What should I google, or look for, to learn better editing techniques. Not how to use lightroom, but what one should aim for when editing? Thanks
I’ll answer this publicly because I think, that maybe someone might chime in with more opinions on that subject. Please note, that the following is purely my personal take on things:
Actually – and I know it might sound cheesy – the most important thing is to look closely and analyze photos you really like. What is the certain quality that makes them stand out? And then try to recreate that. That is not copying btw, that is practicing. Just like in learning to play an instrument or exercising in sports.
Photography and post-processing is to a very small amount knowledge and to a very big amount practice and experience.
You do not have to know many things (even though I have to say: knowledge helps to understand – shamelessly plugging my “What I learned about photography” and “Ramblings about photography” series and my new Youtube-Channel here ^^).
Basically, there are not so many things to know.
The big mistake many people make imho, is to first concentrate on effects to create „Cool looks“ without really trying to realize, what those exactly do to their photos.
With that having said:
IMHO, learning how to read and manipulate the histogram is the single most important thing. The histogram in your camera and the histogram in your processing-software.Almost all tools in every post-processing software do nothing else than manipulate the intensity of the three colour-channels red, green, and blue - either locally or in the whole photo - and so change the histogram (the representation of those three colour-channels in the RGB histogram or the combined representation in the luminance-histogram).
Okay, to come to the point:
The things that helped me a lot to research on and to play around with them (practice):
Cropping with keeping the aspect ratio and without keeping the aspect ratio. Your point of interest in a photo can dramatically change, if you crop a photo. What do certain aspect ratios do to your photo?
Straightening photos or tilting them for effect.
Colour-manipulation: Opposite colours, the colour wheel, the difference between additive colour-mode (the mode you are working with when you are working with photos) and subtractive colour-mode (crayons, watercolours, printing), removing and adding colour tints. Research on how to manipulate these universally and locally.
Understanding dynamic range: What is there, what can your camera capture, and what can you photos actually show.
Guiding your viewers eye through the photo. This is of course mainly a matter of composition and light (well, light is a part of the composition), but you can emphasize or even change that in post-processing by the use of (local) light and colour-manipulations.For example:Colour can create depth. As a rule of thumb: blue seems to be farther away, red seems to be closer.Or with brightness: Lighten and darken parts of a photo.
Histogram, histogram and … well … histogram ;) Where do certain brightness values lie in the histogram? How can you shift these? Learn how to use levels and curves.How bright can areas be to still have texture visible.For example: Skin-tones. Caucasian skin (is this the politically correct term?) is ususally about 1-2 f-stops brighter than the exact middle of your histogram.
Then of course specialized topics: Skin retouching in portrait photography, whitening teeth, brightening eyes, etc. etc. etc.
Another thing that helped me tremendously, is to watch screencasts of photographers actually working on photos while they explain, what they are doing. The fun thing is, even though every post-processing software has various tools, and sometimes it is really hard to get everything there is. But it’s even not neccessary, because you will learn to use them effectively over time, if you know, what you want to achieve. It is very useful to know, that they are there and (thank you, Internet) looking up how to use them is most of the time only a matter of minutes.
Forget about these “paint-by-numbers” recipes (I know, you didn’t even ask for such), most of the time, they will only help you to create „exactly this“ and will not give you any deeper understanding.
I know, this kind of learning curve is very steep, but also very rewarding.
Hope this helped a bit :)
Edit: I completely forgot to say that all this playing around in post-processing will also have a huge positive impact on your photography
