Video: Keep it simple with quick and easy photo editing techniques

 

 

In many of his videos, nature and landscape photographer Adam Gibbs shows his raw image files alongside his final processed photos. He shares the original files to provide transparency and illustrate the amount of processing he does to his images. In many cases, Gibbs's editing is fairly light. It's not because he doesn't enjoy processing his images, but he doesn't enjoy spending hours on his computer editing just a single image. Unless he has a specific idea that requires combining images and working with many layers, Gibbs doesn't spend much time editing any one photo.

In Gibbs's new video, seen below, he goes through the editing process for some of his photos. It's not a full-blown editing tutorial for advanced Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop users. Still, it's a great video for photographers who are just learning the ropes of photo editing or perhaps want to learn how to efficiently process landscape photos that look realistic. "I am a true believer in trying to get as much as possible done in camera before you bring it into Photoshop," said Gibbs. "And I really recommend to people that if you're not into computers and you just enjoy taking photographs, but you don't enjoy processing, then I highly recommend you learn as much as you can about photography and how to use your camera. [Learn] about light, composition, all of those great things, so you can get all of that done in camera so that when you do eventually process those images, you have to do very little to them."

Subtlety is an important part of Gibbs's editing process. In many cases, he makes minor adjustments to brightness and contrast to add a bit of pop to the image. He sometimes employs local adjustments to brightness and contrast using dodging and burning. Even when Gibbs uses layers to combine different images for focus stacking or exposure blending, it's still in service to a natural-looking image.

To see more from Adam Gibbs, visit his website and follow him on Vero. You can see more of his excellent videos by visiting his YouTube channel.

(Via Adam Gibbs)