Editing your images goes far beyond simple adjustments—it shapes your vision into reality. These unique editing techniques will help you create distinctive visuals and refine your photographic style.
Coming to you from Adrian Vila of aows, this insightful video shares practical editing methods that can enhance your images creatively but subtly. Vila begins by demonstrating how adding grain can lend mood and texture to your photographs, particularly foggy landscapes. Instead of applying grain uniformly, Vila uses masks to add a technique he calls selective grain. In instances where your subject is very small, uniform grain application can cause loss of crucial fine detail. Vila’s approach involves carefully masking out the key small subject (such as the castle in his foggy morning shot) and applying grain selectively to the surrounding area. This allows you to keep important detail crisp while still achieving the atmospheric effect you want.
Next, Vila introduces another intriguing technique—selective clarity and dehaze. Clarity and dehaze adjustments help control viewer attention and guide eyes smoothly across your image. Sometimes details in your scene, while appealing, compete directly with your intended focal point. Vila explains how he skillfully masks particular areas, enhancing clarity where he wants the viewer to look first, while decreasing clarity or adding subtle haze to non-focal areas. Through an overhead drone photo of a building framed by roads, Vila clearly reveals the effectiveness of subtly adjusting clarity and haze. Such changes might initially seem modest, but in practice, they dramatically strengthen your composition’s visual flow. Vila shares more examples of this technique in action to help you grasp its applications.
Finally, Vila explores a method he terms “color manipulation,” surprisingly applied to black and white photography. While this may initially sound contradictory, Vila clarifies that the raw files still contain valuable color information, even if the final output is monochrome. Vila uses a real-world scenario from a shot at Redwood National Park, showing how adjusting individual colors using the black-and-white mixer allowed him to completely reinvent an image. His initial vision—a bright leaf against a darker woodland backdrop—fell flat due to patches of brightness in the forest scene. Adjusting the luminance levels of specific colors transformed the original idea, inverting it to feature a dark leaf against a softened, lighter background instead. Vila shows us further examples reinforcing that having color data in black-and-white raw files provides unexpected creative flexibility, even allowing you to take your image in new directions beyond what you originally envisioned.
Vila's video notably emphasizes one key theme throughout: subtlety. Every technique he presents works best when applied carefully, without making adjustments overly obvious or unnatural. Vila urges you to focus on gently emphasizing what already exists in your photos—skillfully toning your images without exaggerated changes. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Vila.
