 Are you ready to up your photo editing game? That's what we're talking about today on The Journey. One of the biggest rookie mistakes that people make is they get all these great photos for their website or their social media, but then they don't put forth the time and effort to actually edit them and make them really stand out. Yeah, we're not talking about like you being a professional image editor with this stuff. There's a lot of easy tricks that you can use really up your game, but why is this so important? Photo editing is so important to utilize because if you don't, then you can have photos on your website that are really distracting from your brand or your message. Well, the last thing you wanna do is look unprofessional. Now, if you're sitting there wondering, how do I get started with editing photos? I've never done it before. It's actually quite simple. You don't need any formal training, although it's nice, right? Or any special tools to do it. We're gonna provide some free resources and tools that you can use to edit your photos here. Yeah, don't worry. You don't have to be an Instagram influencer. We're gonna help you out with some really simple tools. So a couple of tools you can use. We're gonna start with a paid one first because it is the creme de la creme. It's what a lot of editors actually use. It's Photoshop. You can literally manipulate almost any part of the image there. But what a lot of people don't realize is that Adobe Lightroom, the editing software for photography is absolutely free. They have a paid version, but you can do a ton in Lightroom. We're actually gonna get to a bit of a demo later on in the episode, but there's also stuff on your phone too, right? Yeah, there's a ton of different free apps that you can use that are really easy to use to edit your photos. I know even just the built-in editor on your Apple iPhone. That's a really great way. It has a ton of different tools that you may not even realize to help edit photos. Or there's Google Snapseed. That has a lot of advanced features. You can do even selective parts, which is really interesting. There's also Canva or Over, if you're looking for more like templates and more design. Those are great alternatives. A VSCO, that's a really popular one. And of course Lightroom. They have an amazing mobile app that's actually free, and it has a ton of different features, and you can add presets. It's a really great option. And now you might think that all 10 of our best practices for editing images happens post-production or post-picture. But I think our tip number one starts with having the right lighting. Now, you don't have to go out and spend a ton of money on getting fancy lighting equipment. Sometimes it's just making sure that you're outside or it's not too dark, or you have an extra light setup. I know with a lot of popular YouTubers or Instagrammers, they're getting those little fancy ring lights. They're not that expensive. I think they start at like maybe 40 or $50, but that small investment can really up your game when it comes to photography on social media and with your website itself. The next tip is limit any distractions in the photo. We've all been there before when you're taking a photo of food and you've gotta move the fork and the napkin out of the way and get that perfect setup. Think of it like that. It's gonna be a lot more difficult to edit something out later on after the fact. That's really difficult to do. It's gonna take an hour. It's pointless. So make sure you get rid of those distractions from the get-go. Yeah, you really wanna look at like what is your focal point? What do you want to stand out with the actual image itself? And if there are other things that would detract your eye from that shot, you want to remove it. You can also look at the rule of thirds. So with a screen, we'll say it's a square, there's a rule of thirds like the left side, the middle and the right. And kind of position it in one of those thirds, typically left or right. It's where our eyes try to go when we're looking at pictures rather. You can even utilize the grid on your phone to actually show you that three by three grid. It's really easy to use and show you that rule of thirds. Our next tip we have for you is to use a tripod. Don't rely on shaky hands to take the photos. Unless you're doing like some crazy action shots, use a tripod and make sure that your pictures are crisp and clear. Although there's a cool feature on iPhone called live photo. So if you take the shot, it ends up a little blurry. Actually it takes about a second to a second and a half of pictures rather. And you can kind of pick your shot. Something may look fine on your phone, but if you're gonna use it on your website, you need that to be extremely crisp or else it's gonna look low quality. All right, so now that we got some of the pre-work done when taking the photos, let's talk about some tips on after the fact. Let's actually go into our demo and edit an image. So as we continue to go through some best practices, we're gonna edit this photo here on the fly and starting with check your rotation. So you can see from this image that everything kind of looks like it's going downhill. It's very sideways. You wanna make sure your lines are really lined up and you can actually use that grid that was on there to make sure that it looks as straight as possible. Yeah, and with Lightroom, if you go over to the crop and rotate, there's actually an auto option. So Lightroom will try to do its best job to understand the picture itself and straighten it out for you. Like there wasn't a ton, but it did straighten it out. I'll just hit enter and now the photo has been straightened. The next thing we wanna make sure to do is crop the photo. So if you can see here, there's a lot of extra space on the left side versus the right side. So we wanna crop it so that it's more even. This is also really important if you wanna utilize a photo multiple different ways. So let's say you wanna do one individual photo of Emma and Sam and then one individual photo of- Of us. Of us, you know, there's a lot of different ways that you can reuse content so that you get multiple different photos that you can utilize different social media posts. There's a lot you can do. All right, our next tip is to size your image. So it really is going to come down to where is this image going to live? Is it going to be on Instagram where they prefer the thousand by thousand or the three by four aspect ratio? Or is it gonna be on your website with if it's going to be on the website, it's going to have to be a big image. You can't put something that's 250 pixels wide by 300 pixels long and expect that to take up the entire screen. It's just gonna be blurry and it's not gonna look good. Luckily with most iPhones and Android phones, they take some pretty large pictures. So you typically don't have to worry too much there. Now, if you go into Lightroom under this crop feature, there's different aspect ratios you can use to kind of size up your images according to maybe the social media profiles that you're doing. So like Instagram really wants it to be a one by one. That way it's kind of that just square photo right on your social profile feed but others may be a little bit different. If you use this or you can just go to custom and crop it however you want. If I really want this picture just to be all about me, I can just go ahead and do that and then it's all about me. Yeah, and a lot of the mobile apps have made this a