How to Improve the Quality of a Photo?

Photography as a craft has a lot of pitfalls. There are a lot of small factors that can chip away at the quality of your shot, and, unfortunately, you can’t keep in mind all of them all the time. Especially when taking pictures in the field and having no chance to recapture a fleeting moment. Thankfully, there are a lot of tricks for how to improve the quality of a photo and enhance the image overall. Let’s take a look at some stuff you could do and parameters that you have control of.

Correct the Exposure

Every photograph begins with the light hitting your camera. Hence, it is essential to have proper lighting to get good-looking images. It’s great when you have control over light with a setup in a studio. But what can you do about the sun shining bright? Most photo editors have the option to correct the exposure level when there is too much (or too little) light. Even some cameras have such built-in tools.

Balance the Color

Color is a little more tricky to deal with than light. You can curtain the windows to make the room darker. But how to enhance a photo in terms of color? How do you make a red dress less or more red? The easiest answer – fix it in post-production. You can easily make each color pop or make your picture more mellow and desaturated, depending on what you want to achieve.

Increase the Sharpness

Taking a crisp, clear picture requires perfect focus. But adjusting the lens, both manually and automatically, takes time. And when you have to think on your feet, those precious seconds can be enough to miss the moment completely. So you just have to take the shot and go with it. However, you can add some sharpness in a photo editor. This is not a panacea but can help if the focus was a little off.

Crop the Frame

Composition can make the image look more expressive and captivating. A lot of times, a proper composition is already built into a photo, you just have to crop away all the extra stuff on the sides to frame it the right way. This is one of the easiest tricks you can do since nearly any app that can open a photo can also crop it.

Retouch the Image

Another thing that gets in the way of a well-composed shot is, well, other things. You can’t remove people from streets, blemishes from skin, and leaves falling in front of the camera on an autumn day. Except that you can. There are many photo editing programs, some even powered by an AI, that seamlessly iron out wrinkles, artifacts, small defects, or even remove huge objects from the image completely.

Apply Effects

Another way to enhance the quality of a photo is to apply some sort of artistic filter. The diversity of filters and their effectiveness in masking the flaws depends on the photo editor. However, by applying a filter to the image, you risk making the photograph look somewhat unnatural and over edited. Sometimes this is a worthy trade-off, though, especially when purposely striving to achieve an outlandish look of your photos.

Extra Touch: Add Captions and Stickers

If you are willing to become professional and spread your work as such, it’s better to protect your photos with a watermark. Alternatively, if you wish to make your picture look more fun and goofy, why not slap some stickers and captions on it? Or you can go one step further and create a collage or a double-exposed image (which is also a good way to hide defects).

Conclusion

Now you are armed with the knowledge of how to improve the picture quality. There are a lot of other things you can learn, and if you want to have a glimpse of them, check out this guide on how to enhance photos. Hopefully, you’ll be able to take your photography and yourself as a photographer to the next level. Just remember that being perfect is impossible, but being better – is.