Less IS Best.

Let's say you've decided to take your involvement in photography up a notch, going beyond the endless flow of selfies, the keepsakes and the occasional “doesn't that look cool” grab shot.

Let's say part of that process was getting a dedicated photo editor (Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Snapseed et al) instead of just relying on Instragram filters or the effects your smartphone camera has built in.

Let's say you're sitting down at your computer, editor open and looking at a photo and checking out all those cool sliders like “Clarity”, “Noise Reduction”, “Sharpen” etc.

Let's say you're wondering what to do with all those nifty, yet daunting controls, and are hoping to find a tutorial on how to use them to best effect.

Well, this ain't that tutorial. Said tutorials are built into the help functions of the various editors, and can also be easily found on YouTube or via Google. I can't offer anything that would be better than any of those, (probably not even as good). What I can do is offer an important piece of advice that many people starting to use more advanced editors really need to heed:

Less is More. Take It Easy. Dial It Back a Notch. Don't Overdo It. Chill.

Yes, that is all one piece of advice.

You see, what happens when many people get their hands on some of the controls in a good editor is they become enamored of what the effect does, beyond their ability to recognize when the effect has become destructive to the image. An otherwise nice looking photo can be ruined by overdoing certain helpful functions, and often a beginner doesn't recognize what is going wrong. But those with a more experienced eye will see the problems, and we see a lot of them because the overuse of certain effects is rampant.

Oh yeah, here's a second piece of advice:

Keep Things in Order.

This is important because certain effects can adversely affect other changes. For instance, making exposure or contrast changes can make noise (that grainy look) worse. So noise reduction should be applied before doing any exposure or contrast changes. Most people use the following workflow when applying various effects and controls. Note: You should do any cropping before starting further work on the image.

1. Noise Reduction
2. Contrast/Exposure/Color Saturation (these 3 are interdependent and often must be tweaked at the same time)
3. Special Effects Filters
4. Sharpening.

The reason for this order is simple, and important: each change could have an adverse effect on the previous changes if done before, rather than after. I could go into some in depth technical explanation why, but this isn't really a technical article, so just Google it if you want.

Now comes the whole “Chill” part. There are two reasons why changes should be conservative. The best way to proceed when getting started is to make a change to a certain point, then dial it back about 10%. The reason is because of, you guessed it, how future changes will influence the changes already made.

Noise Reduction: Digital photography has created an expectation that images should be as smooth-toned as possible. The days in which “grain” was an acceptable part of using certain films to produce photos are gone. In fact, some people assess photos primarily by how much noise they have, with other factors such as whether the photo is even worth looking at being secondary. But I digress.

Getting rid of noise is both easy and a pain. Simple noise reduction usually involves just clicking a button or, better yet, moving a slider until the photo looks “clean”. The problem is that reducing noise also reduces detail, so too much noise reduction can result in a smeared looking photo, or one that is so artificially digital it looks like it's CGI instead of a photo of real life.

Sharpening can recover some of this detail, but not all of it. So it's always better to take it easy with noise reduction, in part because the next steps can help reduce noise as well.

Exposure/Contrast/Color Saturation: One of the great things about digital is that it's much easier to correct or change exposure (brightness level) contrast and color saturation. However, because these three are interdependent in a lot of ways, you will find that making small adjustments of each on is better than trying to improve or fix an image by making a big adjustment in a single area.

Increasing exposure is going to make most photos look like the contrast and perhaps color saturation, have been reduced, while decreasing exposure can have the opposite effect. Increasing or decreasing contrast can make a photo look over or under exposed, and throw off color saturation. Increasing or decreasing color saturation can give an apparent increase or decrease in contrast. This is why adjusting these three settings really needs a light touch, and some patience, to get things looking the way you want.

How does all of this can have an effect on noise levels? Increasing exposure can make noise more apparent in shadow areas. Increasing color saturation can make noise more apparent in large areas with little detail. Contrast changes can make existing noise more obvious. However, reducing things such as shadow or black level can make noise less obvious, at the expense of losing some shadow detail. All of this is why you do noise reduction first, then go gentle with the next set of changes.

Special Effects Filters: Yes, they can make your pics look really cool. When used properly. And sparingly. As in not on every photo you want to share. Really. Not every pic is well served by the vignetting, or old style film effects, or overdone tone mapping. Always keep in mind that as a photographer, what may be a great shot to you involves your emotional investment in that image, something that may not be shared by others.

Effects filters can make a shot look better, or be more attractive to the viewer, but my advice is the same, to dial the effect back about 10%, or more, from what you think looks good. Most importantly, always, always, always consider whether the image is actually improved, or made more aesthetically appealing, through using effects filters. Often what people do is take an image that should simply be deleted and make it worth looking at for a few seconds by adding the effect(s). However, that doesn't really make the image worth keeping, it just makes it the photographic equivalent of a gimmick song by a “One Hit Wonder” musical artist.

Sharpening: Sharpening isn't really sharpening. No, I mean it. All sharpening does is increase the brightness or darkness between adjacent pixels, making lines between light and dark more apparent. Your brain perceives this as an increase in sharpness, to a point. However, if you apply too much sharpening, you create halos around certain areas in the image and it ends up looking like that photo taken with your brand new $800 dslr kit was made with a cheap cell phone. In fact, oversharpening is probably the main way in which people ruin images.

Modern editors have some wonderful sharpening tools. I recommend sticking with Unsharp Mask to start, although the smart sharpening tools found in Photoshop and some other apps handle the task quite well. Just keep in mind that some dialing back of what you think looks good is usually in order.

Remember how I said that each change can affect previous changes? This is why sharpening should be done last, because if you sharpen a photo, then do something like noise reduction, it won't work as well as it should. The noise reduction is basically trying to undo the sharpening process. It's kind of like trying to change your shirt while still wearing your coat.

Clarity: This is sort of a “fix a lot of stuff at once” tool. You should still do noise reduction first, but clarity can eliminate doing other things like exposure adjustment or sharpening. As the name of the effect implies, it improves the clarity of the photo by making all those other adjustments at once. So the sliders in a clarity control handle the interdependent adjustments of exposure, contrast, color saturation, black/white/shadow/highlight levels and even sharpening all at once.

This sounds like a great tool, and it is for a lot of photos, but it can also be overused. Too much clarity can result in an image with a bizarre combination of too much contrast, with grungy looking dark areas and plastic looking bright areas.

At this point you might be asking “Can't I just use the 'One Stop Photo Fix' or similar one-click option in my editor?” The answer is yes you can. Keep in mind, however, that this control works by comparing your image to thousands of “normal” photographs and changing things to match that “look”. That's a look you may or may not want. Also, photos which are not “average” will turn out disastrously with one stop options. Concert photos, for instance, with great areas of darkness and colored lights, will turn out looking horrible most of the time when fixitall options are used.

The bottom line is making your photos look awesome using photo editors takes some time and experimentation. Eventually you will find settings that make your photos look great, but also like your photos instead of photos imagined by the programmers of the editor. That's why I didn't include any examples in this article: how I produce my photos is based on my tastes and goals, and yours may be very different. You may like levels of effects that I don't, and ultimately it's up to you to decide what works best.

One final consideration, be aware of how others will be viewing your photos. What looks great on the 5” screen of your iPhone 6 or LG G3 may not look so good on the 22” monitors people are viewing it on as they peruse Facebook. Problems which you can't see or appear minimal on a phone or tablet screen become major bugaboos on a computer monitor. If you're going to be printing photos, that involves a different approach to editing, and so a different article.

Most of all, enjoy!