This effect turns a bland photo into something that makes you ask a lot of questions. Now I don’t know who this person is, but what if she’s incredibly wealthy, has an wonderful life and is happy about everything. Then you’ll feel deceived. When you use an effect like this… which I like to call the poverty look… you’re twisting the story and your photo is no longer truthful.

5. Protect People’s Privacy

A common technique to hide a person’s identity is to create a silhouette effect where the background is visible but the main subject is dark and hidden. If you’re doing this, you need to ensure that the black tones are properly clipped away. Sometimes the silhouette is dark enough that you can’t make out any details. But if you brighten the shadows, you can often restore all the details in the photo or video - especially if it’s taken with a high quality camera with a large dynamic range.

To prevent this from happening, you can use the Curves tool and drag the top-right node towards the left until the silhouette becomes visible. Then drag the bottom-right node as far to the right as you can. Drag the top node back to the top-right position and you’re done. Before you publish the photo, do a test to ensure that you can’t recover the details anymore.

6. Use Geotagging with Caution

I know this video said 5 tips. But there’s one last thing I want to talk about. It’s not really about post processing but it’s so important that I just have to tell people this. It is the GPS data. Many cameras now have geotagging which tags your photos with a location of where it was shot. A lot of times, this is a very handy feature especially for travel photos. But if you’re doing anything like investigative journalism, it’s very important that the photos you publish don’t have the GPS coordinates because you can seriously ruin a person’s life.

If you’re publishing a photo, make sure that you’re removing all of the metadata. If you use the save as command in Photoshop, won’t do this . The correct way to save a photo for web use is to go to File > Export > Export As. For older version of Photoshop, you can go to File > Save for Web. And there will be an option for you to remove the metadata. Always doublecheck to ensure that the GPS coordinates are removed. A better solution would be to just get in the habit of disabling geotagging in your camera before you start shooting.