How I Edited Photos To Triple My Tinder Match Rate

You’ve taken tons of photos now and they look OK. But then you compare them to your inspiration photos or someone with a really successful Tinder profile? Damn, your photos look like you didn’t even try. There’s such a huge gap in the photo quality, which makes you wonder “How the hell did they do that?”

You tried copying the background, the lighting, the pose, the framing—everything! But when put side to side, the inspiration photos appear so perfect, while your photos come out as meh at best.

What do they do differently? How come inspiration photos are on an entirely different realm of perfection to yours? Is it some magical attractiveness thing that average guys can’t even dream about?

Well in short, the secret between a decent photo and a stunning eye-catcher photo is editing. Not to fake anything, but to subtly make you appear as the hot guy you are and draw attention to you rather than the background—not turning you into some catfish Tinder nightmare!

Here I’ll discuss why you should edit and show you my process for editing Tinder photos.

Why you should edit your photos

Editing to enhance a photo can significantly improve your photos and results on Tinder. From my own experience, my match rate almost tripled after editing the photos I was using at that time.

But I certainly don’t want to catfish girls. Just help draw the attention to me and what I’m doing.

And it works. The same photos, just edited to draw the focus better to myself. It really is crazy how such simple adjustments could lead to some seriously awesome results.

My Editing Process

0.1. Have great photos to start with

While you can basically create anything if you are a Photoshop wizard, we’re after enhancing existing good photos. Thus you want to ideate the most interesting photos and shoot them as well as you can before starting editing.

0.2. Open the photo in Lightroom in Develop window

1. Correct white balance (if you shoot with RAW)

First, you want to check the white balance for a natural skin tone. Often, photos tend to make especially whiter skin colors to look paler than they are. Most often you need to warm the photo a tiny bit.

If you’ve shot photos with a smartphone, there’s not much you can do here if it’s completely off. Though often the smartphones get quite close so small changes might be possible.

2. Adjust the overall levels of light

Next, you want to adjust the levels of light, or in technical terms exposure. In other words, if some parts of your photo (or the whole photo!) are too dark or too bright, we want to adjust the exposure to the other direction.

2.1. Test whether ‘auto’ edit works for the image

Lightroom provides an automatic edit option, which, in my experience, works quite well if the photo is shot outdoors. For indoor shots, it tends go overboard making the photo too bright.

However, it’s a good idea to start with it and see how well it works. If it doesn’t work, reset the settings and do it manually.

2.2. Manual adjustments

What we’ll be adjusting are mostly exposure, contrast, highlight and shadow sliders. If you aren’t familiar with them, here’s a quick reference. For a bit more visual explanation, check e.g. this article.

• Exposure: Global level of light that uses EV (exposure value) units. One units are in exponential scale meaning an increase of one unit doubles the level of light while decrease halves the level of light. Common adjustments in my experience vary between ±0.2-1.5EV.
• Highlight: Adjustment of only the bright areas in the image.
• Shadows: Adjustment of only the dark areas in the image.
• Contrast: Adjust contrast in midtones, or in other words, the areas that fall in between highlights and shadows. Essentially the middle-to-dark areas become darker and the middle-to-light areas become brighter when you increase contrast, and vice versa when you lower contrast.

Now, from top down adjust each slider. If the photo feels a bit too dark, adjust the exposure up. To give more detail with the differences of highlights and shadows, increase contrast a bit. If there’s a bright spot that’s a bit too dominant, decrease the highlights. If there’s a shadow that’s too dark, increase shadows.

There’s no hard rules in editing really. It’s more up to experimentation to find edits that work the best. Either way, the changes you should do are quite minimal meaning there’s no need to crank up the sliders to the extreme ends.

3. Drawing the attention with light and sharpness differences

Now, the magic touch: make yourself stand out! One of the most typical ways photos draw our attention to someone is by having the subject brighter and crispier than the background. Thus we want to darken and blur the background, and possibly brighten and sharpen (part of) the subject i.e. you the guy.

N.B.! These changes should be extremely subtle so don’t go overboard. What you’re looking for is that it looks roughly natural. What I often do is that I create this effect that I like, leave the photo for at least 15min or even a day, and then take another look. Often after I end up tuning the effect from 100% to 70-80%. Or even leave out the subject mask off if the subject is well lit in the first place.

4. Remove small details that would draw the focus away from you

Time to remove any small distracting details like emergency signs, traffic signs that are with really bright colours, passerby’s bright color backpacks, litter on the ground…. Essentially anything that’s not a prop for doing the activity and tries to grab the viewer’s attention.

If you’re unfamiliar with how to do these, I highly recommend Phlearn’s Photoshop tutorial. It takes the large beast that Photoshop is, cuts it into manageable pieces and teaches each of those at a nice and clear way.

5. Crop the photo

Last, we want to ensure that the framing is perfect by cropping the photo. In other words, if the framing wasn’t perfect when you took the photo, you can fix now as long as you were not too far nor too close. However, it’s easier to get it correct when taking the photo than it is to fix it drastically when editing!

Crop the photo to 4:5 ratio in vertical orientation, because that’s what Tinder crops your photo to. This way, you can control what’s visible and what’s not, making it easier to upload to Tinder without any worries.

Before & After

After all that, let’s take a look at the end result. Clearly draws the attention towards me a lot more, while being subtle enough.

Takeaways

• After you have good photo candidates from photoshoots, you should maximize their quality by editing so they draw the attention to you, the hot guy. If you don’t know how, you should either learn or pay for someone else to edit your photos.
• You maximize the attention on you by darkening and blurring the background, and possibly brightening and crisping up yourself
• Tinder uses 5:4 vertical format so we can control what’s visible already now