Best Ways to Get Started Editing Photos as a Beginner

The hardest part of editing photos is actually getting started as a beginner. Being unfamiliar with editing in general as well as the photo editor that you’re using, you’ll be up against a pretty steep learning curve.f

To make things a little bit easier, it will help if you know the best ways to get started – and some easy improvements that you can make to your photos:

• Automatically adjust the white balance

In practically every photo editor nowadays there should be a tool that will help you to automatically adjust the white balance. With a single click you can make the colors in your photo look more like they did in real life, and fix any issues with blue or orange-tinted photos.

Try to make it a point to play around with the manual color settings as well, so that you can get a feel for what they do.

• Crop and improve the composition

As you are probably aware the crop tool will let you remove a section of your photo adjacent to its frame. Effectively it will let you directly alter the frame of your photo, and that in turn will enable you to improve how the subject and other elements are framed (i.e. the composition).

If you want to improve the composition more effectively, you can use techniques such as the rule of thirds or the golden ratio when you crop the photo.

• Apply filters to stylize the photo

The filters in photo editors nowadays come in many shapes and sizes. Some will help you to color grade your photos in a particular way, while others may do much more than that and mimic a certain style of photo.

All said and done, filters are an easy way to stylize your photos as they can be applied with just a few clicks. After you apply a filter you can always try to make other manual adjustments if you want to.

• Level photos that are crooked or slanted

One of the most annoying mistakes in photography is when you snap a photo that is ever so slightly crooked. Although it may seem minor at first, it could ruin the impact that the photo is able to have.

In most photo editors you can level a photo fairly easily, and there should be a tool that lets you do so. If there isn’t you can rotate the photo manually and then crop it – which is essentially exactly what the level tool will be doing anyway.

• Sharpen blurry images

For photos that look a bit blurry or have poor definition for any reason, you can fix them by sharpening them. Normally the sharpen tool is a simple slider, though there are some specialized types of sharpening tool that may be designed to fix specific types of blurry images.

While relatively easy to use, you should handle the sharpen tool with care as if you sharpen your image too much it will start to look grainy. For an example of how you can sharpen your photos with Movavi Photo Editor you can head over to https://www.movavi.com/support/how-to/how-to-fix-blurry-pictures.html.

If you start to edit your photos by using the tools and methods listed above, you should slowly but surely develop more of a feel for photo editing. More importantly you’ll be able to familiarize yourself with the editor that you’re using.

Just like any skill it will take time and experience to master the tricks involved in editing photos. That is why it is important that you know where to get started, as the sooner you get underway the faster you’ll improve.