The Final Touch: How to Properly Edit Stock Photos

Editing, retouching, post-production, however you call it it boils down to the same point: giving your images a final touch as a chance to catch clients’ eyes and generate more sales for your images. Before you even start shooting remember that you want to avoid over editing, and spending a lot of time on the final touches - so make sure your camera settings are set up to set you up for success.

Generally speaking, stock images are edited in almost the same way as other photos. Yet, there are certain aspects you should be careful about, and we’ll share them in this post.

Light and Shadows

There’s always a possibility you’ll end up with photos that are too bright, too dark, or that the general lighting on the sat wasn’t really on it's A game. When you sit down to edit those photos you should try and tweak the shadows/highlights, brightness and contrast, levels, exposure and tone of the image.

If there’s a specific part of the photo where the difference between lights and shadows is a bit much, you can use a mask tool and edit only that part of it.

Colors

Keeping the colors as natural as possible is the key to making a sale, because most clients will edit the photos a bit themselves. So if you end up with images that look warmer, or cooler, you should adjust temperature, tint or white balance. Yet, if you only want to make certain colors darker or lighter, editing the HSL (hue, saturation and luminance) is the way to go.

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Noise

Noisy photos don’t even get accepted in most agencies, because noise makes photos look like they have poor quality. Most common reasons for noisy photos are sharpness settings, incorrect ISO or exposure, but also the dust on your lenses.

To minimize noise while you’re shooting make sure you lower your ISO, avoid long exposure and oversharpening your images. Also, always make sure your lenses are perfectly clean before you start shooting.

If you’ve ended up with noisy photos, you can deal with this by using a noise reduction tool which will resolve your issues with luminance and color. Color noise usually shows up in areas that should be one color, while luminance noise looks like film grain.

Composition

When you reach the post-production phase of your shoot, it might happen that you realize that you’ve failed to frame your main subject properly, or that there are some details in the background which are distracting. The solution for this is simple cropping. You can crop to adjust orientation, distance, angle or perspective. This way, the buyers will have more options to choose from, and you’ll have a higher chance of selling your stock photos.

Irrelevant Elements

Brand logos in any form (if you don’t have an image release for them) will get your photos declined due to possible legal liabilities. Other irrelevant elements include mess in the backgrounds of your stock photos, or stains on your model’s clothing. The best solution is to avoid these situations, especially the brand logos, while you’re shooting.

However, if any of these sneak into the photos, you can use the patch tool or spot healing tool to edit the irrelevant elements out of the image.

Metadata

Metadata includes your photo title, description, keywords and other relevant data a stock agency might require during uploading. While you can do this in Lightroom or Photoshop, it can take a lot of your time to enter all relevant details for each image. Which is why you should use StockStudio.

Once you’ve selected and edited the images you want to distribute commercially, upload them to your StockStudio account and you’ll be able to add this data in batches (and submit photos to agencies of your choice at the same time). This process will save you a lot of time, and help you keep all the information organized and easily accessible from anywhere.

Also, some stock agencies might require other types of metadata, so make sure you’ve checked the submission requirements before uploading.

Extra Tips

The tips in this section might not be directly tied to the editing process, but they’ll certainly be of great help.

Always shoot in RAW format, instead of JPEG. The reason is simple - JPEG automatically makes color adjustments so you might not be able to edit them as you want. On the other hand, RAW format doesn’t display so much intensity and saturation, giving you more space to edit and add more life into the colors during the post-production.

If you master the art of camera settings while you’re shooting, you can opt in to get RAW and JPEG files at the same time, so when you get to processing you can see which option works best for you. Generally, you’ll probably spend less time editing a JPEG, but only if your camera was set up properly. Otherwise, there isn’t much you’ll be able to do.

Be consistent in the editing process when you’re uploading images from the same set. Clients will sometimes purchase images from different angles so they can adjust them for various purposes, so you want all of them to have the same feel.

You can record and save your most common edits in Photoshop, and make basic edits in just a few steps, so you can concentrate more on individual details. Additionally, you can use and save presets in Lightroom and paste them on all images from the same series so you would keep the editing consistency.

Before you wrap it up and save your final versions, zoom in to 100% and look for any inconsistencies. Focus on the main subject of the photo in the beginning, and then take a look at their surroundings. Look for any blemishes or spots you might have missed and edit them out.

Final Thoughts

Natural images are the most marketable images, so if you want to sell you’ll stay away from heavy filters, overused saturation and vibrance, as well as oversharpening. Do edit all of your photos, but keep the editing as natural as possible in order to get the best results, and get more sales.