Photo Editing for Beginners

Discover the World of Photo Editing: Post-Processing for Beginners

We’ll help you get started with tips and tricks

When you start with photography, you might also begin exploring the basics of post-processing. In this blog, our expert Uli guides you so you can start editing your photos well-prepared. Uli has been a photographer for decades and has been editing his photos since 1995. He explains more about photo editing by answering a number of common questions.

Why should you edit your photos?

Although you may want them to be perfect straight away, the photos you take aren’t always perfect right out of the camera. Sometimes the images don’t fully match what you saw with your own eyes. This can have several causes. For example, our eyes perceive colors, brightness and contrasts differently from a camera sensor. You might also accidentally tilt the camera, resulting in a crooked horizon, or you may not have zoomed in enough on your subject. Sometimes you simply prefer the image in black and white. These are all reasons to edit your photos. On top of that, editing can be fun and creative—there are many possibilities within editing software.

What are the most important adjustments you can make?

When editing your photos, there are many options. You can make classic corrections such as removing a dominant color cast—does your image look yellowish? You can fix that. You can also correct the white balance, contrast and brightness.

Other useful options include sharpening your photos and reducing noise. You can also remove red-eye in portraits, erase distracting elements, or even add elements to your image.

Finally, editing allows you to give your photo a personal style. By choosing a certain crop, atmosphere or color tones, you can create a recognizable look that people will associate with your work.

Which program should you use?

That depends on your budget and experience. Paid editing programs like Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Luminar or Capture One are generally easier to use than free tools. The best program depends on your preferences, so it’s worth testing a few. Adobe software is often quite beginner-friendly.

What’s the difference between Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom?

The differences between the two programs are becoming less noticeable, but traditionally Adobe Photoshop (Elements) is a classic image-editing program, while Adobe Lightroom was originally a RAW converter. Today, Lightroom offers increasingly advanced editing tools, and Photoshop can now also convert and edit RAW files. Let’s take a closer look at both.

Adobe Lightroom

In Lightroom’s Develop module, you’ll find a series of clear tools that allow you to adjust white balance, exposure, brightness, and contrast. You can also change individual colors, sharpen images, reduce noise, straighten lines and add effects.

Here you'll find an example after adjusting the brightness:

You can also change individual colors, sharpen images, reduce noise, straighten lines and add effects. Everything you can do here is well-defined—it's hard to “go too far.” However, Lightroom does not allow you to add text to images or combine multiple photos into one composite. One useful advantage: every editing step can be undone, making Lightroom very forgiving.

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop offers far more possibilities because you can divide your image into layers. This allows for much more complex editing if you want. Unlike Lightroom, there is no single streamlined editing toolset—Photoshop is broader and more versatile.

Photoshop offers countless editing options, but some changes are not reversible, which makes it less forgiving than Lightroom.

Once you understand the differences and possibilities of both programs, you can choose the one that fits your workflow. If you mainly want to adjust basic aspects like exposure and contrast, Lightroom is ideal. If you want more advanced editing and like to experiment, Photoshop is the better choice.

Are there any free editing programs you can use?

Yes, there are several free options. For example, the RAW converters RAW-Therapee or Darktable offer extensive editing possibilities, and there are many YouTube tutorials available for them. For classic photo editing, GIMP is a free program with a large range of tools—though it is more complex to learn. Fortunately, many beginner tutorials are available.

Where can I learn more about post-processing?

At the Kamera Express Academy, we offer a free basic course on photo editing. This course provides the first essential steps for anyone who wants to start with post-processing. In Germany, we also offer beginner courses focused on editing in Adobe Lightroom, and from 2024, we will also offer courses on Adobe Photoshop.