Say cheese on three!
Whether you’re a professional or trying to find the best photo editing software as a beginner, it’s easy to get caught up in the vast array of photo editing tools.
In reality, taking a photo is all about the basics. Photography has become much more accessible to everybody, and though digital tools can be great for camera capture, they don’t always portray the details we see in real life. That’s where photo editing and photo enhancement software play an important role.
What is photo editing?
Photo editing refers to the art of enhancing, brightening, cropping, retouching, or using photography tools to make a digital image look more like what you see with your eyes. Photo editing helps correct muted colors, low contrast, or off-balanced lighting to make images more realistic and beautiful.
How to edit photos
In a digital world where a simple TikTok photo editing hack is viral, it’s crucial to nail down the basics of every photo editing software. There are so many photo editing apps, from free photo editing software to subscription photography editing platforms. Each photo editor offers a distinct way to amplify your skills. Following these simple steps, you’ll be editing like a professional before you can click “post”.
The five steps to editing photos:
- Upload: Whether you’re on a Mac, PC, or mobile device, uploading photos from your photo library using photo editing software is easy. Most photo editing apps even allow you to select multiple photos to design a photo collage.
- Crop: Trim some of the edges to bring attention to the subject of your image with photo cropping. Crop your photo using a rotate, scale, or flip tool to achieve your desired image composition.
- Resize: Try out different resizing tools to help you format your image for standard photo prints, poster collages, website images, newsletter headers, blog posts, and social media, like TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook posts.
- Image Adjustment: Use photo enhancer tools to take your image to the next level. Adust your image for low lighting, balance exposure, enhance colors, bring up contrast, boost saturation, or fix blurry backgrounds by sharpening your image. Some photo editing software offers automated image enhancement, which instantly beautifies selfies, portraits, and landscapes.
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Save, download& share: Photo editing software allows automatic downloads and saves. You can download various image files, such as JPEG or PNG. Once saved, it’s simple to instantly share your photo edits to social media platforms, portfolios, websites, or friends and family.
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Types of photo editing
All styles of photo editing can be broken down into three categories:
- Tonal/lighting adjustment
- Color correction
- Special effects
Playing around with these three main types of photo editing can create interesting style differences. Smartphone photographers lean toward grungier styles, such as editing a picture to look like a film camera took it. On the other hand, professional photographs lean towards natural results, such as making a sunset landscape appear realistic.
What is a photo editing style?
A photography editing style refers to the theme, look, vibe, or feel that a photographer creates in their images. Editing styles can be simple or complex, but most require the right photo editing software to come to life. Sticking to a consistent style enhances your brand’s reputation and optimizes your content workflow.
Types of photo editing styles
Nature photographers, portrait photographers, street photographers, and beginner photographers use various photo editing methods. Since there are thousands of creative ways to edit a photo, let’s narrow it down to a few main styles:
Natural
This style is the most popular way to edit photos since it only requires a few minor adjustments and mainly relies on the beauty of the original photo.
Key edits:
- Boosts contrast until the dimensions of your image stand out
- Increases the saturation and vibrance until the color looks realistic
Matte
People love this for editing portrait photos, but it’s also used by many street and travel photographers. The matte style gives a faded look to your images, especially in the shadows and background.
Key edits:
- Adjust the tone of your image using a photo editing curve tool. The curve tool alters the amount of shadow or light within an image.
- By adjusting the tone, you raise the black point of your image, which creates a faded look. You can choose to adjust the tone of specific colors, like selecting only blue to brighten or darken a blue sky.
- You can also adjust the tone of the entire photo. Keep in mind that tone means lighting. If your image is bright, the matte style may not work. The matte effect will fit beautifully if your photo is dark, with many shadows.
HDR
The high dynamic range (HDR) style brightens an image’s colors, adds more contrast to the different tones, and increases the sharpness of an image. HDR photographs are intricately detailed photos. Editing with this style enhances your image’s detail. There are two ways to edit with HDR style.
- Professional: Capture the same scene in multiple ways: a dark version, a mid-level, and a bright level. You can blend these three photos using artificial intelligence (AI) tools or on your own with programs like Lightroom or Photoshop. From there, simply alter the photo’s highlights and shadows to adjust the HDR style.
- Beginner: If you only have one version of the shot, simply use your photo editing software to boost the image’s shadows, drop its highlights, increase clarity, and increase color saturation.
Cinematic
This style is great for adding your photo edits to a portfolio. Your image will turn out looking like a shot from a movie – who doesn’t want that?
Key edits:
- Decreases the exposure of your photo to create a moodier vibe
- Increases the black point by using the tone curve tool
- Desaturates your image or adds an orange/teal split tone to enhance the cinematic effect
Vintage
Social media loves the vintage look right now and how it combines fades, light leaks, and fantastic color grades. Editing a photo for Instagram or TikTok can be easy with mobile photo editing software platforms like Canva.
Key edits:
- Reduces the image’s saturation
- Increases the black point with tone curve adjustment
- Uses either white balance tools, split tone tools, or filters to add yellow, red, blue, or purple color changes
- Adds grain and low-contrast light leaks for an even greater vintage feel
Bright and airy
Even though it’s the quintessential wedding photo style, editing a photo to be bright and airy is excellent for portraits or any happy occasion. Many industries opt to use this style for their evergreen content, as it can portray a company’s culture in an inspiring way.
Key edits:
- Increases the exposure until it looks slightly overexposed
- Uses the tone curve tool to boost shadowing but doesn’t change highlights
- Uses a filter to boost the exposure at the top of your image, creating a hazy, sunny day effect
Dark and moody
This style is excellent for photographs who want to achieve a more mature look and feel in their image edits.
