How To Edit Blog Photos | Photography Series 1/3

Hey guys. This is the first post of three in the new photography series we are doing! We have had a few people ask us how we get our photos so bright and so we decided to write three posts with a different theme each. This one is, obviously, all about editing blog photos.

Some people don't like the sound of editing photos of products because it could alter the colour of it, but we find that editing just enhances it.

The app we use for editing is just Instagram. They upgraded their editing options so there is all sorts now from brightness to colour tints to warmth and saturation!

BRIGHTNESS

This is the first thing we always do to our photos. It makes white whiter and makes the photo look airy and, well, bright. Sometimes photos need a lot of brightness e.g. +70. Sometimes they are over exposed so we turn down the brightness, which creates a more even picture e.g -10.

WARMTH

Next we always turn down the warmth. This gets rid of any orange/red tones to your picture, making it whiter and bluer. This is essential to us! We never turn up the warmth because personally we like our photos cool toned.

CONTRAST

After adjusting the warmth and brightness, we turn up the contrast to bring back any colour and dimension lost. This brings the photo to life and makes products stand out from their backgrounds more. Again, we adjust this depending on the photo.

HIGHLIGHTS & SHADOWS

Turning up the highlights means making the lighter parts of the photo lighter, and turning down means making them darker. Likewise, turning up the shadows means making the darker parts lighter and turning them down means making them darker. Usually we turn up both to make the products true to their colours. For example, packaging may not look as black after turning up the brightness, so you would turn down the shadows.

SHARPNESS

This speaks for itself really. Sometimes we want to make the photo more sharp and crisp so we turn up the sharpness. We don't always use this because it could bring attention to unwanted things like dust!

SATURATION

We only turn up the saturation a little bit e.g. +5 because it is very powerful. You can easily turn a light pink into an orange red if you turn it up too much! This just brings more life into the photo.

COLOUR TINTS

This adds a tint of light blue, orange, pink etc to either highlights or shadows or your photograph. We rarely do this but when we do it is usually because the picture is still too warm. Therefore, we add a light blue tint (+5) to the highlights and a blue tint (+3) to the shadows.

We hope you found this post useful! Instagram editor is quite underated we think. We don't jse all of these on every photo, of course. But we do use brightness, contrast and warmth no matter what.

Byeee! X