I’ve been busy working behind the scenes updating old photos in my recipes. I cringe when I look back at some of them. I remember thinking back then that they looked good to me. Years later, not so much. I’m happy to say that I’m almost done and have even managed to revive a few dead posts.

What I realized when I was going through all these old photos was all the editing mistakes I made. I believe in learning from my mistakes and wanted to share them with you so you won’t make the same ones that I did. Here are my top seven photo editing mistakes I made as a new photographer.

1. Oversharpening. I like my images to be crisp and in focus, but not to the point where they begin to look unnatural. I find if you oversharpen, your image takes on a newsprint like quality. More is not always better.

2. Not making local adjustments. I would apply adjustments like exposure and contrast to the entire image versus only parts of the image that need to be fixed. My favourite tool now in Lightroom is the adjustment brush. I use it with every single photo I edit.

3. Forgetting about white balance. I’ve had many a blue photo in my day. Sometimes, you’ll see a blue cast on photos and that’s a sign that you need to fix the white balance. When you shoot in RAW, it’s easy to do post-processing. With JPG, it’s a bit harder to fix.

4. Unattractive crop. I didn’t even know about the rule of thirds when I first started. I’d plop a plate in the centre of the photo and call it a day. Now, I try to think about composition on every photo and fix it in editing if I don’t get it right out of the camera.

5. Blown out highlights. Whites are tough and it’s easy to get them too bright that you lose all the details. I had a few photos where you’d wonder what the heck that white blob was supposed to be.

6. Going crazy on saturation. I love the look of vibrant colours, but I overdid it with some of my photos to the point they looked unnatural.

7. Editing with presets or filters only. I’d apply a filter in Picmonkey or a preset in Lightroom and that was it. I didn’t bother to tweak the photo to get it looking the best it could. Now, I don’t even use presets.

Have you made any of these editing mistakes or maybe have some that I haven’t mentioned here?