos like 10 years ago and they're raw, they are um, they are still good quality photos, but maybe my shooting style has changed, maybe where I position myself in relation to the light has changed, and so if I apply a preset to an old photo, sometimes it looks terrible, and so it's not really the preset that is making your photo. It's taking a great image that was already good, and then you'll find that you apply one preset and another and another, and they all look good, and then you have trouble trying to decide which one.
Speaker 1:So, again, follow the steps to become a better photographer, first with your camera settings, and then you get to do the fun stuff with the creative stuff and making that photo look like your ultimate goal. I have this final vision in my mind of what it's going to look like. If I want a certain feel, a certain mood, and colors will play into that. Again, like I said, what your clients are wearing or your family is wearing will play into what the preset does Same with light, same with the color bouncing off walls. So if somebody has like a blue nursery and you're editing with a warm preset, that blue is going to now look warm. It's not going to look like the same blue it did in the nursery when you were there, like in person. So you have to be careful with that Presets that I I love and have purchased.
Speaker 1:Let me just go through some of my ones. Okay, um, trisha Victoria presets. Um, sherita Ray. Um Tara Sweeney. I told you I am like addicted to presets. Um, any idea of like your photo could look like something else. I'm like Ooh, maybe, maybe I want to try it out, maybe I want to see if my photo looks like that? Um, heck, yeah, presets, g presets those are so good. What else do I love? There's a new one, um, archipelago palago I can't remember how to say those. Those are great. Um, I feel like I'm saying that wrong. Um, there's one more, somebody with a P, they'll um.
Speaker 1:Let me look at my phone real quick. I save all my the presets that I like, okay, and then you buy them and they could be like. They could be like 20 bucks for like iPhone ones to install, or they could be like a hundred bucks for whatever ones, or they could be more than that. Um, so don't get stuck on buying like the perfect preset, because you can always tweak it and again you're gonna have to look at your before image and make sure that it qualifies to be edited in a certain preset. Okay, phil Chester presets that is one that comes up a lot and I'm like, oh, oh, I like that, I like that, and um, so I can really go down the rabbit hole and spend too much money on presets. Um, so pick out one that you love and you love, like the work and that's what you would like.
Speaker 1:Aspire to have photos that look like, because, again, they're, they're sharing a mood they're sharing like do you want to be a realistic portrait photographer with no editing? Do you want to just focus on how natural can you make it look? Do you love headshots? Do you love studio work and do you love like school portrait photos? Or do you want to add like emotion and connection and a feeling and you want to add some nostalgia to it? Then you're looking at completely different presets and editing styles. So you kind of have to come up with, like, what do you want to look like as a photographer and make sure that your shooting and your editing aligns, okay.
Speaker 1:So once you go into Lightroom so say you have Lightroom and on your desktop or your mobile they're going to have similar features. On my Lightroom mobile I don't have all my presets that I have on my computer. I don't think I have it synced because I'm using Lightroom Classic on my computer and then I have Lightroom CC, I think, on my phone and I don't really like the mix, because one houses my iPhone photos and edits and my computer one houses those edits and okay. So if you look at your tab, your panel on the right side, if you have it set up um to develop, I think, is my mode. Okay, so you have your white balance and we talked about this in the iPhone sliders. But if you're shooting in raw, this is where it's going to not mess with your photo as much.
Speaker 1:When you do these sliders, because you're shooting with a really big image and you are, you have everything in the picture available to you that was actually there. I don't know why that is, but it may not make sense, um, but anyways. So the sliders, you can adjust these here, the the temperature. You're pulling it cooler, going to the blue side, and so if you are shooting in um, this again this depends on your light. So if you are shooting in a very, uh, stark white room, you may want to add some warmth to that by going towards the yellow side. Or if you are in a really cool toned room, like a blue room, then, um, maybe you want to add in some warmth. Or if you are um on a really warm sunny day and you need to add some blue back in, then you can go towards the left Um, or if you want it to look less about the color, then I always try to like take some of the yellow out. It just depends where you're shooting the tint, you're either adding green or you're adding magenta to it, and these are things you would tweak even if you have a preset, so you can start from scratch and slide the sliders, or you can start with a preset and then slide the sliders.
Speaker 1:Exposure we talked about that Brightening or darkening an image. Contrast I have been pulling mine down because I really love that like film kind of look. So I've pulled mine down to like negative 21, maybe less. I pull my highlights down, I pull my shadows up, my whites down, my blacks up. But again, you can make these go the opposite way and have a really high contrast photo.
Speaker 1:Um, texture is going to be how much texture is available in the photo. So if you're shooting people, I don't think you want that texture up really because that is going to emphasize people's skin and we don't really like that. So same thing with clarity. That's going to add some sharpness to your image. I wouldn't bring that really high. I bring that kind of down. I bring that um kind of down. Um, the texture and clarity would be great for like a landscape, like a crisp landscape photo or something that has like texture that you want to show off um in the photo, like, maybe you're doing like product photos or maybe you really want like an old hand and you really want it to look old in the photo, then maybe you would add some texture and some clarity to that Dehaze. That is like on a bright, sunny, golden hour day you are going to crank that baby up and that will save your image from being completely blown out by the sun.
