Hey everyone, welcome to the June episode of our Edit Explorer series! In Edit Explorer, we dive deep into submitted photo edits, offering constructive feedback and valuable tips that can enhance your photo editing workflows and techniques. If you’re a member of ON1 Plus, you can submit your edited photos along with sidecar files for review. Today, we’ve randomly selected three submissions from the community to discuss editing techniques and inject new life into these images.

Photo #1 Cruise and Mountain Background:

Common issue: Too much foreground, especially if it’s a singular tone or color.

Recommendation: Try to crop away the excess so that it’s not distracting to the viewer. After that, if the area is bright, you could use a Lens Blur filter to remove sharpness and make it less distracting – lower the brightness in the Filter to darken. A local adjustment also works great for this.

Photo #2 Lanterns:

Common issue: Removing too many highlights can create black dots and specks.

Recommendation: Sometimes there’s not much you can do to completely recover blown out highlights. When dealing with lanterns, street lamps, etc. you can use a sun star to exaggerate the light and make the blown out area not so noticeable.

Photo #3 Heron: 

Common issue: When selectively modifying the background behind wilderness, it’s tough to completely desaturate the background while keeping the subject natural – especially if the animal is similar in tone and color to the background.

Recommendation: Keep the tones consistent in both the foreground and background or if you really want to desaturate the background – play with the opacity to ensure things look natural.

Photo #4 Desert Mountain: 

Common issue: Sky replacement doesn’t seem natural.

Recommendation: Try examining the lighting direction for the original image and see where the light is coming from. Finding a sky with that same lighting is key to ensuring the scene appears natural after a sky swap. If you can’t find a sky that fits, just go with the original one and focus on the foreground edit.

Thanks to everyone that submitted their images! Submit to the next Edit Explorer here —›