How to edit your photos from your travels?

I recently reviewed some of the cameras I`ve used in the past, now I thought it was time to talk about how to edit the travel photos. Once you have your photos taken by the best camera for travel, you want to edit them in a program to get the best result.

I`m used to working with Photoscape and really like it. It`s a free photo editing program that can do most of the editing you need for JPEG images. But last year I wanted to learn how to take night shots. I remember being in the Northern Territory at Uluru seeing an amazing starry sky and not being able to shoot it with my camera. I just hadn`t looked into how to do night photography. So when the opportunity presented to go to the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, I knew I wanted to prepare myself for some night photography. I watched this helpful video for your first night out shooting stars by Ben Canales.

I had the camera, tripod and lens sorted, shot RAW images instead of JPEG images, but then what? You need a photo program to edit those RAW images. Even though Photoscape lets you convert JPEG images into RAW images, I wanted to edit my RAW images because RAW images have more data you can work with. That`s where Adobe Lightroom comes in, a photography software program that provides a comprehensive set of digital photography tools. Just what I needed for my night shots.

Next up: learning to use Lightroom.

I searched the internet for some tips and found two helpful articles: How and why you should use Adobe Lightroom and Mastering Lightroom: How to use the basic panel. And this video was particularly helpful for me as I wanted to use it for editing night shots.

Here you can see one of my pictures from Jordan I played with in Lightroom.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Not bad eh! I have to admit I need some more time with Lightroom to get the hang of it, like with everything new it takes a bit of getting to know what you can and cannot do with it. But so far, I like it.

For more tips on Lightroom, check out these videos. Here`s a list of videos especially for Travel Photography. I also enjoyed checking out these tutorials from Canvas of Light.

Which program do you use? Have you used Lightroom before? Any tips?

I received a copy of Lightroom 4 for research purposes, but all opinions in this post are my own.