Lessons

Lesson Info

Full Editing Demo

So what I'm gonna do now is actually walk you through the steps that I usually take when I edit an image. Essentially what I do is select the apps that I wanna edit in based on what needs to be done to the image. So if I'm editing something like a portrait, for example, I may not need to open that in SKRWT to fix the perspective at all. The lines in the background of a portrait don't necessarily matter as much as they would in, say, a photo of a building or something that's very geometric. The editing process that I take, then, could involve as many as four different apps or it could be as few as one or two different apps. For the purposes of this demonstration I've chosen an image that I want to edit in four different apps so that you can see my process along the way. The app that I usually start with is SKRWT and the reason that I choose that first is because when I make those perspective adjustments, some of the edges of my images, by nature, just get cropped out of the frame. So in...

the past I've actually done edits on an image where I've taken the time to actually retouch the edges of an image so that they're nice and beautiful and clean, and then I've gone in to correct the perspective but the perspective correction crops out those edges that I just took the time to edit so nicely, so for that reason I tend to start with SKRWT so that the image that I'm editing throughout the process is already sort of cropped to essentially what my final image will be, so I'm not wasting any time along the way. The first app that I wanna show you, then, is SKRWT. I'm gonna launch the app and select the image that I wanna edit. I've basically placed it into this images to edit folder, it's the center image of this street with some buildings on the edges. I import that into SKRWT and automatically know that I wanna start with the vertical perspective correction. So, by opening up that tool, it allows me to pull my sliders to be roughly where I want them. I'm using those grid lines as my reference points for lining up the strong verticals in the image. The strong verticals in this particular image are the edges of the buildings and the edges of the windows, so this is a fairly good place to be right now. And, just to make a slight adjustment, I'm also gonna rotate it ever so slightly, and then maybe pull it back a little bit, dial back that vertical pole. What I'm looking specifically at in this instance are the white lines of the window frames that are up against the right edge of the image. If those are fairly in line with the right edge, I feel pretty good about the image. Opening up any of the tools will show me a grid that I can then use as a reference point, making a few slight adjustments again, making sure it's where I feel like it's good. If I press and hold on the image, it toggles between the before and the after, that feels pretty good to me, the images, the lines are actually pretty well lined up with my edges and in the grid. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit save to gallery. Once I save that image out of SKRWT I decide which of the apps I wanna take it to to try out some filters. I'm gonna go ahead and open that image in Priime. So when I launch Priime, it actually launches me straight into this images to edit folder that I created. But now, since I've already done my base edit in SKRWT with the perspective correction, I don't actually want to open the original photo anymore. I actually wanna navigate to my most recently added image and edit that one. So I'm going to recently added and I see that the newest image is the photo of the street. I'm gonna tap into that, so from here I get to decide which of the filters that I wanna apply. I tap the center icon and it allows me to really swipe through and see what the different filters do to my image. So there are a couple here right in the beginning that I like a lot. Say I like this one, I'm gonna go ahead and hit adjust at the bottom, and play with the intensity of it. This one looks good roughly here but let me do the before/after comparison to see whether or not I like it. I do kinda like it, it adds a little contrast, brightens ever so slightly, I lose a little bit of saturation, so I'm gonna kinda remember those things as things that I might wanna either adjust or fix later on down the road. So let's say I wanna apply this as is, I hit the check mark, at this point I really have to decide whether or not I wanna continue doing my edits in Priime, using their edit tools, or take it into another editing app like Snapseed, where I have a few other tools available to me. Because I know that I like the Snapseed editing tools, I'm gonna make a decision at this point to save the image out of Priime and open it in Snapseed. I'm gonna hit the check mark and hit save, copy. So at this point we've just launched Snapseed and we wanna continue our editing process. I'm gonna tap anywhere to open a photo, navigate to open from device, all photos, and select the last photo in my camera roll. That's the one that I just saved out of Priime and now can apply my Snapseed edits to. I'm gonna navigate straight to tools, straight to tune image and then straight to my favorite tool, the ambiance slider. With this I'm going to see what it looks like when I pull the slider positive. I always like to check what it looks like negative, that's not too bad but what it does is darken my darks and I don't really want that, I like there to be a little bit more detail in my shadows. So I've slid the ambiance slider positive ever so slightly, I'm gonna toggle between the before and the after. What I notice is that my darks, my shadows have gotten ever so slightly brighter and I also have a little bit more saturation in the sky. If you recall, from the beginning, once I added that filter in Priime, it actually