Hi there!
Guess you came here to find out either A) how I edit my stuff or B) Improve your editing skills. Or maybe you just came here because your bored and feel like reading something I wrote haha. Ok, well let’s get into it then!
Regardless if your platform is web, Instagram, print there are a few things you can do to ensure your photos are awesome from the start. First is probably the biggest one, START SHOOTING IN RAW! I find too many people still shoot in JPEG, and I mean it’s fine if you’re just shooting for fun and messing around. But if you want to get the most of out of your shots and your edits, shooting raw will give you the range to do so. The dynamic range you can get is incomparable to JPEG for those that don’t know. you can save a lot of photos that are underexposed or overexposed. Especially if you are shooting with a flat colour setting. You can always bring colour back into your shot if you’re shooting raw, and you will save a lot of the blacks and highlights.
Here are some examples of before and after shots I took as well as the settings I used to shoot them.
This is the power of RAW, I”m sure some of you are saying “Yeah I can do that with a regular jpeg image too!” Well yes and no, you can still brighten and edit and bring it up. However due to the limit in information captured, once you start pushing the whites and black in the image you’ll start to see banding and much less dynamic range.
I will make a video soon just to go over my personal workflow and how IÂ go about editing photos using Lightroom soon, so stay tuned!
But for now, I will save you some time and give you guys a few presets you can use for your raw files. Note that presets aren’t a magic solution! Learn how to make your own and you’ll be better for it. Also, be mindful that presets won’t magically make your photos better, I’ll have a few presets for lighter photos as well as a few presets you can use for darker photos. Please leave a comment below if these helped you out at all, also let me know if you guy would want some editing tutorials or more presets to help you guys out.
