When we visit an unfamiliar place, we’re tempted to capture almost everything. Unfortunately, many of the photos we bring from our travels have to be discarded because of their poor quality. During a trip, we’re often in a hurry and don’t have the time to set up our camera or build up the frame properly. What’s more, there are crowds of other tourists everywhere, preventing us from taking postcard-perfect photos.
The good news is that most problems with photos taken while traveling can be corrected with the help of good image-editing software. In this article, we’ll look at 5 typical travel photo problems and see how they can be solved using 3 popular photo editors: PhotoWorks, Affinity Photo and GIMP. Let’s get started!
5 Typical Problems With Travel Photos
1. Tilted Horizon
Tourists in a hurry often make this mistake when photographing landscapes and architecture: they don’t hold the camera parallel to the horizon line, and the result is tilted photos, looking quite sloppy and unbalanced.
2. Strangers In The Background
When you visit a popular sight, especially in tourist season, you’re unlikely to be the only one there, so you’ll probably have photos spoiled by strangers in the background.
3. Bad Exposure
Most people take vacations in the summer or choose sunny destinations, so lots of travel photos are taken in harsh light, backlight or shadow, which can lead to various exposure problems:
- The whole photo is overexposed.
- Overexposed sky which appears too bright and lacks color.
- Underexposed foregrounds.
- The entire photo is too dark due to poor lighting.
4. Blurry Pictures
When you’re in a rush to capture a mountain landscape from the window of a bus or car, or you’re taking a photo while walking, or your child won’t stand still in front of the camera, or your hands are shaking slightly because of fatigue or emotions, you can end up with a more or less blurry, out-of-focus photo.
5. Grainy Night Photos
Normally, you want to capture the beauty of the city where you’re staying not only in the sunshine, but also at night, with all its illuminations. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to take high-quality night photos, unless you have a top-of-the-range camera whose settings you’ve mastered perfectly. In conditions of insufficient light, we tend to get photos containing too much digital noise, that is, nasty dots of color scattered over the image.
Now, let’s see how you can get rid of all the defects listed and many others with the help of the powerful photo editors we’ll introduce below.
1. PhotoWorks
PhotoWorks is an AI-powered photo editor for beginners and professional photographers alike. You’ll find in it a whole range of automatic features and presets that let you enhance your photos with a single click in a multitude of ways: correct color and brightness, retouch portraits, apply attractive filters including 3D LUT and HDR and much more.
PhotoWorks offers several intuitive, easy-to-use tools that will help you improve your travel photos in mere seconds. Let’s take a closer look.
How To Fix Tilted Pictures In Photoworks
Under the Tools tab, you can find the Geometry tool which lets you correct all kinds of distortions in your photos. To straighten a tilted pic, you need to use the Rotation slider. A grid appears helping you find the horizontal line and to angle your photo accordingly. For your convenience, the image will be cropped automatically.
How To Erase Unwanted People Or Objects
PhotoWorks offers several tools letting you erase odd objects, but the most convenient one is the Clone Stamp you’ll find under the Retouch tab. Paint the photobomber with an adjustable brush and specify the image area from which the pexels will be copied to cover that uninvited person in your picture.
How To Amend The Exposure Of Your Pics
Whenever you start editing in PhotoWorks a photo with color or lightning problems, we advise you to try the Auto Correction tool. You can also drag the Exposure slider to the left or to the right and to tweak other settings like Whites, Highlights and Shadows. In case you need to adjust only the sky exposure or that of the ground, use the Graduated Filter perfect for landscape photos correction.
How To Fix Blurry Photos In PhotoWorks
For landscape photos, use the Clarity slider you’ll find among the main settings under the Enhancement tab. It will increase the overall contrast of the photo. If there are people in your picture, prefer the Sharpness tool. It lets you control the changes with a preview box. It’s important not to overdo and to adjust additional sharpness settings like Radius and Threshold to make your photo look clear but natural.
How To Denoise A Night Photo
As a really user friendly software, PhotoWorks offers an automatic tool for that. All you have to do is to go to the Tools Tab, to opt for the Noise Reduction tool and to drag the slider to the right.
As you can see, PhotoWorks is an efficient yet easy-to-use image editor capable of coping with any problems your photos may have. Besides, it allows you to transform your travel photos into postcards by adding cute frames and text captions, to edit RAW files and to process your photos in batches saving you a good deal of time retouching the dozens of photos you bring back from your travels.
2. Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo is a fast and powerful photo editing software used by professional photographers and graphic designers. Available on macOS, Windows and iPad as a one-off purchase, it lets you retouch images, edit them, remove unwanted objects and create multi-layer compositions. It also boasts comprehensive RAW development functions.
Here are the advantages of this image editor that make it suitable for editing travel photos:
- An intuitive, customizable interface.
- A wide range of image retouching and correction tools, such as the magical Inpainting Brush to remove unwanted objects.
- File compatibility on Windows, Mac and iPad.
- Batch processing, to apply modifications to several images at the same time.
However, there are a few drawbacks that may prevent you from using Affinity Photo effectively:
- A bit of a learning curve for beginners.
- Lack of certain features.
- Weaknesses of the RAW dematrixing engine.
3. GIMP
Gimp is a powerful and comprehensive image-editing program used by photo enthusiasts looking for a free alternative to Photoshop. It offers a wide range of photo retouching tools for modifying color, brightness and contrast. GIMP can also be used to correct perspective and remove unwanted elements from an image. You can also create compositions from multiple images and apply special effects.
its advantages for travel photographers include the following :
- Free and Open Source.
- Multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux).
- Numerous basic functions for image editing.
Gimp’s disadvantages :
- Less user-friendly interface.
- Lack of some advanced features, such as adjustment layers.
Final Thoughts
Traveling gives us a great opportunity to take a lot of beautiful photos, which are nice to share on social networks, store in family albums and review years later, reliving those vivid and unforgettable emotions. Often, however, these photos will first need some work to improve their quality and remove typical imperfections. A powerful photo editor such as PhotoWorks, Affinity Photo or GIMP can help you with this. Choose the program that best suits your needs in terms of ease of use and value for money, and enjoy flawless photos from your travels.
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