Photo Editing for Beginners: 4 Tips for Creating Stunning Images

About 71% of people edit selfies before posting. Editing photos lets you touch up minor details and make the image sharp and clean.

You don’t have to just edit selfies, either. Food photos, landscape images, and wildlife photos get edited before you see them. Photo editing helps your creative vision become a reality.

Photo editing for beginners is challenging at first, but with the right photo editing tips, you’ll get the hang of it in no time. Keep reading because you’re about to learn basic photo editing techniques that are available in any photo editing software.

1. RAW vs. JPG

Basic photo editing starts with your image file. JPG is the most common image file, and that’s what most phones and cameras use to produce images.

RAW is another image file that captures every piece of data that the camera’s sensor picks up. Most DSLR and mirrorless cameras have the option to shoot in RAW. Some phones have the ability to shoot RAW.

If yours doesn’t have the option, you can download an app to create RAW images. RAW gives you more options to edit the data in the image file.

2. Crop Images

Cropping an image lets you re-adjust the composition of the photo. You may have a wide-angle photo of a flower. The wide angle makes the flower seem distant.

You can crop the image to make the flower the focal point of the image and bring it closer to the viewer.

Cropping an image removes distractions along the edges of the photo. You can realign the image and recenter it if you want to create a different composition.

3. Change the Background

The background of an image helps set the scene or the tone of a photo. A dark shadow of a person with a sunset in the background gives an image depth and contrast.

A person in front of a bright background gives the photo a fun and playful tone. When you’re learning to edit photos, one of the photo editing techniques to learn is to remove background from an image.

You’re able to create a transparent image that you can apply anywhere. An example is a transparent logo which you can now put on a t-shirt, website, or anywhere else.

Change the color of the background to create different styles of the photo.

4. Exposure Adjustments

Most phones have an auto-exposure feature. You should learn how to take photos manually, so you have more control over the exposure.

Professional photographers shoot manually and deliberately underexpose their pictures. This makes the photos slightly darker. They’ll increase the exposure during photo editing to create the look they want.

They shoot darker because if a photo gets overexposed, it’s too white and you lose the details of the image. You can’t recover those lost details in photo editing.

📌 Takeaway

Photo editing for beginners doesn’t need to take a lot of time. You just need to know the most important adjustments to make.

These photo editing techniques take you through the steps to touch up your images and get them ready to post online. Do you want more tech tips? Check out the home page of this site for more helpful tips.