Photo EditingTerms Glossary

Crop: Slice off the edges of your photo and make it your desired size. Most apps will also have preset aspects ratios (like 1:1 or 2:3) that allow you to set your photo to that size

Brightness: Adjust how bright your photo is, or simply how light or dark your photograph is. This is not adjusting the lights or the darks individually, but rather making making the whole photo lighter or darker

Contrast: The difference between the darkest and the lightest pixels in your photo. Scaling up the contrast widens that gap while lowering it closes that gap. The feel of your photo changes drastically from higher to lower contrast and this is one tool that really requires a feel to it to get better at using it.

Exposure: Very similar to brightness and can be used in a similar way, but exposure more specifically attacks the brighter parts of the picture rather than the image as a whole

Highlights and Shadows: This is where you are adjusting just the light parts of your photos or just the dark parts. Higher highlights will brighten up the light parts of your photos while lower ones will dull them down, same thing for shadows. This term is also similar to “Blacks” and “Whites” and often functions in the same way.

Vibrance: This adjusts how much colour is in your photography. Lower it and your photo is black and white!

Saturation: This attacks each colour in your photo, either making it more pigmented or less, often giving bland photos a little more life by giving it more colour

Dehaze: Removes cloudiness and makes your photo clearer, however this doesn’t work that well all the time and I don’t suggest it too often

Sharpen: This tool, however, is quite useful. If your photo is a bit blurry or just unclear, the sharpen tool will give your photo shape again and just sharper the lines that are clear in the image