Making an Image POP with 2 Simple Edits with ANY Photo Software |photoshop - iPhoto - GIMP|

Throughout my own journey with photography I have come across two big misconceptions:

One, the images I saw online that I wanted to reproduce were strictly all shot in camera and two, you must spend a lot of time in post production when editing photos.

After spending hours upon hours editing my images to only want to throw them all away led me to the conclusion that I had no idea what I was talking about. Sure you can use reflectors or off camera flash and whatnot to get the image straight out of camera to look like the image on the right. For real though...have you ever tried to use a reflector when shooting by yourself? I have tried it a few times and eventually just throw it to the ground instead of looking like a lion tamer in a circus, balancing a big circle object in one hand trying to hit the sun and a sweet spot and my camera in the other hand...trying to focus and compose an image. No thank you. I sweat easily enough without all the extra action. (I bet the first photographer to shout "Show me Tiger!" at a model was balancing a reflector in one hand.)

So all that being said and off my chest.... All editing programs use the basic adjustments of Contast/Brightness and Levels. Sure there are a lot more to editing software than that, but those two adjustments, I believe, help your photography more than any other adjustments.  If you are using the mother of all editing programs Photoshop, the pre-installed iPhoto program on your Mac, or the ever popular free editing program GIMP (which you can download here free at gimp.org) you can make your images pop with these two little adjustments.

First, check out the image I took straight out of camera. I then edited the same image in three different editing programs using the same adjustments in each; Brightness/Contrast and Levels.

You can see that each editing program offers it's own quality of adjustments to an image. While there is a visual difference, compare what you see to how much money each program cost; Photoshop from $600 and up - iPhoto is free with your Apple computer....which start out over $1000 - and of course GIMP which is a totally free download. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but for making this slight adjustment, pretty much any photographer of any level and/or tax income bracket can make this edit. See below where these adjustments are down in each program:

PHOTOSHOP: 
I shoot in RAW format, so when I open an image in photoshop I first edit the image in the Adobe Raw editor. I do 90% of my editing in the Adobe RAW editor.....you guessed it...brightness/contrast and levels adjustments. Below is a screenshot of the RAW editor and where I make those adjustments on my images.

Note: if you don't shoot in RAW format but still have Photoshop, you can still use the Adobe RAW editor. Simply view the images in Adobe Bridge, then "right click" on the image you want to edit and choose to open the image with Adobe RAW. 

iPHOTO:
iPhoto is nice if you have a Mac. It is a great program to manage all of your photos with and if you are a Apple fanboy like myself and use an iPhone and an iPad, it easily pushes your photos to those devices as well as Apple's iCloud storage. And...the editor isn't all that bad. It is simple to make adjustments and move on without being overwhelmed with the selections and size of something like Photoshop. You can make the adjustments as seen below. You can click on an image and click on the "edit" button to bring the editor up.

GIMP:
Gimp is a pretty good piece of photo editing software. The actual program itself looks and acts a little dated. I felt like I was using Photoshop from 1995. But...it is totally free. If you have ever used Photoshop in the past, you will be able to fire around this program in just a few minutes of playing around. Making adjustments to images in the program is pretty simple.

Doing post production to an image doesn't have to cost you time and money. Sure you can really dig in deep when editing your photos and there is always more you can learn. But if you want to save your sanity, your money, and your time there are plenty of options out there for all of us.

Have any questions on editing or any of these programs? Feel free to hit me up in the comments, on facebook, or shoot me an email!

FACEBOOK or ryan@ryandaleyphotography.com