In my case, I was walking down to get dinner when I was surprised by some really beautiful sunset colors in the sky. I saw orange and purple light casting over the entire city, and looking left, the sheer warmth and vibrancy of twilight struck me.

Unfortunately, my image came out of my iPhone looking dull and overexposed in the highlights — the sky was very bright.

That’s not how I saw it. I wanted to edit it to look more like the way I saw it when I walked down the hill, and also slightly exaggerate the effect to better convey how beautiful it was in person.

The result:

I skewed the white balance a bit towards purple, and applied some split toning to get the same impression I got when I was standing there taking the photo. Therein lies the parallel between image editing and acting: it’s best to slightly overdo it, as long as it doesn’t overtly distract from what you’re trying to communicate.

Know thy Edits

When editing photos, there’s a slew of sliders, knobs, buttons and levers. We can break these down into three basic groups.

Brightness and Contrast

The first thing I tend to edit in an image is getting the exposure right. It’s important to get exposure right when you are shooting*, but nobody’s perfect, and there is more to exposure than just the amount of light on the sensor.

In an image, I consider the ‘true exposure’ to be the image roughly as I saw it. The human eye has an impressive dynamic range, which means that it can see lots of detail in bright areas while still being able to see details in the shadows. Digital cameras haven’t quite caught up yet, but that’s nothing our tools can’t fix.

*more tips on how to shoot and camera settings in a future article.