Have you ever seen a GORGEOUS photo on Pinterest and thought, “My photos will never look like that”? ME TOO. All the time. But rest assured, there are changes you can make to massively improve your photos. Even without a big, expensive camera.

If I sound a little bossy throughout this post, it’s because I could not BELIEVE the difference it made with my blog! Photos matter, y’all.

For bloggers, it’s a way of luring in new readers. Remember: content is king, but social media is queen. People are checking Facebook on their lunch break. Or while trying to decide what to make for dinner. Or while reminded themselves to pick their kids up from soccer practice.

Meanwhile, a hundred gorgeous photos and interesting posts are bombarding their newsfeeds. You have to stick out! Very few people read posts on social media. It’s the photos that make them stop scrollingscrollingscrolling to click your link or share your post.

Improving my photos doubled the amount of traffic I received. I was also featured on quite a few BIG websites. Women’s Day Magazine and Huffington Post come to mind. Proof that it was due to the photos? They were posts that already existed (for years) but didn’t take off. At least, not until almost immediately after I redid the old (crappy) photos.

Another reason? Because it feels good. There’s something satisfying and more personal about taking my own family photos. They look better than the photos I paid a professional to take for my wedding. (I mean, not to toot my own horn. But toot toot.)

Editing photos complicated because there’s a balance. If you edit too much or too little, your photos look unprofessional. To add to that complication, it’s all subjective. What looks right to you will look OUT OF THIS WORLD to some people. Or it could look terrible to others.

There are many ways of editing photos. I normally use Photoshop, but not everyone can afford it. So I’ll be using for Picmonkey because it’s easy and FREE to use, which means everyone has access to it.

So if you want to follow along, go to Picmonkey and open a photo you’d like to edit. On to the tutorial!

(These photos are from the Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake recipe that I posted to Growing Up Gabel for Valentine’s Day.)

This post includes affiliate links.

A Beginner’s Guide to Editing Photos in Picmonkey

Here’s the photo we’re starting with:

1. Clarity/Sharpness

A photo may look nice and crisp on the camera screen, but that’s because my eyesight is awful. (This is why I use auto-focus instead of manual focus. But if your eyesight is fine, use manual. It’s easier to focus on the area you want.) When this happens, sharpening is an easy fix.

I like to do this first because the “Clarity” bar tends to darken the photos. It acts as if I’m adjusting the contrast (which comes later). For clarity, I usually go between 10% and 20%. For sharpness, I never go above 10. Usually, I stick to 3-7. Over sharpening can really ruin a photo by making it grainy. So be careful with the sharpening.

2. Brightness/Contrast

Nothing ruins a photo like not being able to see the subject. I see this a lot with beginners because it takes a while to figure out the finer points of lighting. Brightening a dark photo won’t make it look any nicer, so you have to make your photos bright on the camera. The best way to do this, no matter what camera you use, is to take advantage of your best natural light. I take most of my photos beside an open window.

That said, you can go too bright. So usually once I have it “perfect” on my camera, I bring it down a notch. It’s hard to fix “too dark” pictures, but it’s also hard to fix “too bright” pictures. So I get as close to bright as I can without washing out the subject and then the rest I handle in editing.

Even in editing, though, it’s easy to go too bright and think it looks good. So, like I said, once I’ve reached what I think is perfect, I bring it down a little. Too many times, I’ve gone through old photos a few weeks after posting them and said, “Wow, that is WAY too bright.”

Better: if you have time to put the photos aside after editing, do it. Looking at them from a fresh perspective–not from the perspective of a crazy person who just wants to get this crap done already—really helps. You may find that after bringing it back, you want to go even brighter. And that’s fine!

3. Color Balance

Color balance just means that your colors look like they should. White is pure white, red is red, and so on. This particular edit took me a while to figure out and sometimes I still struggle with it. Color balance is weird.

One little “hack” I learned from How I Made $40k My First Year of Blogging is to always include something white in your photos. The easiest way to do that is with white dishes and doilies since they go with everything.

With this particular photo, I used a white background. Though I usually don’t, which means I have to find some other way of adding white. Normally I use a paper doily or a cotton towel with a lot of white in it.

The wonderful thing about Picmonkey is that you can use the “Neutral Picker” tool to help your color balance. Go to Colors > Neutral Picker and then click on a white area in your photo. I click on a few different white areas (because of shadows) to test and make sure there isn’t a better spot.

The photo I put in my Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake post is more balanced than this one, but this is fine. It’s a little blue-ish, but I prefer more blue than yellow in my photos. And, yes! If your photos are coming out too yellow, this is how you can fix it in editing! Though there are ways to adjust your camera settings to fix that, which is what you SHOULD do. But that’s a tutorial for another day.

I find color balance is easier to achieve if there is only a little white in the photo. If you have a lot of white areas, like with this photo, clicking different areas will change the way it looks. As you can see, some of the white spots in this photo are totally white and others look way too blue.

4. Saturation

This is one that I sometimes don’t use because not all photos need saturation. Saturation just means the colors pop more. So it’s another you want to be careful with (especially with bright colors). I usually don’t go any higher than 2-5 for my saturation.

Bonus: Blemish Fix

In Photoshop and Gimp, this is the Healer tool. It’s one of my new favorite things.

In this photo, you might see that the tray the cake is on has a little chocolate smeared on it and one of the hearts is being reflected. I just went into Picmonkey, under the make-up section, chose Blemish Fix and clicked on those areas. Poof! Gone.

Not a big deal and most of your probably didn’t notice. But when you’ve been staring at a photo for a while, little flaws start to jump out at you.

Much better!

To be honest, editing your photos in Gimp or Photoshop would look better, because then you have more control. Instead of Exposure, I usually edit the Levels in those programs. Much nicer. But if all you have is Picmonkey, you can do pretty well!

Want to get the recipe for that delicious cheesecake you’ve been staring at? Find it over at Growing Up Gabel!

What photo editing tips would you give to a beginner? Any editing tool you simply can’t live without? Let me know in the comments!