lot easier for us too. So rather than having to memorize all the different aspect ratios for each platform, it'll actually show you, okay, this one I want formatted for the Instagram size or Facebook or you know, a Twitter cover photo, all of that so that to make it really easy and effortless for you. The next tip is fix your lighting. This is extremely important, especially if it was way too sunny or you had a ton of lighting in your photo to start with, you know, maybe too bright or if it's way too dark and there's a ton of shadows, this is gonna be really important for making sure that your photo really pops. So you go in here, whether it's levels or changing the light in this instance and then you can adjust, you know, brightness, contrast, shadows, highlights. Yeah, and this is kind of why we typically recommend Lightroom just because you have a lot of control over those different elements. So exposure is gonna be your overall lightness and darkness but you can also adjust things like contrast, the highlights and the photos, the shadows, the whites, the blacks and kind of go from there. And if you don't know what any of this means, you can just click this auto button at the top and it's gonna do its best to try to adjust it for you. So you see it drop the highlights. So this is what the highlights will impact. So I'll put that back to right about there. The shadows, you can see if I darken the shadows, if I want to lighten the shadows, I like it a little bit brighter. The whites in here, obviously we have those white shirts. We kind of want to emphasize them and then the darks in the screen depending on how you want them. You kind of want to play around with it. And as you get more advanced, you can impact things like the point curve and add a bunch of different adjustments to the levels. But this is super advanced stuff because it impacts almost every part of it and we can really just go real weird. This is it, it's the winner. And if you ever mess up, control Z or command Z as your friend. The next important step is make sure you're adjusting that color tone or cast. This is really important to make sure that it's really white balanced. So if you are wearing a white shirt and you are in a super blue lighting, then it's not gonna come off as being white. So you need to make sure that you're adjusting those colors correctly. And so in here in Lightroom, it's under the color tab. That's gonna be like your temperature. That's gonna be super blue or super warm with those yellows or you can also adjust tint. If there is a slight tint, you want this to look as natural as possible. Yeah, this really comes to play really where you're taking the picture. Is it bright and sunny out? Because chances are it's gonna be really warm in that photo. So you wanna make sure your temperature has dropped down a bit, make it a little bit colder. Or if it's a cloudy day, it's gonna be really, really blue and you need to add some vibrance and some warmness into that photo. So you'll throw it up here. So I wanna make us a little warm because we're having fun. So increase the warmth, but not too much. Otherwise it just looks not good. And sticking with editing colors, you can also adjust your saturation. So a really high saturation is gonna make it look really vibrant. But you also don't wanna do that too much because it comes off looking really strange. Or if you go the opposite direction, you can actually change it all the way to black and white. Yeah, and you can kind of play around with it. Again, like you said, don't overdo it. And you can even go one step further and adjust individual colors inside of light rooms. If you go to the color mixer here and say you really want to make the reds look more saturated or desaturated, you can adjust those right here or make them brighter or even change the hue to be yellow or red for those red colors. This is really great for super colorful items. So if it's like food or flowers and you really wanna make those colors pop, that's when saturation's gonna come into play. Our next tip is clean up. Sometimes there's blemishes or dust or something going on with the picture that we just need to adjust just a little bit. And that's where the healing brush comes into play. So we click this healing brush and choose our side. Like, I don't know what I'm doing with my face. I'm just gonna clean all of it and just get me out of the picture. And then we're good. But in all actuality, it's for things like, say I was breaking out. I had a huge zit on top of my forehead. I can go in here, that healing brush, nice and quick and easy and get that zit away. And I look flawless. Now say you edit your photo and it looks fantastic and you have a bunch of photos that are in the same lighting or in the same just genre of types of photos. And you don't wanna go through all those things again. You can actually create your own presets. I obviously, I'm in Lightroom a lot so I have a ton of different presets. Now if I wanna make another one, I would just go to presets down here and click this little guy and then create preset. I can name it whatever I want and it's saved here so I can go down and find it later and choose my different adjustments that I've made in the past without actually going through each one. And if a photo needs to be updated just a little, you've done most of the work, you just make those tiny adjustments. Yeah, and this is really great for getting that aesthetic that we were talking about earlier. So if you want your Instagram feed to just look great and all consistent with the same colors and editing, that's when these presets are gonna really come in handy. Now all these edits were done on my desktop but if we're ever on the go, everything that we actually went through here, we can do on our phone. Yeah, exactly. So especially with social media content, when you're trying to do things really quickly, you don't always have a laptop with you. So luckily we all have phones. So here in the app, you can still do all of the same things starting with crop here. You can actually rotate the photo. You can crop it to help get rid of some of that extra space here. You can also change, start working on the lighting. Here's where you're gonna get the exposure, make it brighter or darker. You can change your contrast, which is a really great way again to make those photos pop. And then especially with color, here's your temperature. Say you wanna make it a little warmer, going all the way down to saturation. All of these things can be done right on your phone. And a great feature is you can also just hold down your finger to see the before and after. I mean, look at that. That's pure magic. Honestly, for as long as I've used Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile, I did not know that till just now. Yeah, well, there you go. That's what I'm here to help. She's my saint. But if you don't wanna edit with these Lightroom apps, the actual editor on iPhones and Androids are pretty good too. You can manipulate all those exposure settings, the color, the vibrance, things like that too. So you don't need the extra stuff. We just recommend it. All right, so you just learned our 10 best practices when it comes to photo editing. Be sure to like this video and let us know in the comments down below what your favorite photo editing app is. Yeah. And hey, if you got a bunch of value out of this video, make sure you subscribe to our channel and ring that bell to see these episodes first. This is The Journey. See you next time.