Crop and exposure fixes, and where I stop
Okay. Last lesson we culled your shoot and found the keeper, probably the one right after you told everyone to relax. Now you've got a handful of photos you actually like. This lesson is what to do to them before you call them done, and honestly, a big part of this lesson is me telling you where I stop and hand it off to somebody else.
Let's do the easy stuff first because it really is easy.
Cropping
Cropping is just deciding what stays in the frame after the fact. You already practiced this in the moment when we talked about watching your edges, but nobody gets every edge perfect live, so crop is your backup plan.
A few things I actually check every time:
Get rid of the stuff you missed. That branch coming out of someone's head, a slice of garbage can lid at the corner, a stranger's leg in the background. If it's distracting and it's near the edge, crop it out. That's the whole job most of the time.
Watch where you cut joints. Don't crop right at a wrist, an ankle, or a knee. It reads like an amputation and it's distracting in a way people can't always name but definitely notice. Crop above the joint or below it, never right through it.
Leave room for the eyes to look into. If your subject's face is turned or looking off to one side, leave a little more space on the side they're looking toward than behind them. It's called leading room and it's a small thing that makes a photo feel less cramped.
Don't crop just to zoom in tighter because you can. If the shot works as a three-quarter body shot, let it be a three-quarter body shot. Cropping in hard on a photo that wasn't shot tight usually just makes it blurry, because you're stretching pixels that don't exist. This is the same reason I tell people not to buy the expensive lens before they've learned to frame properly in camera. Getting the framing right when you take the picture will always beat fixing it later. Cropping is a rescue tool, not a replacement for aiming your camera correctly the first time.
Exposure fixes
Most editing programs, even the free ones on your phone, give you sliders for exposure, highlights, shadows, contrast, that kind of thing. Here's roughly how I use them, in order:
- Overall exposure first. If the whole photo's too dark or too bright, fix that before you touch anything else. One slider, small moves.
- Highlights down if a face is blown out. If someone's forehead is glowing white and you can't see any detail in it, pull highlights down until you can. This happens a lot with window light if your subject was standing too close to the glass, so it's worth knowing the fix.
- Shadows up if the eyes are too dark. This is the one I use most. Portrait shadows tend to land right under the brow and eyes are the first thing people look at in a photo, so if they're lost in shadow, bring the shadow slider up a bit until you can see them clearly.
- Stop there, mostly. I don't push contrast or saturation much. A little goes a long way and it's really easy to make a photo look processed instead of just corrected.
Here's a real one. My daughter Leilani is naturally photogenic, more than my other two, and she knows it, which sounds like it'd make her easy to shoot and actually makes her harder. She'll find the camera and give it a look, every time, and it starts feeling like a photo of a photo instead of a photo of her. What actually fixed it wasn't lighting or editing. It was giving her a job during the shoot, "look at your brother, not me," so she stopped performing for the lens. I mention it here because editing can't fix a performed expression. You can correct exposure all day, but if the face itself isn't reading as real, no slider gets you there. Fix it at the shoot, not after.
Where I stop
Here's where I'm honest with you. Crop, exposure, maybe a little warmth or cool adjustment if the color's off. That's my whole toolkit. Heavy retouching, skin smoothing, the stuff where people remove blemishes or reshape a jawline or do the thing where a background gets swapped out entirely, I don't do that. Not because I have a philosophical objection to it, I just never sat down and learned it, and I'd rather tell you that plainly than fake my way through a demo and have you copy bad habits from me.
If you want to go further than crop and exposure, that's a real skill with its own learning curve, and it's worth finding a separate class or a good online series for it. I'm not your resource past this point. Personally, I've found that if the shoot itself is good, the pose sequence worked, the light was decent, you don't end up needing much rescue in editing anyway. That's kind of the whole point of everything we've covered so far. Get it right walking in the door and you won't be sitting at your computer trying to fix it out.
Before next time
Take three photos from your best shoot, run them through crop and exposure only, and see how far that gets you. For most of you, I think you'll be surprised it's most of the way there.