What Does It Mean to Edit a Picture?

If you were wondering, what does it mean to edit a picture, this in-depth guide can give you a good understanding of image editing.

Editing a picture means making some adjustments to make it look better than before. It could be adjusting the colors, the framing, white balance, contrast, etc.

In this article, we’ve also covered the basic techniques used by editors to edit images.

So, without further ado, let’s get right into it!

What Is Photo Editing?

Simply put, photo editing is making changes to an image after it is captured, it’s also called image post-processing as well.

Adding something to the image or removing something, cropping, rotating, adjusting the colors, softening or sharpening the image, etc., all come under image editing.

Basic Photo Editing Techniques

Here are a few most common image editing techniques that editors use on a regular basis.

Resizing

After taking a photograph, if you feel the need to increase or decrease the image size without cutting anything out, you can do that by resizing that image.

The most common reason for image resizing is to reduce the image file size since it’s easy to email or share small files.

Apart from the size, resizing affects the image quality as well. When you make an image large, that increases the pixel count in the image.

Too many extra pixels will make the image look dull or blurry. It’s because increasing the size more than the original one changes the details and the resolution of the image.

Cropping

If you’ve captured an image whose framing wasn’t good, you can reframe the image by cropping a portion out.

To put it simply, cropping means removing parts of an image to either drive more focus toward the subject, make a better frame, or adjust the aspect ratio.

Images are also cropped if a part of the image has some unwanted elements.

For example, you’ve taken a landscape photo of a sunset, and accidentally a boat entered the frame, which makes the image look bad. You can crop that portion of the image out.

Color-Correction

The color you, as a human, see when capturing an image isn’t the same in the photograph. It’s very common that the colors in the image look a little bit off.

And that’s where color correction comes in. It allows you to correct color wherever you feel the need.

Doing color correction is easy for the in-house photographer who took the photo, as they saw the exact color when taking that photograph. Correcting colors is a must for landscape images, and proper color correction can make the image look incredibly attractive.

Clipping Path

Removing the background of an image or extracting the image subject is called a clipping path. It’s done when the image subjects need to be put onto a better background.

After capturing a portrait, if the photographer thinks a better background would make the portrait look better, then with a photo editor, they can remove the background.

However, the clipping path is mostly used on images taken for product advertisements.

Clipping Mask

The clipping path and mask are almost the same, and the main goal is background removal.

The only difference is clipping path is used when the image subject has straight edges.

And masking is done when the subject edges aren’t straight, such as extracting the hair area of a human.

Image Sharpening

As the name suggests, it means increasing the sharpness of the image. Photographers often capture images where the subject edges are slightly blurry.

However, in most cases, you’ll have to zoom the image a little to find it out.

Image editing tools have features that increase the sharpness of the image by adding the needed amount of contrast on the edges.

White Balance

The color that the human eye sees and the color a camera captures aren’t always the same. If you’re a photographer, you might be able to relate to that, and sometimes, the camera flash light causes white objects in the image to turn blueish.

And that’s where white balance comes in. It brings the original color back to make the image look catchy.

Noise Reduction

After capturing an image, have you ever noticed discolored and bright pixels randomly spread all over the image? Well, that’s noise!

It usually happens when the camera ISO is set very high. However, it depends on a few other factors as well.

But the good news is image editing software helps remove the noise from the image very easily.

Photo Stitching

It’s done by combining a couple of images together to make a wide image, like Panorama.

What Are Pixel Editing and Parametric Image Editing?

The two most popular photo editing methods are, Pixel and Parametric. Go through to know the differences between these two.

Pixel Editing

It’s a very risky editing process, but if done well, it can be extremely rewarding as well. As the name implies, in pixel editing, the editor edits the image pixels according to their need.

However, once any change is made, there is no going back.

Therefore, if the editor makes any mistake, that’s permanent. This is why experts suggest keeping a backup copy of the images.

There is no doubt that pixel-level editing requires great skill and patience. However, the level of accuracy and details that can be achieved by pixel editing can’t be achieved by parametric editing.

Parametric Editing

On the other hand, compared to pixel editing, parametric editing is way too easy and not risky at all. Parametric edits are recorded, therefore, if anything goes wrong, you can undo that.

Parametric editing is done on the whole image. For example, if you’re adding color in parametric editing, the color will be added to the entire image.

Whereas, in pixel editing, a set amount of pixels will have the effect of the color, not the entire image.

Since parametric editing is easy and non-destructive, experts suggest beginners get a good grip on this editing type.

FAQs on What Does It Mean to Edit a Picture

The following queries will help you to understand more about this topic.

What are the most popular photo editing styles?

There are a lot of different image editing styles, but these are the top editing styles that Professional photographers use on a regular basis − High Dynamic Range image editing, Black & White, Retro & Vintage, Matte, Natural Soft, and High Contrast.

How do I edit a picture?

There are many image editing software for PCs, such as Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Canva, etc. Download any of these, and you should be able to edit images.

How do I edit a picture on my phone?

Android or IOS, whatever operating system it is, the app store must have image editing apps. Download the top-rated apps and start editing images on your phone. Snapseed, Prisma, Photoshop, and Picsart are simple photo editing apps for phones.

Conclusion

So, what does it mean to edit a picture? It means doing some tweaks to improve the image quality, such as increasing the contrast, adding some color, removing elements, adjusting the framing, etc.

Apart from some of these basic ones, there are hundreds of other things which you’ll learn about once you get into editing images.