Speaker 1:Vibrance again that I think is just adding more yellowy, bluish, I don't know, just vibrance Saturation, that is, you're going to add more pop to your colors. And then you have this tone curve, and so this is what I've seen most of my presets um mess with, and so it is very hard, in my opinion, to learn. So on that one you would kind of have to. I think you like could watch a video more on that tone curve. But on mine it is like you are bringing up the, the shadow or the colors.
Speaker 1:Um, you've got the red one, the green one, the blue one, and um mixing with that can add in different colors to your shadows and different colors to your highlights and your mid-tones, and so that can make your photo look completely different by adjusting those. Okay, so then you can go down to color grading. This is where you can add also some colors to your highlights or your mid-tones or your shadows, and so, um, if you want to add like more warmth to your shadows, then you would go down to the shadows and add, just kind of move the dot towards, like the yellow or the red, and then you would have more warmth in those dark areas of your photo. And then the light areas. Some photographers I've noticed do like a cyan kind of like blue, or, um, maybe like a minty kind of blue to their highlights. That I love. It looks like nostalgic and film. Or you can make the highlights be warm with adding orange, and same thing with the mid-tones.
Speaker 1:All right, then you can go into, like, your sharpening and de-sharpening. Um, I have my sharpening at about 24, my radius one, my detail at 25, okay, and then you have I don't really mess with anything else. Anything else, um, yep, so oh, and then grain. So then I mess with the grain. I have been loving lots of grain, so I have mine about 50 in the amount, 50 in the size, 50 in the roughness. Okay, all that to say that this year, or like last year, I started messing with. Okay, let me pre-say before I say it, before I say what I'm gonna say.
Speaker 1:I love editing and I love seeing what it looks like before and taking the image from the thought in my head all the way to the finished product. And I love sharing images right away after the session because I want people to feel like, oh my goodness, she did get something good, even if their kids were crazy. Okay, so, with that said, I would never think about handing my editing off to someone else. I don't want my photos to be somewhere else and then get them back in a week all edited. What if I have tweaks? What if I hate the editing? What if I want to send those photos back, like real quick? And I have no way to do that because the photos are in someone. So I would never outsource editing.
Speaker 1:But recently, with AI, they have two forefront apps that are AI editors that learn your editing style by reading the metadata from your images and seeing and analyzing what you've tweaked in the past, what the photo looks like now, and then you can train it to keep updating your style with adding more and more photos that you edit. So the more you feed it, the more it memorizes your style and then it gets really good at editing all your stuff. So it will do the exposure. It will. It will even crop your image and straighten it, which I'll talk about that in a second. Okay, so it will do all the things. Those are the sliders. You can also crop your image by making it um. You know, if you just shoot off a little bit, I am the worst at getting a straight image, and so I always have to straighten my image, and so you can do that. Or you can crop into a detail. You can make it, um, like one of those mid shot photos If you forgot to take one. You can make it a close-up shot if you forgot to take one of those. You can even duplicate a photo and make one cropped and one the full size. That gives you some flexibility to play with.
Speaker 1:Then you have your remove tool and your healing brush and clone stamp. These are going to remove little things in the room, and the remove thing has gotten so good. I do it with the use gener generative AI and it will take out like a stool that was in the photo that I forgot to move, or it will take out um, like I don't know, like skin blemishes, like certain things in Lightroom I can do here now instead of pulling it over to Photoshop, because if that can stay, save me one less step, then awesome. Okay, so you can use these different tools. They all kind of do the same thing. You're removing something, um, and just depending on what area of your photo you want to remove, then you can try out different things, but you can. You can try out different things, but you can.
Speaker 1:You can do the healing brush and that kind of just like picks up, like another place nearby, to fill it back in with um, and the same thing with the clone stamp. But the remove tool is the one that has like the generative ai that will fill it back in with what it thinks your photo would have looked like without that there, um, if that makes sense. So when I took out the stool, it still put the hardwood floors back the right way and um the wall. And that was amazing, because I don't know how many times in Photoshop I have tried to remake wood floor and the lines are just so hard to copy with the clone stamp and put back on and straighten, and so the fact that that just did it for me it was like, wow, okay, and then you have like a red eye tool. If you have red eyes, mainly if you're using flash, I mean maybe only if you're using flash will you get a red eye, so those can help take out have red eyes mainly if you're using flash. I mean, maybe only if you're using flash will you get a red eye, so those can help take out the red eyes.
Speaker 1:And then the best thing is the masks. So this is beyond basic editing, but there is your masking tools and so you can select. Now so much stuff you can select a subject like, and it will pick the family or the sky If you have a blown out sky and need to help that, or maybe you want to emphasize, emphasize the sunset, or it will notice the background and make that a mask. If you want to make that brighter or darker or try to play with the bokeh and make it blurrier, um, then it goes even more detailed with people's eyes and skin, and not just the eye, but like the eye pupil, you can make it sharper or make the whites whiter of the eye, or you can add teeth whitening. So a lot of times if I'm taking out different colors, then the teeth look duller, so I add in some like teeth whitening to help balance out what I did with the coloring.
