Editing pictures on a smartphone

**We've been sick at the house so I've not been posting much.  Hopefully next week we can get back into the swing of things and post WWWW and some birthday and photography blogs!  But here is a blog I started up a couple weeks ago and never got around to posting.


So I was out at lunch and I walked by this beautiful tree with these beautiful magenta flowers on it (Yes magenta because I'm a girl and I name colors specifically!) against a beautiful blue sky wtih the most perfect clouds behind it.  I loved how it looked and I took a picture.  Because I'm addicted to not only taking pictures, but posting pictures.  :)  So, I was gonna "instagram" it but noticed the tree was a little too dark, so I decided to edit it in my phone.  After all was said and done I thought  that this would be the perfect opportunity to do the "editing in smartphones" blog post I've been wanting to do!  So here I share my secrets (not really) to editing your pictures in your smartphone.  I have an iPhone so that's what you're going to see.  I don't know how to use an Android or any other smartphone, but I imagine the apps can't be much more different (if they're available). 

Because I am a photographer I am usually pretty picky about a picture I post, even if its on Instagram or Facebook.  Especially for Instagram because once you start adding filters it messes with your picture even more. I like for my picture to be as clear as possible and bright as possible.  That's hard to do with a iPhone because 1) the flash is limited in how far it goes (I try not to use it at all) and 2) its a phone, not a DSLR camera or even a point & shoot camera. 

Enter: Apps for editing pictures!  My 2 favorite and the ones I use for everything are Snapsneed and Afterlight.  Each pretty much do the same thing. They both have your general features like brightness, contrast, saturation, etc, but Snapsneed has one feature that I like especially.  Sometimes I use both, sometimes I just use one.

So here you see my original picture... The tree is darker of course because of the bright sky behind it. 

I did it first in Snapsneed because it has a more specific feature that I needed for this picture "selective adjust".  This means that you can mess with a selected area of the picture.  Where as if you were to mess with general brightness, it would brighten the whole picture.  But this selective adjust lets you pic that area that is dark and brighten just that area.  So you're in there, you hit the + sign that pops up and a circle appears.  You can place that circle whereever you need.  Then if you pinch or expand your 2 fingers (just like when you zoom on a picture) it will enlarge or shrink the circle.  But what I like is that it highlights in red the part that will be affected so you can see what your specifically fixing.  So this comes in handy a lot because you don't always have the perfect lightsource.  Also, sometimes your kids face is darker than the rest of the picture and you can specifically brighten it.  I love that!

So you have your area selected and if you swipe up and down you have the option to enhance brightness, contrast, and saturation of that selected area.  If you swipe side to side you increase or decrease your chosen enhancement.  It sounds and looks kinda complicated at first and I'll admit at first I was intimidated by the options, but once you learn it, its super easy.  So that's one of my favorite features of Snapsneed. Another thing I like is that it has tilt-shift feature and center focus feature.  Those add that blurriness to your pictures where you want it to be out of focus.  Other than that it has your generic stuff.  But I love how by brightening it and messing with focus, you can take your ordinary iPhone pic to the next level and it can look like out of a real camera.

So here you see my before and after using Snapsneed:

After adjusting the dark tree, I went ahead and went into Tune Image where I can adjust the general brightness, contrast, saturation, and temperature of the picture.  You didn't know a little picture had so much potential did you??  :)

And here is my picture in AfterLight after making the same adjustments (except selective adjust, since it doesn't have that feature).

Its almost the same, except you can tell that the one edited in SnapSneed has a bit more detail to the tree because of the selective adjust.  I added contrast specifically to that tree because when I brightened up the general brightness of the picture, it made it kinda dull looking.  

Anyway, I hope this made sense and you can go and download those apps and turn your simple iPhone pics into better ones!