What are the best ways to edit images for your Creator Economy portfolio?

Ok, so beyond selecting the right software for editing images, it's crucial to understand the specific requirements of your Creator Economy portfolio. Tailoring your choice of software to the type of content you create—whether it's photo manipulation, graphic design, or simple touch-ups—ensures optimal efficiency and output quality. Additionally, exploring tutorials, online courses, and community forums related to your chosen software can significantly accelerate your learning curve and mastery, empowering you to maximize the potential of your portfolio's visual impact.

As a longtime Adobe Photoshop user, I found a whole new world to utilize Lightroom. I was familiar with it from processing RAW images, converting to DNGs and bulk processing....but LR became THE PROGRAM to use for my tens of thousands of AI images. After going ham on Midjourney in late 2022, I quickly realized I needed a better way to organize, sort, rank and process my images. Midjourney's website does not cut it. LR became indispensable. Yes, it is a massive and temperamental program but for me it's the best. I can immediately take an AI image into Photoshop, fix it and it's saved back in Lightroom. It took me 2 months to create a system. I sort by creation dates, add metadata and then utilize the Collections which sync with LR mobile.

One thing that I would point out for the new designers, Affinity software package is affordable and without subscription. You pay once and get the new updates for life. This is not a paid ad, just a genuine and honest advice to the fellow designers. Also, learn Figma! Free browser based UI software. Good luck!

I would point out setting the white balance properly, which is missing from the original text. The skin tones are probably the hardest thing to set correctly, so take your time with that.

One thing I would like to share for Midjourney users specifically. You need to lighten the shadows in nearly every image. You may even need to adjust the overall exposure. I see so many beautiful images come out of Midjourney & even other AI programs, but they are straight up underexposed. Don't get caught up in the mind blowing image you created. I know it's easy to. My best tips for people who don't know photoshop or photography is: 1) Find a program like Canva, Pixir, Photoscape, Gimp or Photoshop express you can use to edit your AI imagery 2) Lighten the shadows and you will see how much detail is missing that you didn't realize was there 3) If you understand Curve layers - use them as well 4) Play with the color adjustments 5) Sharpen

For applying some filters, the Snapseed app can be especially good and easy to use. Of course, it might be more suitable for personal use rather than professional use, but it's free and helpful.

For anyone using Lightroom and Wix for their website - there is a plugin that will immediately publish your images to your Wix gallery through Lightroom. This eliminates the extra step of editing in LR and then needing to export to a different folder (which creates duplicates and takes up more space.) You also get to use LR to organize your layout rather than Wix's clunky one for their pro galleries. After 3 long weeks and over 20+ hours troubleshooting with Wix advanced support and Adobe, I realized the Wix LR plugin doesn't support the default .png extension files that MJ images download as. As a work around - convert to jpeg or tif, (I use snap converter) THEN import & organize in LR then use the LR plugin to publish to Wix.