Key edits:
- Decreases exposure and highlights to make your image darker
- Increases the whites of your photo to enhance lighter tones
- Desaturates the image to create a moody vibe
- Adds grain texture or blue shadowing for an even moodier effect
Black and white
There are many different styles for turning a color photo into a black and white one. Generally, the results appear timeless and can be done quickly with photo editing filters.
Key edits:
- Completely desaturates your image to create a black and white look
- Uses a grain overlay or adds a color tint using split tone or color grade tools to make your photo more special
Split tone
Split toning is a popular photo editing technique. You can do it fast with the right photo editing software.
Key edits:
- Uses the split toning option on your editing software to add more blue to the photo’s shadows and yellow to the photo’s highlights
High contrast
This style is the most eye-catching photo editing technique out there. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to create.
Key edits:
- Increases the contrast
- Decreases blacks and increases whites using the black and white tool
- Increases clarity to create texture in your image
- Decreases the saturation
Photo editing ideas
Once you have edited your photo to have a particular look and vibe, enhancing your image with more photo editing tools is really easy. Depending on your experience and editing goals, it’s essential to consider more than just image style. Ready to feel inspired? Check out these photo editing ideas:
- Use autofocus. Add depth to your image instantly by adjusting the focal point with autofocus.
- Try a smart mockup or size template. Edit your photo to fit anywhere, whether it’s a social media post or a t-shirt. Using smart mockups adjusts your image size without compromising quality.
- Remove the background. Edit out any unwanted objects in the background to let the image subject stand out. Try using your photo editing software’s AI background remover for flawless results.
- AI image enhancement. Save time and enhance an image’s exposure, vibrance, and contrast in a single click with AI-powered photo editing features.
- Turn your photo into art. Use photo editing software to turn your photo into a cartoon, oil painting, or watercolor image. You can even transform your image with AI-powered animation software.
TikTok photo editing trend
Photo editing plays a vital role in social media. TikTok has significantly increased photo editing popularity, and we are here to spill the tea.
It’s no secret that the trick to getting more views can be as simple as adding a filter. With photo editing, there’s always a new, viral, and creative way to add personality to your edits.
How to edit a photo using the viral TikTok trend:
- Set exposure and brilliance to 100
- Set highlights to -35
- Set shadows to -28
- Set contrast to -30
- Set brightness to -15
- Set black point to 10
- Set saturation to 10
- Set vibrance to 8
- Set warmth to 10
- Set tint to 39
- Set sharpness to 23
- Set vignette to 23
- Set brilliance and exposure back to 0
Even when you are a beginner, or if you are looking to be a professional photo editor, don’t be afraid to check out what is trending on social media – you might be pleasantly surprised.
But editing on a mobile phone can only do so much. The number of tools provided is minimal, and that can limit the scope of your design and photo editing style.
Example of the TikTok photo editing trend
See how I used TikTok's magic photo editing recipe above to transform this image with our very own CEO Godard Abel.
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What is photo editing software?
Photo editing software aims to improve and elevate your image files. Before the invention of photo editing apps, a photographer had one chance to get the perfect shot.
In today’s world, you can easily adjust or completely change those characteristics through software solutions.
Mobile phones offer quick and easy photo editing access through filters, brightness adjustments, and color changes. However, to produce the best image possible or to tweak beyond the basics, you have to keep photo editing software on hand.
Examples of photo editing software
No matter how long you’ve been taking pictures, there are many types of digital solutions to creating the perfect image.
Highest-rated photo editing software
Photo editing software fits various business needs. Photo editing products modify, enhance, manipulate, and format image files to create the perfect appearance, size, quality, or file type. Commonly used alongside photo management and other design products, photo editing software benefits a company’s image and brand.
Best overall photo editing software:
*These are the five highest-rated photo editing software based on G2 data collected on August 2, 2022.
Photo editing software for beginners
Photo editing software tools appears complicated at first. A great way to start your career as a photo editor is to start learning design, style, and photo editing hacks with one of the best beginner photo editing software platforms.
Best photo editing software for beginners:
*These are the five easiest to use photo editing software based on G2 data collected on August 2, 2022.
Free photo editing software
All businesses need content creation tools. Photo editing is vital to this process, particularly when it comes to marketing. Fortunately, a wide range of free photo editing software options is available to use today.
Some are completely free, while others offer free trials – which can help you find the best photo editing app for your business. Remember that as your business scales, you may need to opt for premium subscriptions to get the most out of your photo editing.
Best free photo editing software:
- Pixlr
- Canva
- PicMonkey
- ACDSee
- CoreIDRAW
- Adobe Creative Cloud Express
- Picmaker
- Resizing.app
- EasePaint Watermark Remover
- Let's Enhance
*These are the top ten free photo editing software based on G2 data collected on August 2, 2022.
Ready? Smile!
Photo editing is a useful skill for anyone with a camera, whether you're a professional photographer or just trying to snap the next Insta-worthy pic. The right photo editing software can help you capture, enhance, and cherish every moment.
Don’t miss the bigger picture. Check out the 18 best photo editing software platforms of 2022.
Madeleine Marshall
Madeleine Marshall is a former SEO and Content Marketing Intern for G2, where she utilized both technical analysis and motivation-driven communication to bring her writing to life. An incoming senior at Northwestern University pursuing a double major in Economics and Psychology, Madeleine strives for opportunities that are not only data-driven, but also thought-driven.
