Make Your Shots Pop!

Some simple tweaks to lift your images

You know the story. You’re on vacation in some exotic place, you can point your camera almost anywhere and get a great shot.

Then you get home, or back to the hotel, and you look through the haul. Unless you’ve spent five minutes carefully thinking about composition, fiddling with the controls, and taking shot after shot until it’s just right, most likely you won’t be completely happy.

What to do? You usually can’t go back and take the shot over again.

This is where you can fix a lot of minor problems by post-processing with an image-handling program, which comes as standard with most devices nowadays, or can be downloaded for free.

Let’s try it!

Here’s a more or less random image from Flickr.

Not bad. Nice colour in the sky, some interesting shapes in the foreground rocks, and an ocean image is always good.

But one common flaw. The horizon is tilted. The cloud shapes accentuate this, and I get a little seasick just by looking at it.

Tilt!!!

First fix: level out the horizon. I have Adobe Lightroom, but there are any number of photo-editing apps out there which can do the job, and a surprising number of them are free.

All I did was hit the “Auto Straighten” button, but sometimes this doesn’t work the way I want, and I must adjust it by eye. A grid showing horizontal and vertical lines appears, and I tilt it until it lines up. Horizon lines are good reference marks, but also verticals such as building edges, tree trunks, standing figures. Just play with it until everything looks like it isn’t leaning to one side.

That was only off by 1.3 degrees, but now the horizon is level and I don’t have to worry about the ocean sloshing off the screen.

Yes, it might sound funny, but that’s the way our eyes work. It’s like having a picture hanging on the wall that is just a little bit off level. It nags at the viewer, especially if they have a little bit of OCD like I do. If your readers are going to be expending braintime on your shots, you want them working on the good points, not the flaws.

Next problem. That image is way too symmetrical. The sun is setting dead centre, and the horizon line divides the image into two exact halves. Boring!

Yes, it is a logical way to do it, but our eyes don’t spend much time analysing the resulting composition. There’s not a lot for them to chew over, and you really want people looking at your photographs to spend time appreciating them before moving on.

The Rule of Thirds

There’s a basic photography composition rule. Mentally divide your shot into thirds vertically and horizontally. That gives you two lines going across, and two up and down. We want the main subject to be on one of the four points where those lines cross.

Here’s an example from Wikipedia.

If you look closely, you’ll see that this is a teensy bit of a cheat, because both are cropped from some wider shot. The second image has more sky, and the horizon extends further to the right.

But no matter. Cropping is an art form in itself, but for now, I have four options:

I think that any of these four holds the eye longer than the original, but if I can only pick one, I’ve got to put my thinking boots on. The sunset sky is an interesting feature, but the top half of the sky is pretty blah, to be honest. No sunset colour, and while the cloud shapes add some drama, do they make up for losing the even more intriguing rock shapes?

Not in my opinion. The bottom two images have a smaller sky that is mostly sunset, and two options for the foreground rocks. The left one jumps out at me because there is a big round rock in the corner that has a nice shape. And the right-hand image has a bit too much black space in the lower right-hand corner.

So here, just by using very basic post-processing techniques, I’ve made some solid improvements to the image:

The horizon is level, the main subject — the setting sun — is off centre, the horizon line isn’t right in the middle. The mind’s eye will chew over these choices subconsciously and it will just look more interesting and satisfying.

But wait, there’s more!

There’s a lot to be said for silhouettes against a brightly-coloured sky, and it is perfectly fine to leave the shot alone now. In fact, the most basic photo-handing programs will likely run out of options at this point, but playing around with light levels might be interesting.

I have a standard procedure: Brighten the darks, darken the lights, lift the whites and drop the blacks. In that order. Maybe apply a little sharpening or dehaze, but that’s another story.

Two main effects here. First, the sky is richer in colour and more dramatic. This is just from playing with the light levels. If I boost the vibrance and saturation, I can get even better effects, but if I go too far it will look fake. I like that sky just fine, maybe a little more colour.

Second, there is a heap of detail in the rocks. I’m in two minds here. The silhouetted rock shapes in the original are simple and dramatic, almost abstract. That’s a good thing, because the main subject is the setting sun, and you want the eye lingering on that beauty point rather than crunching over the rocks.

But I now have a crapload of texture and detail in the rocks, and that can also be good. For some images, picking the details out of the shadows can be fabulous.

On reflection, I might leave the darks dark, and just darken the lights and lift the whites. And stir in a teaspoon of vibrance:

I think that’s about as far as I can go with the colours before it starts to look overdone and artificial.

Add some vig

One more basic trick up my sleeve. Apply a bit of vignette. This has the effect of darkening the corners, which keeps the eye from skidding off onto the rest of the screen. It might sound corny, but it works. Once again, a little goes a long way:

So, there you have it. I took an image off Flickr with a commercial licence and the ability to modify the original, and played around with it to make something I think looks a hell of a lot better than the original image, which wasn’t too bad, to begin with.

Just to underline the process, although I used Lightroom, which is a professional photo-editing program, most if not all of these steps are available on basic photo handling programs that come as standard with Mac or Windows. Or even on a phone or tablet app.

Try it. You’ll like it.

Remember, after a good headline, a good featured image is your best tool to attract eyeballs onto your awesome writing.

Britni

Britni Pepper writes for Kindle Direct Publishing. She runs a blog where she reviews erotica, and rambles on about this and that. She may be reached on Twitter and Facebook.

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