5 Editing Mistakes That Make Your Photos Look Amateur

Post-production of your photography can feel like a minefield when you first start; overwhelming, endlessly complicated, and confusing. In this video, Pat Kay goes over five common mistakes that can ruin your images.

Before I was a photographer, I used to be a part of a photography community, just admiring the images of its members. There was one photographer who stood out to me and I still think about him a decade later. I'm not entirely sure what genre he was, I don't think he takes images anymore, and I can't necessarily explain why they were so special, but I have an idea.

This photographer would take minimalist images of mundane things; a leaf, a piece of a fence, a puddle. They were always shallow depth of field and incredibly simple. And yet, I was more captivated by what he was shooting than many of the landscape photographers in Iceland or the portrait photographers with supermodels. He made basic images interesting. There were a number of factors in play, including lens choice and aperture, but his post-processing was a masterclass. He knew how to underexpose in post, add subtle grain, and color grade the image, and create something worthy of anyone's wall. It was he that unknowingly pushed me to learn not only what works in post-production, but what was holding me back.

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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3 Comments

And one spelling mistake that does the same to your website.

And it's also an editing mistake!

Actually, it’s a spelling and a grammatical error.