Editing photos can be really useful, and sometimes a few small alterations and improvements can dramatically affect how your photo looks. But in the process of trying to improve your photos so that they make the grade – you need to make sure you don’t make any mistakes that could actually have the opposite effect.
While there are lots of different mistakes that could be made when editing a photo, there are some that are much more common than others and that you should try to avoid:
- Smoothening skin too much and making it look like plastic
One of the more popular ways to edit photos of people is to smoothen their skin. But as much as that can help, if you smoothen it too much you’ll completely remove the normal texture of the skin and it will start to look very plastic-like instead.
To avoid this mistake you should gradually smooth the skin and compare it with the original photo periodically. That frame of reference should let you identify when to stop.
- Cropping too close to the subject
By cropping a photo you can adjust its aspect ratio, or re-frame it and improve its composition. However if you aren’t careful you could over-crop the photo too close to the subject, making it look crowded.
Always make sure that you have a decent amount of white space between your subject and the frame. Additionally, it can help to use composition techniques such as the rule of thirds as a guideline when you crop your photos.
- Over-sharpening photos and revealing artifacts and noise
The sharpen tool (and various other sharpen masks) is often used to fix blurry photos and restore some of their definition. However, they should be used with extreme care, as it can also force other artifacts to become more prominent and make digital noise more visible.
Essentially sharpening photos is a bit of a balancing act, and you will have to make gradually adjustments to make sure you don’t over-sharpen it.
- Editing the original file
As a rule, you should never edit the original photo’s file directly, and should always make a copy of any photo and edit it instead. That can help you to avoid a lot of problems while editing and will ensure that if you do make any mistakes and accidentally save, you can always go back to the original.
Although some photo editors may do this automatically, backing up your photos for yourself is always a good idea.
At the end of the day if there’s one common rule that you should follow when editing the photos that will help you avoid many mistakes it is this: Less is more. For example, you could easily change background color of photo using Movavi Photo Editor, but you should only ever do it if absolutely necessary.
In most cases your goal when editing photos should be to make improvements to enhance the natural beauty that is present in the photo – not cloud it over. If you can do that, your edited photos will look far more impressive.