Making your photos look good with post-processing

My wife Priya and I went on a year-long trip named India 360. We clicked tens of thousands of photos during the trip. We share them on our Facebook page and Instagram channel. But, we realised that the quality of the photos we shared weren’t high. Sure, the resolution was great and the most of the photos were good. But we weren’t getting the photos to look like what professional travel photographers do.

Late last year we met Aravind, my brother-in-law (Priya’s brother), who is an excellent photographer. He is also good with post-processing using software tools like Snapseed and Lightroom. In a span of half an hour, Aravind taught me how to make my travel photos look good…. really good. He didn’t fiddle with gimmicky settings, nor use jargon. He taught me 5… just 5…. steps that make every photo look great after post-processing. There was a bonus 6th step which should be used sparingly.

Since then, I have learnt from his principles and edited 100s of photos from our travel, making them look much better than the original shot. I even added some steps of my own to the process. I edit my photos from two places. On my Android phone, I use an app called Snapseed. I use neither Mac OS, nor Windows. On Ubuntu Linux, Adobe Lightroom doesn’t work. So my desktop photo-processing app of choice is Gimp. Continue reading “Making your photos look good with post-processing”