Key Takeaways
- Today, professional photographer Laurence Norah of Finding the Universe finishes his five-part series on taking better travel photos. Here, Laurence g
- One of the most misunderstood parts of digital photography is what happens after you take the shot: editing your photos, aka post-processing. This is
- Post-processing is the equivalent of the darkroom from the days we shot in film.
Last Updated: 10/16/20 | October 16th, 2020
Today, professional photographer Laurence Norah of Finding the Universe concludes his five-part series on taking better travel photos. Here, Laurence shares straightforward post-processing techniques you can use to transform your travel images and captivate your audience. Editing is just as vital as composition—so grab your notes!
One of the most overlooked aspects of digital photography is what happens after the shutter clicks: photo editing, or post-processing. This stage refines your raw captures into polished final images.
Think of post-processing as today’s digital darkroom—the modern evolution of film development.
In this guide, we’ll walk through foundational to intermediate editing techniques, from basic cropping and horizon alignment to advanced adjustments like shadow and highlight recovery.
Editing Photos: 7 Editing Tips for Your Travel Photos
1. How to Crop Your Photos
The crop tool lets you adjust image dimensions and aspect ratio—for example, converting a rectangular frame to a square. Common reasons include optimizing for social media, print, or stronger visual storytelling.
Let’s examine the first photo in this article: a lightning shot captured during a trip to the Florida Keys. Here’s the original uncropped version:
And here’s the edited version, after cropping:
Compared to the original, I removed distracting darkness along the right edge of the pier and recomposed using the rule of thirds—one-third land, two-thirds sky—drawing greater attention to the lightning bolt.
You might ask why the framing wasn’t perfected in-camera. In this case, it was a handheld long-exposure shot, with the camera balanced precariously on the pier’s edge. To ensure stability—and avoid missing the moment—I intentionally shot wider, knowing precise cropping could be done later.
Let’s see how cropping works in two popular tools.
Here’s cropping in Snapseed:
And the same process in Lightroom:
In both apps, cropping is intuitive: activate the crop tool, drag to select your desired area, then apply. That’s it—your refined image is ready.
As you’ll notice across examples, interface logic remains consistent across platforms, making skills transferable between tools.
2. How to Level Your Travel Photos
An unlevel horizon is a frequent but easily fixable flaw—especially in landscape and seascapes. When immersed in the moment, it’s easy to overlook alignment, but correction takes seconds in editing.
Returning to the lightning photo: balancing the camera on the pier resulted in a tilted horizon—a detail especially apparent against the sea’s clean line.
A zoomed-in view with an overlay line reveals the tilt—the horizon sits higher on the left than the right:
In Lightroom, the level function lives within the crop module. Simply rotate the image until the horizon aligns with the grid overlay—a built-in aid for precision. Here’s that adjustment in action:
