How Editing the Photo Content Can Improve Your Website’s Looks

There’s no arguing that photo content plays a major role in most websites, as far as user experience is concerned. Unless a user is dead set on finding certain information, or purchasing an advertised product, low-quality or amateurish-looking images can quickly turn that user off.

Even users that have no background in design or photo composition (and most do not), look for, and appreciate, certain qualities in website photos.

• Image size, composition, overall quality, and exposure, are all things that users take note of while browsing.
• Images can affect the actions of a user when they generate interest or excitement. Their appeal can be rational or emotional, or simply fit nicely with your website client’s brand.
• An image also needs to convey or support a certain message. Images and text need to go hand in hand, or the image will serve no useful purpose.

There has even been a study that determined that users simply ignore non-relevant photos, or photos they cannot easily correlate with or link to the overall page or website message.

Photo Editing Tip #1 – Color can Sometimes Save the Day

One of the most effective of Luminar’s photo editing techniques is Color Splash. Here, a selective use of colors can produce vivid, beautiful and eye-catching results. Color Splash works by turning a photo into a grayscale or black and white image, while retaining the color in certain objects.

This is done by clicking on Luminar’s Brush icon, selecting the Mask Erasing mode, and brushing out the monochrome to restore the color.

A nice-looking photo can be transformed into a brilliant one in these 4 simple steps, with the help of Luminar’s Color Splash feature.

Another powerful editing tool is the Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity (HSL) filter. This filter uses simple sliders to give you the ability de-emphasize certain colors, while highlighting others. This is accomplished by using sliders, and moving them to the right or left to emphasize or deemphasize colors for a certain object or in a certain area.

Both editing techniques enable you to be quite creative with your photos, and both techniques are relatively easy to work with; although it will naturally take a little experimenting (which can be both instructive, and a great deal of fun) before you get the results you’re looking for. Photo editing in these two cases simply involves loading a picture into Luminar for Mac, and adding the appropriate filter. Other filter techniques work similarly.

Photo Editing Tip #2 – Creating a Huge Impact with Simple Effects

This photo edited with Luminar illustrates how a certain effect produced by editing with Luminar photo effects can create a dramatic atmosphere.

Simply by using presets and filters, or in varying combinations of both, you can create some remarkable effects with minimal effort. The options open to you are, for all practical purposes, endless.

Some Examples

Not only can you achieve a look you are seeking after through use of these features, but you they also provide you with wonderful opportunities for creative experimenting. Select the “60’s Black and White” preset for example, and your photo can take on a vintage, somewhat edgy look.

Or, you might select the “Portrait Glamour” preset, if you wish to give a photo an ethereal quality. The “Grain” adjustable filter loosens the contrast in a photo, after which you can adjust temperature and tint to achieve the vintage hue you’re seeking. With “Lomo”, in combination with the HSL controls, you can reduce the tones that tend to be distractions, and make certain colors really pop out.

Layers and textures can take your photo-editing adventures to new levels of creativity. Layers allow you to blend photos together, or create composite images, while a texture overlay can effectively produce an illusion of depth.

Automatic presets act as a bonus to beginners, since remarkable effects on a photo can be introduced with a couple of clicks. The ability to make adjustments to these presets, gives beginners the opportunity to learn how to create even more remarkable effects, and also learn how to design their own special filters. Eventually, through learning and experimentation, it becomes possible for them to take advantage of Luminar’s full capabilities.

Photo Editing Trick #3 – Basic Actions Can Take You a Long Way

You can liven up an image, as in this example, with enhancing photo filters from Luminar

Three basic actions that can prove to be quite powerful in sprucing up an image, or giving it more of an impact on a viewer, are to adjust the intensity, adjust color temperatures, and adjust the size.

Adjusting the Intensity – The Saturation slider is an easy way to adjust the intensity of colors in a photo (Intensity and Saturation are one and the same thing). Increasing the saturation level slightly can add a little spice to an image. While this adjustment is easy to make, you don’t want to overdo it, and create an artificial-looking image; something to be avoided in website design.

Adjusting the Temperature – You have two options here; give a photo a warmer look, or give it a cooler look. The goal is to adjust the reds (warm) and blues (cool) until you achieve the natural or attractive look you’re seeking. It’s a matter of experimentation and experience.

Size Matters – Bigger is generally better. Your goal should be to do what’s necessary to direct viewer attention to what’s important; and images typically provide the best way to do that. A related function is cropping.  The crop photo feature is the simplest editing function of all, and it can produce some powerful results.

These editing capabilities can easily be put into play with Luminar – the best photo editor for Mac, that adapts your style and skill level. Give this brilliant tool a try, and see for yourself!