A Non-Editor's Guide to Editing Your Photos

The Five Sliders, In Order

1. Straighten and crop. Do this first, because cropping changes what the automatic adjustments measure. Straighten any tilted horizon or backdrop edge, then crop for your intended output - see one session, three platforms.

2. White balance / temperature. Drag until something you know is white looks white. This single adjustment fixes most colour complaints - the reasoning is in colour temperature.

3. Exposure / brightness. Lift or lower until skin looks right. Judge on skin, not the background.

4. Contrast. A small amount adds punch. Too much crushes shadow detail and makes skin look plasticky. Ten to fifteen percent is usually plenty on a studio file.

5. Saturation or vibrance. Last, and least. Vibrance is safer than saturation because it protects skin tones. If skin starts looking orange, you have gone too far.

Three Edits That Make Photos Worse

Skin smoothing. Studio softboxes have already minimised texture. Adding smoothing on top produces the waxy look people notice immediately, and it falls apart at print size.

Heavy filters. A strong preset applied to an already well-lit photo usually fights the lighting rather than complementing it. If you like a filter, dial it back to 30 or 40 percent.

Sharpening. Almost never needed on studio files, and it exaggerates skin texture - the opposite of what most people want.

Edit One, Apply to All

Get one photo right, then copy those settings to the rest of the session. Most phone galleries support copy-and-paste edits, and it is the difference between a set that hangs together and a set of individually optimised, mutually inconsistent images.

This matters most if the photos are going onto a grid - see building a cohesive Instagram grid.

When to Go Black and White

One specific rescue worth knowing: if the only frame you love has someone blinking or half-turned, our free AI face swap can lift a good face from another frame in the same set, and the rest of our free photo tools cover strips and previews. Use it sparingly - it works best between frames shot seconds apart under identical light.

Black and white is the right call more often than people think. It rescues photos with mixed or difficult lighting, it suits hard-light and dramatic frames, and it ages extremely well.

When converting, raise contrast slightly more than you would in colour - without hue, contrast carries the whole image. Frames shot with strong directional light convert best, which is why the patterns in the four lighting patterns are worth knowing before you shoot.

Frequently asked questions