It’s always fun powering up your photo editing software so you can play about with the photos you’ve taken, but are you guilty of making some basic Photo Editing Mistakes?
A lot of beginners always seem to make the same ones, so we’re going to discuss them today in the hope your skills improve dramatically. Once you know where you’re going wrong you won’t make the same Photo Editing Mistakes again.
1. Don’t oversaturate the colors
It’s not nice when the colors in your photo look dull because it makes it look lifeless. It’s easy to breath some life back into it by playing around with the saturation tool. Just like anything in life you can easily oversaturate the colors if you go too far.
You can normally see when you’ve went over the limit by looking away from the screen for a few seconds before giving it a second look. Don’t forget to keep looking at the original image and this will let you measure the changes you’ve made.
2. Limit filter usage
Everyone is addicted to adding multiple filters to every photo they take. When someone first plays around with photo editing software it’s nice to give them all a trial run because you’ll get to see the effects they have on different images.
Once you’ve got them out of your system you should then only turn to them occasionally when you want to improve a particular photo. It’s impossible to turn a bad photo into a work of art by adding multiple filters to it no matter which ones you choose.
3. Hiding all the little details
When someone looks at a photo they will definitely enjoy it if the photo is brighter, but this leads to people trying to brighten up their photos as much as possible. You have to remember that what makes a photo great is all the little details.
When you try to brighten the photo too much it can lose all the little details that made it special in the first place. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to brighten up your image, but please be careful and don’t keep going until you’re left with a sea of white.
4. Messing up similar tones
Look at your image on the screen and you’ll see certain areas where you might think there is only one color but there is actually a lot of them because of slightly different tones. A perfect example of this is any photo where you have the sky in the background.
When you start adjusting your image and you go too far you might inadvertently ruin it because banding will be introduced and all those subtle gradients will be gone forever, so it’s something you must watch out for.
5. Poor masking skills
There will be times when you want to take part of an image and use it somewhere else so you will have to apply a mask. Most beginners are really bad at this and they can’t mask anything properly unless it’s a very basic feature inside the image.
Anything with a little detail and it’s quite easy to see the image has been tampered with when you look at the end result. This is especially true when masking people because their hair is so detailed, so learn to master this if you want good results.
Don’t fret over it
Everyone will always make mistakes in the beginning and it could take you a long time until you become a photo manipulation expert. The most important thing is understanding where you go wrong otherwise how can you expect to improve?
Pay close attention to what we’ve talked about today and see if you’re guilty of making the same Photo Editing Mistakes.
Article by Vishal
Vishal Gaikar is a professional blogger from Pune, India. If you like this post, you can follow him on Twitter.
