On this page
Editing a photo like a professional mostly comes down to working in the right order. The usual sequence is to pick the strongest frame first, then fix exposure and white balance, straighten and crop, make local adjustments, refine color and contrast, and finish with retouching, sharpening, and export. Each step builds on the one before it. Professionals also tend to make smaller changes than beginners and stop sooner.
To show what each stage actually does, this guide follows one example photo from the raw file to the finished version. It’s a portrait of a woman at a kitchen table in late-afternoon light, with a window on her left and the ceiling light on. The camera exposed for the window, which left her face a little dark. The bulb has added an orange tint to her skin, and the table edge slopes slightly downhill.
The tool names here come from Adobe Lightroom. Capture One, Darktable, and most phone editors have the same controls under slightly different labels.
Start With RAW Files and a Ruthless Cull
The portrait was shot as a RAW file, which matters later. A RAW file holds far more of what the sensor recorded than a JPEG, so a bright window or an orange cast can be pulled back without the picture breaking up. A JPEG has already had those decisions made by the camera, and much of the extra information is gone.
There were about forty frames from that afternoon. Before any editing, they get narrowed down to the one or two worth the time, using Lightroom’s flags or star ratings. Sharp eyes come first, then an expression that looks natural, then hands and posture. In this case, the best frame isn’t the most technically perfect one. It’s the one where she was halfway through laughing, with her eyes still in focus. Editing a weak frame well rarely beats choosing a strong one, and culling first also makes it easier to keep a set consistent later.
Fix Exposure and White Balance First
Exposure and white balance change the whole picture at once, and on this portrait they get done before anything else. Her face is still too dark at this stage. Skin color judged on a face that dark usually looks wrong once it’s brightened, so any color work would have to be done twice.
The white balance eyedropper does most of the work here. Clicking it on something that should be neutral, like the white mug on the table, removes most of the orange from the bulb. Skin still looks slightly warm afterward, which is fine, since a portrait with perfectly neutral skin can feel cold. Raising the overall exposure by roughly two-thirds of a stop brings her face up to a natural brightness.
Brightening her face also brightens the window, and the view outside starts to wash out. Pulling the Highlights slider well down brings most of it back. A small lift in Shadows opens up the darker side of her face. On the Whites and Blacks sliders, holding Alt or Option as you drag shows the exact point where detail begins to clip. Usually only a small move is needed here, and dragging these sliders to their extremes tends to leave a photo looking flat and overprocessed.
Crop, Straighten and Correct the Lens
The sloping table edge is the first thing to fix, because the eye notices a tilt before it notices almost anything else. Straightening it trims the corners slightly. A crop to a 4:5 shape then removes the bright edge of the window frame on the left, which was pulling attention away from her face, and puts a little more space in front of her. If you’re unsure where to cut, our guide to the rules of composition in photography covers the principles that matter most when cropping.
Lens profile corrections go on at this stage too. On this frame, they take out the slight darkening in the corners and a touch of barrel distortion that was bending the kitchen cupboards. Wider lenses need much more correction than this, and our article on post-processing wide-angle photos goes into that in detail.
Local Adjustments: Where Most of the Craft Happens
So far, each slider has changed the whole photo, her face and the room behind her together. To brighten only her face, the edit needs a mask. Lightroom can find the subject, the sky, or the background automatically with one click. For areas it doesn’t pick up, such as a single corner of the room, a brush or gradient can be painted in by hand.
On this portrait, the first mask is a soft radial one over her face, and it raises the exposure slightly so she stands out from the busy shelves behind her. The second mask darkens the far corner of the room, where a bright cupboard door was pulling the eye away. Each change is small, and you’d struggle to spot either one by itself. With both in place, though, her face becomes the first thing you look at.
This is the digital version of what darkroom printers called dodging and burning, and it works because viewers tend to look at the brightest part of a picture first. Our guide on how to use light in photography explains that idea from the shooting side. A good test is to toggle the masks off and on. If you can see the edges of them, they’re too strong.
Color, Contrast and Skin Tones
Even after the white balance fix, the orange from the ceiling bulb lingers in her cheeks. Most skin tones sit in the orange channel of the HSL panel. Bringing its saturation down a few points and its luminance up a little keeps her warm but takes away the sunburnt look. If the picture needs more color overall, Vibrance is a better choice than Saturation for a portrait, since it holds back on skin tones and works mostly on colors that are still muted.
Faces don’t take much contrast before they start to look harsh. Clarity is the slider to be careful with. It boosts midtone contrast, which brings out texture nicely on stone or weathered wood, but on skin it picks out every pore. So on this portrait, Clarity stays near zero, and the extra depth comes from a gentle tone curve. A black-and-white version would be different, since contrast would be doing much more of the work there. Our guide on how to use contrast in black and white photography covers that separately.
Retouch, Sharpen and Export
Retouching comes late, once it’s clear what the finished frame looks like. Lightroom’s Remove tool takes care of a crumb on the table and a power socket on the wall behind her. Removing anything bigger, like a person walking past a window, is usually easier in Photoshop.
The light in the kitchen was low, and the camera ended up at ISO 3200, which left visible grain. Lightroom’s Denoise tool handles that much better than the older noise reduction sliders did. Sharpening goes on after denoising, and it’s worth judging at 100 percent zoom. If you hold Alt or Option while moving the Masking slider, Lightroom shows which areas are being sharpened. Raising it keeps the sharpening on edges like eyelashes and hair and away from smooth skin, which would otherwise start to look gritty.
For sharing online, the file is exported in the sRGB color space and resized to the size it will actually be viewed at. A picture sized for the web looks crisper than a full-size file that a website shrinks on its own.
What Makes an Edit Look Professional?
Looking back at the before and after, the changes are smaller than they feel while you’re making them, and that restraint is most of what makes the result look professional. Amateur edits tend to give themselves away through halos around edges, orange or waxy skin, and skies darkened almost to black, all of which come from pushing sliders too far.
If this portrait were one of twenty from the same afternoon, they would also need to look like they belong together. In Lightroom, the edit from this frame can be synced to the rest of the set. Each photo then gets small corrections of its own, because her position and the light shifted a little from shot to shot. Presets do something similar, although most need adjusting for each photo. It’s also worth opening the finished image on a phone and on a computer screen, because a color cast or a dark shadow can look fine on one and obvious on the other.
What Software Do Professionals Use?
Lightroom Classic is the usual choice for organizing and editing large numbers of photos, with Photoshop for detailed retouching. Capture One is popular in studios, partly for its color handling and tethered shooting. Darktable and RawTherapee are free RAW editors that follow the same workflow, and on a phone, Lightroom Mobile and Snapseed both handle RAW files and local adjustments. The order you work in matters more than which of these you choose.
Editing goes further when the photograph is strong to begin with. Beyond the Click, our 30-day online course, works on the decisions you make before the edit, with personal feedback on your own photographs.
