Tips for Easier and More Effective Photo Editing

Editing is a love-hate relationship for many. For some, it’s the best part of photography. For others, it feels like a chore. It’s essential to find a way to make the process enjoyable and efficient, while also maintaining consistency in the look and feel of your images.

Coming to you from Mitch Lally, this practical video shares a few strategies that have helped him embrace photo editing and stay consistent. One simple but effective tip is using the reference view in Lightroom. This tool allows you to keep a reference image visible while you edit, which helps maintain consistent color tones and styles across an entire catalog. Lally recommends setting up a reference grid of your favorite edits or creating a mood board in Canva to serve as a visual guide. It’s a straightforward way to stay on track and avoid those shifts in style that happen when editing a large set of images.

Curation, or selecting which images make it to the final edit, is a critical part of the process. Lally points out that editing hundreds of photos from a single shoot is neither efficient nor sustainable. Instead, narrowing down your selection reduces time spent in Lightroom and helps you focus on creating a cohesive set of images.

Another key point Lally touches on is the importance of subtlety in editing. Lightroom offers numerous tools that can push your image in any direction—clarity, texture, shadows, highlights—but using them all at once isn’t necessarily the best approach. For portrait photography, subtle edits that enhance without overpowering tend to yield better results. Overediting can lead to unnatural-looking images, loss of smooth skin tones, and even unwanted JPEG artifacts when compressing and exporting your final files.

Keeping things simple and natural isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about guiding the viewer’s eye. Enhancing every single detail can create distractions and diminish the impact of your subject. Avoid heavy-handed editing that turns smooth textures into something harsh or overly sharp. If you aim for clean, understated edits, your images will hold up better across different platforms, especially when you need to compress files for the web.

Lally’s advice is straightforward: use tools to stay consistent, choose your images wisely, and keep your edits restrained. By incorporating these practices, you’ll be on your way to enjoying the editing process instead of dreading it. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Lally.