The Bare-Minimum Edit: Crop and Nudge the Brightness
Okay. We've done kitchen tables, hikes, glare. Today's the one I've been putting off a little, because it's the part I'm worst at.
Editing.
Here's the thing. I know there are apps out there with sliders for everything, contrast and saturation and highlights and shadows and something called "clarity" that I've never once understood. I don't use them. Not because I tried them and rejected them on principle, but because I opened one, got overwhelmed, and closed it. That's not fancy, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What I actually do, every time, is two things. Crop, and nudge the brightness. That's it. That's the whole edit. And honestly, for most everyday photos, that's plenty.
Why bother editing at all
If you got the light right and you're standing where you should be, you might not need to touch the photo. But most of the time there's a little extra stuff at the edges, or the shot's a touch dark, and thirty seconds of cleanup makes a real difference. It's the last small step, not a fix for a photo that has bigger problems. If the whole thing's blurry or badly lit, cropping it won't save it. Go back and reshoot. We've talked about that.
Cropping
Open the photo in your phone's regular photo editor, whatever came with it. You don't need a separate app. Look for the crop tool, it's usually an icon that looks like two overlapping corners.
What I'm looking for when I crop:
- Get rid of the junk at the edges. A trash can in the corner, half a stranger's elbow, a chunk of ceiling you didn't mean to include.
- Get closer to your subject if you can. If you didn't get low and close enough when you shot it, sometimes cropping in gets you part of the way there. Not all the way, a crop can't fix a photo taken from fifteen feet back, but it helps.
- Use the grid lines that show up while you're cropping the same way you use them while shooting. Put the interesting thing on a line, not dead center.
A caution here: crop too tight and you lose quality, the image gets a little soft or blocky, especially if you're going to print it big. For a text message or Instagram, don't worry about it. For a print, crop gently.
Brightness
Same editor, look for a little sun icon, or a slider labeled brightness or exposure. Slide it up a touch if the photo's dark. That's really all I do. I don't touch contrast, I don't touch saturation, I leave white balance alone because I never trust myself to get it back to normal once I start messing with it.
A little goes a long way. Nudge it, look at it, nudge it again if it needs it. If you're sliding it dramatically to fix a photo, the problem was the light when you shot it, not the edit. The edit's for a small correction, not a rescue.
An honest confession
I tried to photograph an old indigo quilt top I've had sitting in a closet upstairs for two years now. Never finished it, don't know if I ever will. I thought maybe if I got a really good photo of it, laid it out properly, cropped it right, brightened it up a little, I'd fall back in love with it and actually finish the thing.
Didn't work. I still haven't touched it. It's still up there.
But the photo was nice. I cropped in so the piecing filled the frame, brightened it just a hair because that closet light is dim, and it actually looked like something. Better than it deserved, honestly, given how long it's been sitting.
And that's kind of the point of the bare-minimum edit. It's not going to fix your relationship with an unfinished project. It's not going to turn a bad photo into a good one. But it'll take a decent photo and make it look like you meant it.
One opinion I'll stand behind: a clean, honestly cropped photo of something ordinary, your kid's face, a stack of fabric, an old directory page for your dad, is worth more than something over-processed and fancy. I'd rather see the real thing than a filtered version of it. That's why I keep my editing so bare-bones. I want the photo to still look like what it actually was.
Before next time
Pick three photos from your camera roll, ones you like but that feel a little off, and just crop and brighten them. Nothing else. See how far that gets you.