Speaker 1:That's another level of editing, but it is so amazing the things that you can do with your masks and that it automatically finds like the teeth so, and you can copy it to every other photo. So, basically, you set all your settings up the way you like them and then you can copy and paste them to all your photos photos so you can save whatever you've done as a custom preset or like, if you've even tweaked another preset, you can save it as like a custom new one. Um, you can kind of merge things together and then save it as a new preset and then, um, like, maybe you bought one, but you need it to look more warm tone, so you add some more warmth, and then you need it to have more grain, so you can add more grain, and then you can save it as a new preset and then you can apply that to any photo that you're importing. So that is so amazing and you can change the raw ones over and over and over again. So that is really exciting. For that, all right. So playing around with AI is really exciting, for that. All right.
Speaker 1:So playing around with AI, I started with Imagine and then I switched over to Aftershoot. So what I loved about Imagine was the interface was so easy, it was so easy to navigate, it was easy to train the AI. You can even buy AI presets through Imagine or through Aftershoot and buy another photographer's AI presets, and so, basically, what this does it will take. So Aftershoot will call, which means pick the best photos that you took and you can put all these parameters on which ones, like how many, or if you want them to take out all the blurry photos, or all the ones with the eyes closed, which obviously, like some I'm trying to intentionally make blurry, and some of the ones I they're just looking down, and so I'm like, okay, I still want their eyes closed. Um, so you can go through and check all the things that they've you know said was best, and once you have your favorites, then it will edit all of them. And the main thing that I really love is it never gets it perfect. So I've been training it.
Speaker 1:I think I got so I didn't imagine for a couple months maybe, and then I didn't really want to switch. But I heard another photographer talking about after shoot, and so I tried that one. Or imagine AI was you had to pay per photo, I think, and so, like, you start off paying like a monthly thing and then if you go over it, then you have to pay per photo, which I constantly went over. So then I was paying like a monthly thing and then if you go over it, then you have to pay per photo, which I constantly went over. So then I was paying like a lot and then after shoot, you pay one monthly fee and you can edit unlimited amounts. So I thought that that would be a better deal for me. And then they ended up giving like if you paid like for a whole year, like in advance, then you got even a bigger discount. So that's what I ended up doing is I prepaid for a year of AI editing and that means like each new um version they come out with, I can update that, and any new features that they come out with I can update that as well.
Speaker 1:So they like just came out with or not just, but they came out with a um that I can make it mask already, like something in the photo that I know I want to um adjust in Lightroom later, so it could already come with the mask for skin, um, the subject skin. If I was doing a newborn shoot but I don't edit my newborn skin in Lightroom, but if I did then I could have the skin already masked and ready for me to adjust once it comes into Lightroom. So once you have everything edited, or it does it first of all in like three minutes or less, edits everything you could put in so many photos. It will edit less than three minutes and so and call picking out the favorites. So I love that, and then it spits it out to a folder. I bring the folder into Lightroom and then I adjust it and apply some more things or like tweak some more things, because sometimes, um, it's not exactly what I was going for, but it cut the time like in half at least, sometimes way more, depending on, like, how many angles I shot, how many different rooms of light I shot in, if I was indoor, outdoor, and I'm flip-flopping, um. So I can only hope that it will get better and get to know me better. The only thing I hate is when you're trying to train it.
Speaker 1:The other program, the Imagine One. You could imagine AI, whatever it's called. You could just click a button on the folder and say like resubmit or something, and that was so easy. Now it's like I don't even know what I'm doing. I don't even know if it's actually training it. Um, I mean, I think so, but like now, when you go into, like when you view your profile first, first of all you can only get like one, one editing style, so it's not like you can upload all your presets, you get one, and I mean you can pay more to get more. But then it says like improve further. And then it gives like all these, like libraries of catalogs, and I'm like I don't know all that. So I just try to wing it and see what happens, but I'm not 100% I know what that is. So I feel like the the interface of it is not as easy for me as imagining. I'm gonna I'm better look that up and see what that one is called. Imagine, okay, just imagine.
Speaker 1:Um, I am a G-E-N-A-I, so I will link that in case you're interested in looking at a helper for your editing, which I wasn't into at first, but it has taken time off my plates and now I get to focus more on shooting, content creation, talking to you guys, education, some more things that I love, and I still get to see the final result so quick and I have the control over it still.
Speaker 1:So that's what I like. I like having control over it, I like to do the images quickly and I like to have my time back. So I definitely suggest, if you are a photographer that shoots a good bit and it so you have your editing techniques on your phone, the overall gist of editing in Lightroom and taking it a step further with presets, and then, ultimately, the assistant of AI to help you further with editing. All right, so this is been all your how to start photography course and um, I will be putting together that mini course with video to go along with this podcast and make it all visually make sense to you, and next week we will wrap up and be starting a new series with photography. So let me know who you are, why you like listening, what you want to learn, anything like that so I can really tailor this podcast to help my listeners. So thank you for being here and I hope that this has encouraged you to go make better photos. All right, see you guys later. Bye.