Photo Editing Terms That Would Help You To Become A Pro

Jargon: specialised and technical vocabulary that makes you question whether you truly understand your native language. It can make jobs, hobbies and interests sound impossible to get a grasp of because you have very little point of reference for what anyone is actually talking about. In fact, it can be almost intimidating, putting you off exploring that world entirely because the barrier to entry feels hopelessly high.

The same can be said for photography. There’s jargon surrounding composition, exposure, gear and even editing. And while terms like golden ratio, exposure triangle, prime lens and white balance may leave you feeling thrown in at the deep end, it’s actually not too bad at all. Especially when it comes to editing.

Granted, there are a few words to learn, but a good deal of them are actually quite intuitive. Many editing tools are named after exactly what they affect rather than some fancy, convoluted term that requires another Google search just to understand.

So, we are going to go through some of the most important photo editing terms while using Luminar, helping you understand not only what they mean, but what they actually do to your image. By the end, you should be able to navigate your edits with far more confidence. Let’s get started.

Exposure

• Exposure: How bright or dark your image appears.

When adjusting the exposure of an image, you are making the whole image appear darker or brighter. This introduces another useful jargon term: global adjustments, meaning adjustments that affect the whole image.

So we need to be careful when we do this, because if we are trying to make darker areas brighter, we are also increasing the brightness of the brighter areas in our image. In situations such as this, we need to target areas individually, which is what we can look at next.

Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks

• Tonal Range: The complete range of brightness in an image, from its darkest tones through to its brightest.
• Highlights: The brighter tonal areas of your image that still contain detail.
• Shadows: The darker tonal areas of your image that still contain detail.
• Whites: The brightest point of your tonal range.
• Blacks: The darkest point of your tonal range.

We can achieve more precise adjustments with these tools than with Exposure. If your subject appears a little too dark, then we can boost the shadows. Or if brighter areas in your image are a bit too intense, we can reduce the highlights. This will help us maintain a good balance within our shots.

Whites and Blacks control the extremes of the brightest and darkest parts of our image. When we adjust the Blacks, we are setting how dark the darkest point of our image is. Conversely, when we adjust Whites, we are setting how bright the brightest point is, with shadows, midtones and highlights sitting between them.

Contrast, Midtones and Dynamic Range

• Contrast: The difference between the lighter and darker areas of your image.
• Midtones: The range between the shadows and highlights.
• Dynamic range: The range between the darkest and brightest areas in which detail can be recorded or represented.

High contrast creates stronger separation between light and dark, often making an image feel punchier and more dramatic. Low contrast reduces that separation for a softer, flatter appearance.

Midtones are where a great deal of the visual information in your photograph sits, so it’s important to ensure that they have enough separation from the darkest and brightest areas of your shot. This can be achieved with Luminar’s Supercontrast tool, which allows you to control contrast in the shadows, midtones and highlights separately.

Finally, there’s dynamic range, which sounds much more complicated than it actually is. This simply describes the range between the darkest and brightest areas in which your camera can retain detail. RAW files generally retain more usable tonal information than JPEGs, giving us much more flexibility when editing because there is more information available to recover in the brighter and darker areas.

White Balance, Temperature and Tint

• White Balance: Adjusting colours so that neutral tones appear neutral under different lighting conditions.
• Temperature: Moving the colour balance between cooler blue tones and warmer yellow/orange tones.
• Tint: Moving the colour balance between green and magenta.

Different light sources, from the sun to indoor lighting, can create unwanted colour casts, meaning that the colours in our image may not look natural. White balance helps correct this so we can present colours more accurately.

Temperature and Tint work along two different colour axes. Temperature moves between blue and warmer yellow/orange tones, while Tint moves between green and magenta. Beyond correcting colour casts, we can also use these controls creatively, making an image feel warmer and more nostalgic or cooler and moodier.

Saturation and Vibrance

• Saturation: How intense colours appear in your image.
• Vibrance: A more selective adjustment that increases the intensity of less-saturated colours.

