Just got into photography and not sure whether you’re ready to go pro yet? Here’s a tip: you can always go pro.
All you need to start is a good portfolio – for which you can select your most stunning photos and proceed with the following checklist to add more and more professional-looking photos to that portfolio.
Today, I’m here to help you with that last part. We’re going to walk together through::
- What it takes to make your photos look professional
- A set of pre-editing practices and advice you can try to make your life easier in post
- An editing checklist with some professional editing practices & techniques
- Along with some fantastic shots along the way that scream professional photography
What Makes a Photo Look Professional?
- Decent equipment. You don’t need high-end equipment. You can start and take phenomenal photos with a simple iPhone, even the older models work well. You can then build up your equipment as you go.
- Skill and experience with your equipment. You also need to practice and play around with your photography equipment to learn its settings and understand when and where to use specific options.
- Good / adequate lighting. The vast majority of good photos benefit from great lighting. For any studio photography, you can obviously use studio lights. However, for any shots taken outside, you need to learn to plan around the time of day, the weather, and even the position of the Moon. All of these choices can significantly affect your final shots.
- Adequate composition & spacing between photo elements. This doesn’t always come naturally, so you need to learn to identify great angles based on how the light falls, how the items and subject in your photo are arranged in relation to each other and the observer. Going even further, a lot of professional photographers, especially product photographers, care deeply about spacing – whether the elements of the shot are evenly spread out, pleasing to the eye, and if the angle can be tweaked to improve that factor.
- Merciless discard pile. Most photographers have a keep rate of 5-to-15%. That means of all the photos you take during a session, only a very small percentage make it to the client and your portfolio. The choice here is entirely yours, but you need to teach yourself to recognize what you want vs what you don’t want in your photos: what’s your style? What is the purpose of your photos? What looks good, what doesn’t look good, and what actively enhances or detracts from what you’re trying to capture / express with your photography.
- Color calibration and accuracy. An often-forgotten element of good photography is the color accuracy of your monitor. Simply put, you can’t be editing your photos on a tired old monitor that’s never been calibrated or the client will receive a very different image than you intended to deliver. As screens age, they lose vibrancy, and blacks become increasingly gray. To counteract that, I recommend monthly screen calibration. You can use TruHu, our monitor color calibration software, designed to be accessible, easy-to-use, and a great stepping stone for beginner photographers.
- A good software stack. This leads us into the softer side of photography – i.e. you need to pick your editing software. Lightroom is the most obvious first choice, but other tools like Luminar, Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, Photoshop, or GIMP constitute great Lightroom alternatives.
- Skill with your preferred editing software. Once you’ve selected a software stack to your liking (including any adjacent tools you might need), you simply have to practice and get good at using it for editing.
- Clean and intentional photo editing. Clean editing means, first and foremost, not overediting your shots – such as by increasing the vibrancy too much and making the colors “burn.” Then you also need to be intentional about your edits – why are you making this edit? What’s the final look you’re going for? Here’s an example of some intentional photo editing designs:
Photography doesn’t need to be a copy of reality unless you’re into photojournalism.
Pre-editing Checklist for Making Your Photos Professional
- Some rules for your photoshoot:
- Make sure you’ve got the proper setup
- Lighting should always come first
- Location should always come second
- Try to avoid elements that you might have to remove later
- Respect the shot, the angle, and follow your ideas – listen to your imagination and to the environment
- Be intentional about the shots you take
- Take multiple shots from the same angle, you never know which one’s the winner until you actually sit down to edit them
- Calibrate your work monitor – monitor color calibration is vital, that’s why we made TruHu
- Download & sort photos to your work computer
- Show no mercy – discard any photo you don’t like or are unsure about (a slightly off photo can hurt the look of your entire portfolio)
- You can edit 1-10 photos on the go in Lightroom mobile, but for professional photography workflows, working on a laptop / desktop is the more efficient option because it allows you to work much faster and scale your editing productivity
- Think about how you want to edit and create a personal style – very important. Photography is an art, so be an artist – read some art books, follow editing guides and influencers in the space, and overall know why you’re making certain editing choices so you can own your final result.
Editing Checklist: How to Edit Your Photos to Look Professional
1. Practice working with your preferred tool and create an editing workflow for specific types of photos
First off, as I mentioned above, you should learn the ins and outs of your editing software. Naturally, you’ll get better at it as time goes by, but for starters, look through a tutorial and try to walk through the same steps.
As you get better at it, you’ll notice your particular type(s) of photography demand specific editing workflows. That’s when you need to create a list of steps for yourself to follow every time. Of course, spur-of-the-moment ideas will often make your shots, but a good workflow helps you maintain a professional look and work at scale – two very important points for photographers trying to make a living.
Great example of intentionality in an editing style. And a fantastic Lightroom preset to try for your photos.
2. Apply lens correction and then start with some basic cropping, straightening, & color correction
To start, most editing workflows begin with lens correction. And there’s a good reason: most lenses distort the shot slightly, so you should be diligent and use your editing software’s capabilities to enable lens correction.
Lightroom has this feature natively, with a lot of lens profiles available – from high-end cameras to the old iPhone 6 – and the option to do it manually if your camera is absent from the list.
