Another 5-minute edit: from OK to Nice! (Blog #24)

Welcome to my latest blog, which today is about how to turn an ordinary snapshot into an image you are happy to have in your portfolio and share with friends, family, and followers on social media? This is another one of my 5-minute edits.

First I want to give you some background to the photograph I will be editing. Earlier this year I spent a long-weekend in the Lake District, during which the weather was extremely cold and on one day extremely foggy. The day it was foggy I went out to Derwentwater to try to get some photos of the fog that was lying on the surrounding hills and on the lake itself. I walked about from location to location looking for that one great shot, but whilst I did manage to get one or two very good photos, the majority at first seemed very mundane and uninspiring. However, all was not lost, so I want to take you through my simple, quick and easy workflow that helped me turn this RAW photo -

into this in under 5-minutes using the Snapseed photo editing app on my smartphone -

Let's begin by taking a close look at the RAW photo and start thinking about which elements we could improve, discard, or retain.

First, there's the overall colour, which is obviously blue and which gives the photo a very cold look. I might see if warming it up a bit works. Then there's the question of whether or not the composition can be improved by some judicious cropping. In any case I plan on cropping to 1:1 so that I can post the final image on social media. I have a nice leading line directing the viewer's eye to the building - which I could make the subject of the photograph - that is partially hidden by trees and fog. Do I need the second, righthand jetty in the photo, but if I crop it out totally am I going to lose too much of the righthand side of the image?  The more I look at the photo, the more I am wondering if the horizon and horizontals need tweaking. These are all questions that can only be answered by trial and error, and by finding an overall appearance that works.

So first off, I checked the horizontal and it did need correcting, not by much, but enough to make a difference. 

Next, I went to the crop tool to play with various options, all based on a 1:1 aspect ratio. Based on the 3x3 grid type, I managed to position the building, which by now I had decided was to be the subjct, one an intersection, or as close as I could get it. This meant sacrificing some of the righthand side of the composition, but this was fine as I wanted to lose some of the righthand jetty.

The tune tool is invariably my next port of call when editing, and it's probably the one that, whilst you can play around with brightness, contrast, saturation, ambiance, hightlights, shadows, and warmth, is made simple by allowing you to hit the magic wand and let Snapseed do it all for you. This might be considered to be cheating by the purists, but this style of editing is for fast editing not pains takingly labourious editing. Anyhow, I did use the magic wand and am happy with the result.

Next in my work flow is looking at the structure to see if some of the detail in the image can be brought out. The image has a nice, soft, almost dreamy, ethereal feel to it, which some days I would be happy to leave as is, but when I dialed the structure up to 100% the building in the middle distance popped out, as did more of the detail of the trees. I decided I liked this.

Could the image be warmed up, losing some of the coldness? For this I went to the white balance tool. As when tuning a photograph, it is possible to get Snapseed to automatically adjust the temperature. I took this easy option, and liked outcome. I had lost the cold blues, which were now towards the teal end of the colour chart. The introdution of a pink tint certainly warmed things up, and overall produced a pleasing colour palette.

If you have been looking closely at my photo you will have noticed a white object in the foreground to the left of the jetty.  This is a distration and had to be removed, which I did using the healing tool.

All that was left was to add a frame because I think framed photographs look better on social media, and to add by name discretely in the bottom left corner.

All of this editing was done in around 5-minutes. The thought processes behind the decisions to do this or that, or whether one edit works better than another edit are fairly rapid, and are sharpened with practice.

I hope you've enjoyed me taking you through another 5-minute edit, and that you employ some of the processes I have outlined. The only way to develop your photography and editing skills is through constant practice.

© Mike Young 2024.