8 Quick Photo Editing Tips for Beginners

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I think an important element in editing your own photos, is self awareness. When you first look at your photo, pay attention to where your own eye goes/follows. What feeling do you get and is it the same you want to portray. Is the subject clear or confusing/ not sure what the main interest is. The biggest thing that helped me, as James pointed out, is coming back to it. Many times if necessary, and even the next day. Anyway, that's my thoughts. Great video..

I always crop last, and save a version with no crop. The reason why is there may be more than one ideal crop. For Facebook and some application aspect ratio can be fairly random. But if printing, a 4x5 ratio may be ideal. If sending to a stop photo site, I will crop more loosely as the buyer will have his own crop needs.

Great video as always James! I'd like to see a typical beginning to end photo edit from you (maybe with a few different examples to account for diverse scenarios that you'd likely encounter doing landscape or travel photography). I'd really like to see that :)

Been editing for a couple years now, actually really useful to hear the basics again, so much of the basic adjustments I can do without even really thinking about them and its good to be reminded to think about them a bit more than I do!

Re: the shadows in the waterfall... I totally agree with your choice. Bringing up the shadows made the cave wall too distracting. It's nice to be able to recover a lot of the detail if you feel that serves the image, but by and large I'm a big believer in shadows being shadows for a reason. I'm not a huge fan of cranking them up just because I can. If for some reason I want to, I'd bracket first anyway to get the maximum dynamic range.

Local adjustments with keeping in mind the hole image is very a useful tip. Might explain some issues with my editing

our taste in photography and editing couldn't be further apart, but i still love watching your videos, learn a lot from them and love your humor! greetings from Hungary!

on the part of lens distortion, some of my photos in the past have actually benefited from a distortion. it gives a more camera esc element like pointing up at a tree or building. sometimes that distortion without a tilt shift is great.

Wow, that was terrific. I really mean that. Overview is what I needed instead of burying myself in the details (sliders). That tip about not wasting time on a bad image is gold. Also about walking away and coming back. Thanks :)

Love to see this kind of video, talking about methods rather than telling people what they should be doing. I personally have the lens correction as the first step in my flow simply because I am unorganized and might use a different lens on one image or another so I just make that the first step in my process so I can't forget it and then start at the top with WB and work my way down. I might jump around a little bit to make minor adjustments to the shadows or whites after making color adjustments, but overall, it makes things easier for me and I usually don't forget anything.

THANK YOU! Your thinking different always inspires me!!!

Seeing this really makes you respect all the pre-digital photographers!

Love the mid-week video, James. Tip 7 is my favorite.

Great tips for simplifying the process, thanks James. Also that's a really nice pony!

This video really helped me. I am a photo editing novice and your advice is absolutely on the money. Thank you! Paul

Just got into photography again and I really enjoy your videos. Lots of great tips there. You got yourself a subscriber.

Love it when you do LR editing tips! In fact, the first photo that you viewed was the one that I purchased and received the other day. Thank you!

Thanks James, good set of tips. I'll throw one more in for the list, even before cropping. If you need to do any straightening or perspective correction, you want your crop to be based on the corrected image.

Wow, this was a reallly really great video! Thank you!