Editing

You've taken lots of great photos. But your work doesn't stop there.

It is rare to produce a photo that doesn’t need editing. You can apply the following improvements:

- crop

- apply the rule of thirds

- enhance or alter the colours

- sharpen the image

Let's look at these next.

Cropping

Inevitably, unwanted people and objects will appear in your street pictures.

They distract the eye, and hinder the viewer from understanding the true purpose of the picture.

People won't know where to rest their eye, because there are multiple subjects.

And the real subjects are often too far away.

By cropping, you simplify the picture and focus on what counts.

Cropping is what differentiates a  professional from an amateur.

The secret of good photographs is to get in close. It's easy to apply, but amateurs don't do it.

In other branches of photography, such as landscape, the photographer can move closer.

But in street photography, you don't have this advantage. You have to shoot people as you find them. And so you have to crop afterwards to achieve the same result as photographers in other fields.

Treat your original photos merely as raw material, never as a finished product.

Select the most interesting part of the picture. Most people fail to understand that a photo is improved immeasurably by cropping hard and tight. It will make your photos come to life.

The Hare Krishna procession (top) lacks a focal point. But if you crop the photo (left) to exclude everyone except the two men in the front, the image becomes immediately more interesting. Look at the man in blue. What do you see in his face? Not serenity, perhaps?

Apply the rule of thirds

As well as cropping to cut out redundant material, you also need to apply the ‘rule of thirds’.

This rule says that subjects should be located one-third up and one third along a picture.

Not in the centre (that's for amateurs). One-third along.

Look at some professionals’ photos. Draw imaginary lines, cutting the image into thirds, both horizontally and vertically.

You'll mostly find the subject of the photo lies on one or both of the thirds.

It makes for a better photo, because it’s more dynamic and appeals to our sense of design.

A wheelchair user crosses a road. Note how the wheelchair is located at an intersection of the thirds (well, almost).

Normally you might expect to the wheelchair to be more prominent, in one of the lower thirds. But the expanse of grey tarmac emphasises the vulnerability of the wheelchair user. The photo is almost black and white, adding to its poignancy.

Improve your images

You can improve an iPhone image using Perfect Photo. There are other similar apps for Android, and you can use the Gimp or Photoshop for DSLR images.

The following tools are useful:

Sharpen: this lets you make the image sharper. Experiment with different amounts of sharpness.

Levels: by altering the image’s histogram, you can get richer colours and shadows, resulting in a crisper photo. Professionals use this tool to produce stronger pictures. You can find guidance about this on the internet, and in your software’s instructions.

Saturation: you can convert colour images to black and white by sliding the Saturation slider to zero.

De-noise: this makes the photo smoother by making it look less grainy.

Colour temperature: if your photo looks too red because you shot it indoors, you can make it look more natural by changing the temperature.

Alignment: if you took the photo at an angle, the alignment tool lets you straighten it.

Contrast: this makes the photo stand out by making it more contrasty. Take a photo and experiment with it, using the tools mentioned above and others you come across.

Perfectly Clear improves iPhone photos.

Detail in the shadow and highlights: Perfectly Clear is an app for iPhone and Photoshop. With one click it improves the image by adding detail in the shadows. Touchup Pro is a similar sort of app for Android.

You can buy more expensive software such as Adobe Lightroom, for use with PCs and Macs. Lightroom recovers the detail from your highlights and shadows. You’ll be amazed at the improvement such software can bring, especially as street photography often has a wide range of light and dark.

The Gimp, Aperture, Photoshop (and its cheaper brother Elements) allow you to whiten teeth, get rid of ‘red eye’, and improve colour, contrast and lighting. However, these activities can be rather fiddly.

Experiment with Perfect Photo or similar software to improve your image.

Black and white

Many street photographers show their pictures in black and white.

On the street there can be a riot of discordant colour. A black and white image cuts through the complexity and simplifies the photo.

Black and white images hark back to a time when all pictures were in mono. And it makes photos look classic, chic and edgy.

However as the two versions of the same photo on page 80 show, colour can sometimes enhance a photo.

After taking a ride in this ‘tuc tuc’ and paying the driver, I asked him for a photo. While black and white is often seen as more classy, this colourful image looks better in colour. Note: the driver would have been clearer if he’d stood outside his taxi. Subjects often lurk in the shadows of a doorway. You have to entice them out or wait for them to move.

Avoid excessive editing

With Photoshop and other imaging software, you can make major changes to your photographs. Many pictures are photoshopped to such an extent that they’re unrecognisable from the original. This is true of landscape photographers who delight in creating scenes with purple skies and orange waterfalls.

So, how much editing should you do? Should you get rid of the distracting background, by using a Clone tool? Should you remove unwanted people from the image?

Most street photographers would say a light touch is the best one. Do only as much editing as is necessary to crop and sharpen the image.

People are beginning to realise that today’s images no longer necessarily represent the truth. And when people start to mistrust your images, believing them to be the result of Photoshop editing, they won’t be impressed when you show them your latest masterpiece of street photography. They’ll think it’s just another picture you’ve created on your computer.

That’s a good reason to keep your editing to a minimum.