If you are a professional photographer, wouldn’t you agree that a single photo has the capability to speak a thousand words? Those of you who are in the professional photography arena would realize how important it is not to let any margin for error or commit any photo editing mistakes.
Whether you consider product photography, nature photography, or fashion photography, it is important to understand that you need to be adroit enough to maintain its aesthetic appeal.
To ensure that the photo appears appealing and serves the shot’s purpose, photo editing is used. While editing your photographs, you need to practice caution since you want to present the best possible output to the end-user. Bad photo editing can spoil the entire objective of your shot.
You don’t want to make such photo editing mistakes, do you?
Whether you are a beginner or a professional photographer, it is important to stay in tune with the latest happenings in your arena. Peruse the coming section to help you attain the perfect picture post-editing in 2022.
10 Common Photo Editing Mistakes to Avoid
1. Crop the Photos
You cannot present the final picture with a blurred background with irrelevant objects. Cropping helps you put the entire focus on the important part of your photograph and get rid of the unnecessary things in the image.
Don’t get us wrong. We are not recommending simply cutting off the background of the images. Cropping the photographs is an art, and it must be done adroitly. Improper cropping may render your photograph look unattractive.
To avoid this photo editing blunder, make sure you understand the aspect ratio requirements for the platform for editing your images, such as print or a fashion portfolio. Focus on only removing the extraneous and unusual details.
2. Over-Sharpen the Image
Photo sharpening is done to make the image look more attractive. However, many novice photography enthusiasts go overboard with sharpening, making the image look unnatural. Many over-sharpen their photographs while editing Instagram photographs, making them look angrier. Therefore, you need to practice caution while sharpening your image.
Keep the purpose of sharpening in mind, such as fixing blur. You don’t want to sharpen your image too much and show halos around the object in the picture. You need to aim for a perfect balance between noise and sharpness, whatever photo app you use.
3. Overdoing HDR
The purpose of HDR in photo editing is to present the dynamic range between light and dark parts of the image. Professional photographers use HDR in the sunset or sunrise shots to get the correct exposure.
Just like over-sharpening, overdoing HDR may make your image unrealistic. To maintain its aesthetics, you need to use HDR judiciously. You can use copywriting software to edit your photos but make sure that you apply HDR moderately.
4. Computer Monitor Calibration
Another common mistake that photographers make is ignoring the monitor calibration. You don’t want your altered photo to seem different when printed or shared with the client on another device. You notice that the image hue or brightness in the final altered photo differs from what you had specified. When your monitor isn’t calibrated, this happens.
When you calibrate your laptop or desktop monitor, you ensure that the color, contrast, and brightness are within acceptable limits, i.e., close to the natural tone.
This guarantees that the colors in your images are accurate to the settings you’ve chosen and that they seem the same on all devices. As a result, you should calibrate your computer screen regularly.
5. Using Loud Text Colors
Novice photographers make this common mistake of using aggressively loud colors in deep contrasts. It is a big no-no when editing your image.
Have you ever tried reading words on an all red or blue image? It’s difficult, inconvenient, and may even cause physical harm to your eyes. Bright text is notoriously difficult to read, so you rarely see it in professionally created graphics.
Many users commit this Instagram mistake of posting edited pictures with loud text colors. We recommend setting the color picker to a dark gray instead of 100% black text because most designers don’t use it.
6. Put Too Much Emphasis on Edge Vignette
For many photographs, adding an edge darkening vignette is a smart idea. However, going overboard and making the vignette too powerful and evident is not smart.
This style of edge vignette is rarely sought or effective. It just appears obvious, and your attention is drawn to it due to the high contrast it generates – the exact opposite of what you want to happen.
Some marketers appear to believe that vignettes make their photographs look edgier. However, it is a big brand marketing mistake since doing it too excessively can detract from the original image’s beauty.
When your subject isn’t in the center of the image, using a Radial Filter in Lightroom to produce an off-center vignette is ideal. It even lets you use effects like zero Clarity and edge softening.
7. Applying Too Much Noise Reduction
Applying noise reduction to your image may be necessary if you photograph at a high ISO. But be careful; if you go too far, your image may become blurry.
This will mostly rely on the software you use and how it functions, and whether or not you can mask it to apply only to specific places.
It may appear fine when seen in full on your screen. However, enlarge the image to determine if it’s gone too far. It’s difficult to convey this in a low-resolution web image.
8. Not Shooting Raw
If you shoot JPEG and edit in Lightroom or Photoshop, you’re missing out on the advantages of having all that fantastic raw data at your disposal.
You might want to explore shooting raw at some point if you want to grow your business. It simply provides you with a lot more options to deal with.
If you’re processing photos in any way, whether using Lightroom, Photoshop, Elements, Luminar, or your camera’s software, the workflow for JPG and RAW is the same.
9. Neglecting Processing
Purists will argue that processing photographs isn’t photography, and they want reality. On the other hand, digital artists are on the opposite extreme of the spectrum. They can spend hours manipulating a single image or combine many to produce a completely new work of art.
The majority of photographers fall somewhere in the middle.
You may need to process to complete your vision of how you saw the image in your mind’s eye.
10. Unnecessary Conversion to Black and White
Any image will not appear nice in monochrome if the saturation slider is set to ‘-100.’ When retouching a black-and-white image, it is important to check if the frame has enough contrast. If not, then you must stay away from monochromatic conversions.
Check if any conspicuous colors complement the colored image, even if the scenario has high contrast. You may have a lovely and colorful sunset in your frame, but because you are accustomed to turning any image to monochrome, you may make a mistake.
Patience is required as you examine the image. If you don’t like the colors or the image has a lot of contrast, you can convert it to black and white.
Final Thoughts
Just like photography, photo editing is an art. And you must keep yourself updated with all the good practices. It is equally important to know about the bad practices to keep them at bay. The above content reflects what mistakes one must avoid while editing photos in 2022. Hopefully, you make the most of it and come up with a picture-perfect photo.
About Guest Author: Ayush Koul
Ayush is a content writer at RankHandy and he likes to write about SEO, digital marketing, and social media. He enjoys sharing his experience with like-minded professionals and aims to provide high-quality content.