de-saturated my sky ever so slightly, and now that this ambiance tool is bringing that saturation back, I like it because it brings me back to a little bit of what the original color in the sky was, while also preserving some of the other edits that were made possible by the filter and the slider in Snapseed. So I like this, I actually wanna slide it a little bit more positive and then see what that looks like. I know that the original image was pretty saturated in the sky so I'm not afraid of that added saturation in the sky, I don't wanna push it too far 'cause I don't want it to look fake, but I think having that color in the sky is really what makes this image. So I like it like this so let's commit that ambiance change. Toggling back and forth by pressing on the screen, is there anything else I wanna change? I might actually, I've already left that tune image section but I'm gonna pop back into it really quickly and I'm gonna play with my shadows, I'm gonna see what it looks like when I open up my shadows a little bit. So, toggling, that's actually, I didn't even realize it was being displayed because I could barely see the difference, so, before, after, it's ever so slight. Honestly, I don't notice the difference too much, and I feel like maybe I either need to go higher or maybe just leave it the way it was. I think I kind of like the drama and the contrast of the before, so I'm gonna back out of that tool and leave it the way that it is. I think now there's nothing more I wanna do in Snapseed to this image at this point, just toggling between the before and after shows me that there is a little bit of a difference that I've achieved through the ambiance slider and I'm happy, so at this point I'm gonna export it and save it as a copy. Again, it's gonna go into my camera roll, it's gonna be the most recent image, so when I launch my next app, which is TouchRetouch, it'll be the first one that should pop up if I'm in my camera roll. So let's launch TouchRetouch, gonna go ahead and go into albums, go to all photos and the last photo in my camera roll is the image that was just saved out of Snapseed. For this image there's a lot going on in the photo so I'm really gonna hone in on things that are very particular, things that are really distracting me from the rest of the image. Most people may not be bothered by these things. I am, so I'm gonna just take 'em out and I'm gonna use TouchRetouch to show you how I do that. The nice thing about TouchRetouch is that you can zoom in very closely to be very precise about what you're cloning and healing out. So what I've honed in on is actually these, basically, manhole covers in the middle of the street. They're not really that harmful in the image but at the same time they kind of clutter the roadway and it's a really easy thing to remove using TouchRetouch. So I'm gonna navigate to object removal and try out that brush size to see if it's good, it feels pretty good, I'm painting over one of the manhole covers, and I'm gonna press go. That worked pretty well, so two finger drag, to pull the image over and enlarge it ever so slightly so that I can paint over the other manhole cover. Sometimes when you do this, it actually isn't super precise, or it does something like pull in things from other parts of the image that you don't want, so that one actually, if you notice, it pulled in this other light spot that was just above the manhole cover, and I don't really want that. But instead of redoing it, which is a possibility, I can just paint over those two spots and get rid of them. Now I'm super zoomed-in so these things are barely perceptible in the actual image, so it's really up to you how precise you want to be, I find that I can get really kinda neurotic about it, just because I like having really clean images. So I might do something like clean up all the manhole covers on the street, these little bright dirty spots on the road I might edit out but that's just because I'm me and I'm very particular about those sort of things. In general though, I've taken a few things out, I think the image looks pretty good, so I'm gonna go ahead and export it, save as copy, so essentially, when I navigate back to my camera roll, so what I've gone ahead and done is put all of those photos that were the final edits and exports out of each app into one folder just so that I can show you the step-by-step process of each image iteration as it came out of each app. So here's my original. I first took it into SKRWT to fix the perspective. I then added a filter in Priime. I then adjusted a little bit of the tones using the ambiance slider in Snapseed. It brightened it ever so slightly. And then I removed some of the manhole covers on the ground using TouchRetouch. So that's my final edit and that's the image that I would then share to social media. So what I've done in this lesson is I've really walked you through several different editing apps that are available for you in the App Store that are either free or that come at a very low cost. There aren't really any single apps that take care of all of the things that you want to do all within one app so what we've been doing for many years is kind of pulling together an editing process using different apps. So we went from using SKRWT for perspective correction to apps like Priime and VSCO for applying filters, then into Snapseed for a couple of their more specialized tools, and then into TouchRetouch, which is really great for cloning and healing. So in that process we've used a bunch of different apps. In an ideal world we would really have one app that we could work in that would really take care of most of those needs for us. For beginners this is a really great way to start, and if you're interested in a more robust workflow with one single app, you should check out my next class on editing in Adobe Lightroom CC for mobile.