This is an area that can often leave beginners confused about how different these two tools really are, and the answer is quite significant. When we boost Saturation, we are globally intensifying the colours throughout our image. Or we can desaturate them, dialling down their intensity until eventually the image becomes black and white.

Vibrance, on the other hand, works more selectively, giving less-saturated colours a stronger boost while generally having less effect on colours that are already intense. This can make it particularly useful when you want a more colourful image without pushing every colour equally.

Hue, Saturation and Luminance (HSL)

• Hue: What the colour itself looks like.
• Saturation: How intense the colour appears.
• Luminance: How bright or dark the colour appears.

Inside Luminar’s Colour tool, you will find a range of colours that you can work on individually. Let’s take blues, for example. Using Hue, I can shift the blues in my image between sky blue to purple. I can then make those blues more or less intense with Saturation, before making them brighter or darker with Luminance.

HSL gives you far more precise control over how individual colours are presented in your shot, helping you perfect the balance and harmony between them for a much stronger image. It’s an incredibly useful tool and one that is well worth becoming comfortable with.

Noise and Noise Reduction

• Noise: Unwanted grain-like variations in the tones and colours of an image.
• Noise Reduction: The process of reducing the appearance of noise present in your shot.

You may have heard of ISO. Increasing it allows us to shoot using less light, which can be especially useful in darker environments. However, as we increase ISO higher and higher, noise generally becomes more noticeable within the image.

This can reduce the quality of an image and even obscure finer details, which is why photographers generally try to keep noise under control. The best solution while shooting is usually to capture as much light as the situation allows. If noise is still present, we can use noise reduction tools such as Luminar’s Noiseless AI. It can analyse the image, reduce unwanted noise and preserve as much useful detail as possible.

Masking

• Masking: Selecting a specific area of an image so that adjustments affect only that area.

Masking used to be far more complicated, often involving the tedious manual process of delicately selecting an area. Thankfully, modern editing software has made things much easier. Within Luminar’s tools, you will find the Masking menu within every single tool, which gives us several options for targeting specific parts of an image.

For example, if we have a subject that is too dark, we can jump into Develop, head into Masking and select our subject using Object Select, or simply brush over them manually.

From here, I can increase the Exposure or Shadows slightly so that only the subject appears brighter while everywhere else in my image remains unaffected. This is what makes masking incredibly powerful, allowing us to shape specific areas of an image exactly as we intended.

Dodge and Burn

• Dodge: Selectively brightening areas of an image.
• Burn: Selectively darkening areas of an image.

The names dodging and burning come from the days when photographers developed their images in darkrooms. They would physically control how much light reached different areas of photographic paper during printing to make parts of the final image lighter or darker.

Thankfully, we now have simple tools that allow us to brush over areas to make them brighter with Dodge or darker with Burn. I use these all the time. I like to make areas of the foreground darker to create more depth, or use Dodge over my subject to make them a little brighter and help them stand out.

Histogram and Clipping

• Histogram: A graph showing the distribution of tones within your image, from dark to bright.
• Clipping: When areas become completely black or white and tonal detail is lost.

This might be the most intimidating tool you’ll come across, but I will start by saying that there is no such thing as a perfect histogram, so don’t try to develop your shot based purely on what shape you think it should have.

Instead, photographers can use it as a visual guide to understand how tones are distributed throughout an image and whether clipping has occurred. Sometimes our eyes, or even our monitors, can be unreliable, so this gives us another way to check whether we have pushed our highlights or shadows too far.

If the graph is heavily pushed against the left edge, you may have areas clipping to pure black. If it is pushed against the right edge, you may have areas clipping to pure white. We can then decide whether that clipping is intentional or whether we need to adjust our image to recover detail.

The Bottom Line

Jargon and editing terms can be difficult to understand, with some being far less self-explanatory than others. But by following this guide, you will hopefully have a stronger understanding of what these terms mean and how they relate to the adjustments you make while editing.

Above all, the best way to learn is to keep experimenting. Work with the different sliders in Luminar and pay attention to how each one affects your shot. Soon enough, you’ll be reeling off editing terms like they’re second nature. Good luck!