Few effective tips to achieve clean and consistent photo editing

Do you follow a colour style when it comes to edit your photos? Have you figured it out yet?

You must have noticed scrolling through Instagram, that every great photographers have their own unique style. It makes them different and recognizable. As a photographer it is important to have a clean and consistent photo editing style. Editing or photography has no set rule but this consistency will definitely define your work and set you apart from other photographers.

Depending on your niche you can produce great aesthetic images with consistent and clean editing style. Here are few elements that I think will help you to achieve this.

FINDING YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY STYLE

A photography style is what will determine the niche. It will also helps in maintaining consistency of the type of the photo. One of the best way to find out the photography style is to determine what type of photos you like to look at the most and the patterns in your clicking style.

If you are photographing for awhile, you just need to look for patterns of your previous images. You can certainly see your own taste in photography already reflected in those images. Also you can be proficient in many photography styles.

Also if you’re a beginner, you just need to discover your culture, preference and taste in photography and get a direction of your own unique journey. You can make a list of photography genres that you can like to experiment with and if you need to find what you love, you need to be exposed to all different genres. Here are some important genres out there:

• Portrait Photography
• Landscape Photography
• Photojournalism
• Street Photography
• Food Photography
• Product Photography
• Architectural Photography
• Event Photography

Now just go out and experiment. Equipment doesn’t matter but creativity is important. Studying other photographs and work on using that as a foundation will also help you on the way.

MAINTAINING CONSISTENCY THROUGH EDITING

 

With photography style, editing your images in certain matter will help maintaining the consistency of the final image. Here are some tips that will improvise.

Photos by Brandon Woelfel

1. Make use of the filter

It is certainly the easiest way to edit your images using in-built filters. There are many great application out there like VSCO that has many great filters. Even on Instagram, there are many filters that can count as final touch before uploading the photo. Using the same filter before uploading the photo every time will create a consistent look.

2. Learn using color palette intelligently

Limiting the exposure of color in certain way will help the photos look consistent like desaturating blue or green in every photo or using certain tint in every photo or editing in warmth or colder tone. These all may seem restrictive but it’ll help in maintaining the theme absolutely.
Also if you’re a beginner and still learning editing your preference, you can simply choose the color of the subject and clicking between 3 to 5 color. Like predominantly using same color in every photo will make a consistent theme.

3. Creating your own Preset

Presets are similar as using filters but presets are original, as it is your own creation. There are many ways to tweak the image according to your own preference and style. It is a bit updated but playing with the tone curve, HSL, and split toning with reading between the histogram often gives the best result.

Tone curve is divided in 5 parts: black, shadow, midtone, highlight and white from left to right. So it gives more precision editing the contrast in the image. HSL is Hue, Saturation and Luminance which can determine the color theory of the image. Split toning determine which color will be in the shadows and highlight, giving photos an unique dimension. Also adjusting the temperature can make the image either warm or cold. And the tint can tweak the white balance of the image.

In the end, if you want to edit lots of images and play with the color of the image, consider shooting on RAW format. RAW keeps all the information that camera captures allowing you to make drastic changes in the image without losing much details. Photography is a creative long journey, and certainly there is no rule but I hope these will help you out and make your journey smoother.