Simple Camera Adjustments to Make Your Images POP!

Are you feeling like the images you’re shooting are looking a little mundane lately? Looking to step your photos up a notch? Here are some tips guaranteed to help you sharpen your focus, and produce more eye-catching photos that really POP!

Utilize the elements of composition

Think of this as more of a head start towards making your photos “pop”. It goes a long way in helping you capture shots that can indeed be truly extraordinary. With a better composition that already has dramatic elements, it will be much easier for you to enhance your shots by using any of the methods on our list. Composition elements like lines, shapes, colors, balance, and contrast coupled with perspective can give you better photos to begin with.

Use in-camera image styles

Every camera has built-in settings that you can adjust to fine tune how a photograph will look after you’ve captured it.  These settings include saturation, contrast, sharpness, color tone, etc. They can be found in your camera menu and are called ‘Picture Style’ in Canon cameras, ‘Picture Controls’ in Nikon, and ‘Creative Style’ in Sony cameras. There are often presets like landscape, portrait, neutral, and vivid with predefined settings for certain settings that will produce a certain look. You can even create your own custom preset by adjusting those settings to what you like and saving it.

Add more color

Boost the saturation by dialing up the saturation level or picking a descriptive color setting like vivid or super vivid found on the Canon PowerShot models from Beachcamera.com. As you’re taking pictures, start out in vivid color mode while keeping an eye on the LCD screen. If you like what you see, try out the super, or extra vivid mode to really make the image pop!

Bump up contrast

The normal factory setting on your camera that controls exposure compensation often makes your photos look flat. However, by turning the exposure contrast up or down on your Nikon D610 FX-format Video DSLR Camera from Beachcamera.com, you can increase lighting contrast allowing the tones to be primarily very dark or very light. This will have a strong impact on your images, giving them the “pop” you’re trying to achieve.

Control your white balance

Set your white balance manually to avoid making your photos too blue, red, magenta or even too green. Hues will appear livelier when a more accurate white balance setting is used over the automatic setting. On a slightly cloudy day you would use the “light overcast” white balance setting so your camera would increase the color warmth to compensate for the cloudiness. Use the same setting when it’s sunny out, and oranges will be more orange, and reds will be redder. Better yet, be a rebel and use the “cloudy” white balance setting. It’s just like using the “extra vivid” artistic mode.

When in doubt, take the picture anyway. Making your images pop is all about challenging your imagination. One of the great things about digital photography is that you can afford to take chances. You can snap away until you discover what works for you.