Blogging 101: Photo Editing with Photoshop

Before we even get to Photoshop, I recommend shooting in RAW format. This is easily done in your camera settings and helps improve the quality of the image as it allows more precise photo manipulation whilst on your laptop rather than processing the photo through the camera. It also means, that while you’re editing the image it’s higher quality than if you edited a JPG. 

When using RAW format, you will see this screen first when opening in Photoshop which allows you to edit your photo. The rest of this post will include screenshots from this screen, although all the features I will talk about are also available when editing a JPG file normally. 

Crop and Straighten

As you can see to the right, there’s plenty of tabs with loads of different ways you can edit your images. At the top of the screen there’s also some tools to use. My most used ones would be the 6th and 7th buttons which are the crop tool, and the ruler tool. Often I find that playing around with these tools can help improve my composition if a leading line is too wonky or if there’s too much blank space.

Lighting, Vibrancy, Clarity and Temperature

My first go to is to always lighten up an image because when I shoot I try not to overexpose in camera. This means editing my lighting afterwards to create a bright image that isn’t too grainy or low quality. I play around with exposure, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks to make my image look as bright as I want, but still with some contrast with the darker areas.

I also increased the clarity to make the image look a bit sharper around the compact powder. Plus, I increased the vibrance as I wanted to make the colours and packaging pop out. You can also adjust the temperature here to make the image look warmer or cooler (or fix it if your camera does this for you!). I know a lot of bloggers opt for one or the other so this is usually an editing preference.

Curves

I personally love using curves on photoshop! It’s a super easy way to have full control of your photo’s tones and contrast levels. In order to create a stronger contrast, you can drag the line to create a stretched S shape. Don’t be too heavy handed though as you can drastically change the tones.

Remove Unwanted Content

Once you’ve finished with your edits, you can ‘Open Image’ into your usual Photoshop workspace. In this workspace you can use the Spot Healing Brush, Patch Tool, and Content Aware Move Tool to remove any unwanted content. For example, if I had a blemish, I could use the spot healing brush. Or if I had a great white background to take a portrait but it had a hole in it (yes my wall does have this issue…) I can use the content aware tool to remove it with very little effort.

As you can see above, my final image is much brighter and better looking than the original with minimal editing. If batch editing, you can also copy my lighting and curve settings across to all the images to reduce time when in the RAW work space.

You can then save as a JPG or as a PSD if you’ll need it for more editing at a later time!

Shortcuts

[Ctrl +] Zoom in

[Ctrl -] Zoom out

[Ctrl Shift N] Create new layer

[Ctrl Shift L/C/R] Align text left/centre/right

Double click on T thumbnail – select all text on current layer

Hold Ctrl when in any other tool to move selection

[Ctrl T] Transform object

[Shift and drag] Resize object and keep same ratios