Editing my cover photo

So from here on out for my blogs, I will be taking you through the steps I did to create a digital magazine for my food page. I will be using Adobe Indesign and photoshop to edit and create my spreads/pages.

Step 1. Editing My Cover photo

Without editing or anything, the photo I shot for my cover picture is horrible to say the least. And it is all because of the lighting. I quickly learned that good or bad lighting can really make or break your photo. The rest of the photo in my eyes is pretty good, I like the framing, I like how the dishes look visually, i thought I did a good job. But looking back at it, the lighting and how dim it was really ruined it. And it's like that for majority of my photos, so I'm really gonna have to do extra work to make this look presentable for my cover.

Pre Edited version

After Editing

Here's what I did in photoshop to achieve this look.

Color & Vibrance

• I brought the temperature down to -7 to make the photo look less "grey."
  
  
• I brought the vibrance all the way up to +77 to make the food specifically, but the colors of the photo to "pop" more at you.

Brightness & Contrast

• I brought the brightness up to 52 so that the lighting of the photo didn't look so dim and depressing. In doing this, it made the photo look 10x more better due to the fact that it looked lit up now and it didn't look like I took it with all the lights off...

Hue/Saturation

• This here was a slight change, all I did was change the hue of the photo to -3 which made the food appear more orange. I did this to make it look more warmer and to look more appetizing. Because pre-editing, in the photo, the food looked cold and old (which it was) but after editing, it revitalized the food and made it look more fresh and hot.