How to Edit Your Vacation Photos so They Don’t Suck
So, you’ve taken a cool journey, took a bunch of photos and now you don’t know what to do with them. Don’t worry, vacation photo editing is not as difficult and technical as it sounds.
While in Havana, Cuba, I spoke to Brian O’Neill Hughes, Director of Product Management, Creative Cloud and Services at Adobe, and Josh Haftel, Mobile Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, to learn the secrets of editing vacation photos (full disclosure : Adobe paid for my trip). Here’s what you need to know.
Do not postpone
The longer you wait for your vacation photos to be edited, the less likely it will ever be done. Time is key, O’Neill Hughes said: “Getting them out quickly and efficiently is more important than spending a week retouching them at the pixel level.” You want to tweak your photos, even though you still remember what it was like to take them.
And in this age of Facebook and Instagram, it’s important that you share your personal stories as quickly as possible. Why? Because your interest is rapidly waning, says Haftel. “When you return, on the first day you will have 99% interest in taking and sharing photos, on the second day – 70%, on the third day – 22%, on the fourth day – about 0.0001% interest in doing what – or with these photos, because life has gone on … ”It’s not because you are lazy, notes Haftel, but because you are busy.
Take shit away
However, before you start editing images, you need to edit your film. Let’s face it, most of the photos you take are probably not worth editing, let alone showing to other people. Hopefully you’ve become more mindful of photography throughout all of your travels, but even if you did, not every image is the best .
Maybe some of them are out of focus, maybe you forgot why you took some of them and they don’t mean anything to you right now, or maybe you have 30 shots of the same for some reason building.
This is why the first thing you should do when sitting down to edit is culling. Digital photography is a double-edged sword: you can take a lot more photos and upload them anywhere, but that means a lot more shit will go through. Don’t be that kind of person, and please, PLEASE don’t sit people down for the slideshow until you at least do this part.
When culling, remember to think about who your audience is (your mom doesn’t want to see Paris, she wants to see you in Paris), and consider asking someone what shots they like and why. Perhaps you like your photos a lot more than other people. Kill your loved ones. Fewer best photos will always be better than tons of crappy ones.
Create a story arc
While you’re cleaning up, O’Neill Hughes invites you to try and create a story arc. Choose images that best represent your vacation from start to finish. Start your album or slideshow with things like sunrise, snapshots of your hotel, then continue with snapshots of the main things you did each day and the places you visited in some sequential order, and then maybe end with something that carries a tone of finality with it – like the sunset completing your initial sunrise. And it doesn’t have to be in the exact order, says Haftel. If the sunrise shot you took on your first night is better than others, you can use it. Nobody will know. Focus on the story.
Underline the main thing
After you’ve selected and planned your vacation story, it’s time to dive into the individual images and make some edits. Before you get overwhelmed with settings, sliders, and other stuff, tell yourself, “I need to select an item and then shrink everything else.”
Let’s say, for example, you took a great photo of a dog surrounded by people. You need to emphasize the dog (object), while not focusing on everything else. Crop the image to remove as many distractions (people) as possible, and direct the viewer’s eyes directly to the story of the dog. Then make selective adjustments to make the dog stand out even more. Brighten or saturate it a little, create a vignette to darken objects around the dog, or find a way to make the dog’s eyes pop out so that you immediately turn to them. Remember that whatever is in focus is not your subject, it just distracts from your story.
Bring emotion back into your photos
What you see and what the camera sees are two different things. This is partly to do with hardware and stuff, but also because you are not an emotionless machine. O’Neill Hughes and Haftel emphasized that editing is the bridge between what your camera captured and how you felt when you took the photo. This process allows you to re-add the psychological elements that were in the game.
You may have been cold when you took this photo of the dog, so lower the color temperature a little to reflect that. Or perhaps you felt sorry for the dog because it was homeless and you turned off the bright colors to make the photo look less joyful. Or maybe the colors in your photo just don’t match the colors you saw. It happens often with sunsets, and it happens to me all the time with vegetation. My photos never look as green as I personally thought.
The camera captures some of that emotion, so play with your photos and bring them back. The key word here is “play.” Remember, photo editing should be fun! The phrase “editing photos is like drawing with your fingers for adults” stuck with me.
Don’t go crazy with sliders and presets
Photo editing apps like Adobe Lightroom are pretty powerful and come with all sorts of image customization options. This can make the process quite tricky, but it also means you can easily overdo it. Relax, take a breath, and try to keep things simple.
For example, sharpness and contrast are largely overused, according to O’Neill Hughes and Haftel. Yes, these sliders can sharpen your image, but it may not be what your image needs. They warn that you should only use sliders if they reinforce the story you’re trying to tell. A little softness can do wonders for photography.
And when it comes to presets, or what you might call filters, look at them as a starting point. Don’t add the same filter or preset to every photo just because it looks good on one of them. Each image is a puzzle and you try to unleash its potential with subtle adjustments.
When in doubt, Renan Oztürk, a photographer and director for National Geographic, who gave me tons of hints during the trip, recommended a list of the most basic changes: adjust the exposure as needed, make some highlights down, some shadows up, some clarity, then play with color. There are no magic recipes for enhancing every photo, sorry, but you’d be surprised how much tweaking these few things can help.