Photo Stuff: 3 Steps to make your pictures pop!

Photo editing 101

I see so many people with holiday pictures which have bland flat colour, when you talk to them about editing they always complain about it being really complicated, well its not! I’m going to give you a basic lesson on how to make your pictures “pop” with more vivid colours, in get this….3 steps!

Its also worth noting, what I’ll be showing you here can be done any nearly any program which lets you edit your pictures on either a Windows or Mac computer, it’s a universal concept. In this tutorial the screenshots will be taken from iPhoto(Mac program).

In my opinion there are 3 main adjustments when it comes to making your pictures look rich, lets expand on each of them:

- Exposure(brightness)
- Contrast
- Saturation

•  Exposure (Brightness): The amount of light reaching or being applied to a picture. Basically allows you to control how dark or light a picture is.

Here is a picture that was taken on a cloudy day and is a little darker then what would be ideal to see all its detail.

Dark image, not enough light.

So on your editing program navigate to the area where you can adjust the Exposure (brightness).

Image editing window on right

Here we will fiddle with the exposure settings, in this case increasing it, till we achieve a level which brings out enough detail.

(Tip: When increasing exposure watch out for light colours, they might get too bright ruining the naturalness of the image, this is also called over-exposing) 

Exposure adjusted (increased) in editing window on the right.

We can already see that it has made quite a difference to the picture, the darker areas have more detail and the whole picture is brighter.

(Tip: If your program has a setting for “Shadows” have a play around with that, it will focus on brightening the darker areas of the picture rather then the whole picture)

This is the picture that we end up with, though it may be a small adjustment later on we will compound this with other adjustments and the difference will be amazing!

Image adjusted for brightness

•  Contrast: The degree of difference between black and white tones. In simpler terms, think of it as making the blacks blacker and the whites whiter.

Now lets look at this next example. Here is a picture of a lush garden outside of Disneyland, now the garden was lush green with vibrant colours, here it looks all washed out.

Washed out picture, grass is much greener in real life.

The next thing we will do, is on the same panel where we adjusted Exposure we will now adjust Contrast, in this case the contrast was increased to just under 100%.

(Tip: Always keep an eye out for the darker areas in a picture when adjusting contrast, too much contrast and it will get way to dark to see any detail)

Contrast adjusted to nearly full

We can again now see that the grass is much greener, and you will also notice that the darker areas of the photo have gotten darker. In many cases such as this one, it will increase the detail in the photo.

Contrast adjusted, photo is much more vivid.

So there we go we have just learned how to adjust the three main components in a picture. Lets now have a look at what they can achieve when all adjusted in one picture!

Picture looks dull and washed out.

Here we have a picture, now armed with all the knowledge on Brightness, Contrast and Saturation we can instantly recognise what adjustments need to be done. So lets pop it into our editor and see whats what.

With the changes that i have made we can instantly see the amazing difference from the original picture to this more accurate discription. Some people will argue that the edited picture is not accurate too what it would have looked like in real life due to the overcast and snowy situations. That is correct but we are here to achieve a more vivid picture and in some cases if you want, one which is more accurate.
(TIP: Don't be afraid to experiment and try adjusting different things you can always go back by pressing the undo button!)

Great detail, beautiful colours.

There we go, 3 steps to better picture, time to get started!