How to Enhance a Photo: The Ultimate Guide


As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Whether you want photos for your social media platform, your website, or build your brand, pictures are an excellent way of communicating with your audience. However, no matter how hard you try shooting, you will still have some elements that need enhancement, ranging from a slanted horizon on a landscape picture to a blurred image. Luckily, you can use various image enhancement tactics to adjust, tweak, and correct an image, turning a mediocre shot or seemingly ruined image into a perfect picture. Keep reading for more insights.

Why you may need to enhance an image

Nowadays, everyone is looking for high-quality images, regardless of where you post them. If your photos don't match the expected quality, they won't be appealing to your target audience.

Here are more reasons why you need to enhance your images:

  • To produce images meant for advertisements
  • To make the image clearer
  • To fix the images without manually editing them
  • To create photos that look better than they were before the enhancements
  • To eliminate blemishes
  • To fix the image in cases of exposure compensation or noise reduction

How to enhance a picture

Here are some vital tips to help you enhance your images and improve their quality.

Reduce or enhance color intensity

Designers and photographers adjust image saturation settings to bring out better color intensity. Using less saturated colors brings out more faded images, while more saturated colors are brighter and bolder. In case you want a black and white photo, complete desaturation will do the trick. However, note that too much saturation can make your images look unnatural or strange. As such, unless you want a specific effect, go easy on the saturation to avoid having a picture with an almost glowing, neon look.

Sharpen your photos

If you are in print media, you'll need to be good at sharpening your photos. This technique helps you to make images that appear crisper and better focused. Blurred and obscure photos affect the quality of an image. You can use a picture enhancer tool to help you fix the poor blurriness in your pictures and add some sharpness.  Apply all the necessary settings until you get an image with the correct sharpness but one that still looks natural. This way, you will never have dull, unfocused, and hazy pictures.

Crop the photo

Cropping is one of the easiest ways to enhance a picture. Cropping eliminates distracting or unwanted areas, helps to emphasize a focal point or improve the composition. The rule of thirds is an essential technique while cropping photos. This tactic imagines a photo being split into thirds. The four points where the imagery lines intersect should be the guidelines to place your focal point. If you plan to do significant cropping, use a large image because extended cropping reduces your image's resolution and quality.

Enhance overall lighting

Even if you are a professional photographer, you know that lighting can be challenging. In most cases, you'll never lack a photo that is too dark after a shoot, but you can always improve it through editing the lighting.

While enhancing the lighting, keep in mind that it makes everything brighter. Therefore, enhance the lighting incrementally without making some areas overly bright. Remember to balance and improve your results by making contrast adjustments at the same time. Alternatively, you can use a photo enhancer to help you solve this problem with ease.

Conclusion

With the above guide, you can make image enhancements to help you produce professional-quality photos in minutes. You can also download the CorelDRAW Graphic Suite purpose-built to edit your pictures in fewer steps.


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