Less is More
How do you edit your photos? How do you know how far to go and when to stop? In this post I would like to show you my thinking behind editing this featured photo of the moon rise.
With the tools available today the things you can do with a photo are limitless. Lightroom and Photoshop are amazing at giving us complete control of what we can do and how we can transform a photo.
It is easy to enhance a photo in minutes and make it pop, and it is also very easy to take it overboard and make it unrecognizable. In the end I think it all depends on your personal style and your personal end vision for the photo.
Analyzing the Original Photo
I took this original photo a while back when I was first learning to use my camera, but the one thing I liked about this photo is the magenta-orange color and the soft light of the sky.
The original photo already had the basic elements I was looking for, and I just needed to enhance these elements a bit. There are also other elements, mainly the crop, that distract from the main point in this photo.
The Editing Process
I made a quick video summarizing the editing process of this photo. It is not meant to go into detail of every step, but to just give you a quick overview and an idea of what was done and how easy it was. The editing took about 10 minutes and is summarized in about 30 seconds.
Final Photo
As you can see in the video, the process was pretty simple and was all done in Lightroom, which is if you are a beginner, a lot easier to start with than Photoshop. This final photo is not a master piece by any means, but I think it is a much improved version of the original snapshot taken a few years ago.
The main improvement, in my mind, is the composition. The unnecessary elements were taken out with the tighter crop, the color in the sky was enhances just a bit, and the foreground brought down a notch so that the eye is really attracted to the light and not the grass in the foreground. And that is it. Simple!
I believe that anyone can make the most awesome photos they can imagine! All they have to do is learn a few easy basics. I hope to inspire you to also pick up a camera and develop your own photographic vision.
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