How to Improve Your Photo Editing Skills: A Quick Guide
Having photo editing skills is very valuable. Editing is useful for personal projects and is a sought-after skill by employers. Want to stand out above the rest? Then you’ll need to edit like a pro!
But a lot of people don’t know which skills they need when they learn to edit. Editing can seem like a vast process and you might not know where to begin.
Luckily, this article can get you started with some great photo editing tips! It covers enhancing your product photos through color, background removal, and more! So read on for a quick guide to getting started with improving your photo editing skills.
Master Color Correction
When it comes to product photos, accurate colors are very important. Customers often base their purchasing decisions on the color of the product.
Colors can also evoke different emotions. Knowing how to influence customers’ feelings through color is a powerful marketing tool. Saturation, contrast, white balance, and brightness will allow you to create evocative images.
Background Removal and Resizing
An essential editing skill is removing backgrounds from your images. Using the pen tool is the best way to do it in most cases (you can find more information here).
Removing the background can make objects stand out more. It also allows for more consistency in your brand as everything has the same layout.
In a similar vein, you should also learn how to crop or resize images. This changes the number of pixels or the size of a photo. This could be especially important if you will be printing your images, so you get the highest quality possible. Framing your images through cropping can help to draw focus to them.
Retouch Like a Pro
Product photos need to look perfect if you want to give a professional image. Getting rid of finger marks, scratches or blemishes makes products seem more desirable.
Learning how to use the smoothing tool, eye drop tool or clone stamp is great for this. These tools allow you to copy details and colors exactly. This will make your images appear more uniform.
Retouching can also help with shadows or light spots. This is especially helpful for products that have reflective surfaces. Retouching, combined with color correction, can make your images jump off the screen!
Practice Editing Product Photos
Learning how to edit product photos well is a difficult skill and it will take some time to master. But, the key to any worthwhile skill set is persistence and consistency.
Try to practice every day on different styles of images. If you can’t take a lot of photos for yourself, then search online for raw photo files that you can practice on for free. Experimentation will show you how many ways there are to manipulate the same image!
Make sure that if you are using your own images, you store your original raw files in another folder or drive. This prevents you from losing files or destroying the original photo. Make sure you know all your undo commands with whichever software you choose!
Perfect Your Photo Editing Skills
Learning how to edit photos is a great way to take your product photos to the next level. Combining the editing skills above can make your images stand out against competitors.
Check out our technology section if you found this article helpful. There you can find more articles about photography, editing, and much more!