After that, I recommend going through the basic steps before moving on to more complex edits:
- Cropping and straightening – decide how much of your image you want to keep and whether or not it’s angled the way you want it.
- Basic color correction – next, tweak the exposure, contrast, dehazing (under Effects in Lightroom), then all the other settings under Light: highlights, whites, blacks, shadows
3. Remove elements, spots, clutter, or anything else you don’t like
Sometimes, a dumpster might sneak into your shot. Literally. You might not notice it outright while shooting as you’re distracted by other factors. Other times, it’s impossible to avoid having it in the shot, and the best you can hope for is to minimize the space it takes up.
In either of those cases, you’ll need to use your editing software to remove ugly elements from your photos – unless you’re into photojournalism in which case removing anything is a big faux pas and against the NPPA code of ethics.
4. Apply your desired look to your photos: make a personal checklist
Next, it’s time to settle on a look for your photography. You can use one of the Lightroom presets widely available on Instagram (like the Dark Knight one mentioned above), or establish your own vision for the photos.
Here are some questions that may help you in that effort:
- What is the purpose of your photography? Is it artistic, journalistic, product, real estate? All of these have different scopes, and you should edit them accordingly.
- What is the story you’re trying to tell with your photo? Photography can tell powerful stories, you should be aware of that both while shooting and while editing.
- What type of lighting matches this type of photography? Should you underexpose, overexpose, or leave it natural?
- Is the subject visible enough? Do you need to enhance the colors, apply blur, and recenter the image to focus on the subject better?
- What adjustments do you expect to need to make from photo to photo? You can’t simply apply a preset and hit export – most times, you’ll have to manually step in and tweak some things.
- How stringent do you want to be with yourself? Strange question, right? But the fact of the matter is photographers are often their own worst critics. Clients are likely to accept shots you may not think are good enough, and that’s a simple truth of the trade. Now, whether or not you include them in your portfolio is entirely your artistic choice.
A great shot with some fantastic advice from @nomadict on how you can create a unique brand and style in photography.
5. Add a watermark and other finishing touches to make the photo really your own
Adding a watermark to an isolated area of your image is the most professional thing you can do. Many photographers choose to do this for fear of their images being stolen.
Some tips for adding a watermark to your photos:
- Pick a font that defines you and your style of photography. For example, if you’re into real estate photography, pick a serious font such as a Sans-Serif.
- Don’t make it too big. Your watermark should be discrete, in a corner, or overlaid upon a blank or remote background part of your shot.
- Decrease opacity to highlight the watermark while letting the background elements bleed through a bit.
- Lightroom can automatically superimpose your watermark on photos during export. However, those who want a bit more freedom might prefer to add it manually.
If you want to go even further, you can use multiple new tools to protect your photography from AI. That way, you don’t end up seeing a fragment of your photo “generated” by AI into another photo without any form of attribution or credit.
6. Use photo editing guides to learn techniques and fine-tune your craft
Like any other occupation, photography also implies getting better as you work and staying updated on trends and recent tech developments. To that end, you should seek out places where you can extract useful information for your photography and learn new and advanced techniques to fine-tune your craft.
Here’s a few examples of articles from the TruHu blog you can check out:
- How to Fix Overexposed Photos
- How to Remove Light Glare from Photos
- How to Edit Astrophotography
- Which Color Settings to Use in Adobe Creative Cloud
As for other places you can check out, I’ll always recommend PetaPixel, Expert Photography, and r/Photography on Reddit,
What You Shouldn’t Do: Dead Giveaway Signs of Amateur Photography
Maybe for some of our audience, it’s easier to see the clear giveaways telling the seasoned professional that a particular photo or portfolio is not professional. Here’s what I usually notice:
- Off colors. It can be very easy to tell when the colors you see in a photo are the ones the photographer intended to use or slightly off due to the difference between their unoptimized screen and your optimized one. Color calibration solves this issue.
- Oversaturated colors. When a photo has too much digital vibrance, too much gamma, or too much saturation, the colors end up looking fake. Sure, they may pop, they might even work for a sci-fi look, but you have to be extremely careful not to overdo it lest your photos will look amateurish. Keep an eye on your histogram to ensure you’re not blowing out your colors.
- Bad composition. Cluttered photos, weirdly cropped photos, empty focus areas – all these and more are composition issues. The best way to solve this one? Pick up a photography book and take notes.
- Overediting. Beyond fake, oversaturated colors, you can make a wide variety of mistakes during editing that mostly boil down to overediting. Changing your original photo too much is a risky choice, and must be done with great care for the overall look and feel of a photo. As with the first point on this list, keep an eye on your histogram and make sure it doesn’t get compromised by too many edits.
- Fake-looking portraits. Portrait photography can be particularly tricky when most photographers want to heal every skin imperfection and blur any background. The result? Fake-looking photos. The subject’s skin starts to look like a 3D model, the background blur is too strong compared to the foreground – both are very clear amateur mistakes.
Summing Up
And that just about wraps up our discussion around what makes photos look professional. But I’ll leave you with one last tip that many in the industry know, even if it’s a little in jest, it’s nonetheless very true: what makes a photo look professional is the invoice next to it.
Meaning – if you can sell and do business with your current photography skill level and workflow, you’re a professional. The only person you need to impress beyond that is yourself – to learn and improve your skills for your own curiosity. Cheers!
