(melodious instrumental music) - So this is where the
fun actually starts, because in this video you'll discover how to get perfect color
and exposure in your photos. Just watch this video, apply the techniques that
you're about to discover and your photos will literally will never look the same again. The techniques I'm about to
share with you in this video are so powerful, that if you use them you can literally improve any photo that you've ever taken with your iPhone or with any other camera. They're that good. So by the end of this video we'll have taken this
original unedited photo and we'll have transformed it into this beautiful masterpiece with vibrant colors and perfect exposure. And in order to accomplish that we'll be using an app called Snapseed which is a free app that you can use both on your iPhone and iPad. So before you watch any further, please make sure you have the Snapseed app downloaded on your iPhone and also make sure you download
the original unedited photo. And the best way to watch these lessons is to not just watch the videos but to actually do the
edits at the same time. So to do that, you want to watch the
course on one device, such as your computer and then do the actual
edits on your iPhone, just as I'm doing them. If you do it that way
you'll learn the most. But now let's get
started and I'll show you how you can greatly improve any photo using the Tune Image module of Snapseed. So here's what the
Snapseed app will look like when you first open it. And nothing really happens
until you actually open a photo. And to open a photo you
can just snap anywhere or you can use the open button
at the top left hand corner. So if we tap on Open you'll get all these different
ways to open an image, but the one we'll be using
the most is Open from Device, so I'll tap my finger there. And now you'll see all
the different things you have in your photo library, the different folders and so on. And if you just download the sample photo we're going to work with, then that photo should be
in the All Photos folder at the very bottom. So here's the image I want to open and now you can see that
it's open in Snapseed. Now the interesting
thing about Snapseed app is that you can use it both vertically, as I'm doing it right now or you can rotate the screen and you can also use
this app horizontally. So it's a matter of
preference and for some photos you might prefer to hold
your iPhone horizontally and for others you might
prefer to do it vertically. But for most videos we'll be using the horizontal aspect ratio, simply because it looks nice around video. And now we can start editing. So on the right hand side you'll see that there are
a lot of predefined edits. So essentially Snapseed has already done a whole bunch of different
edits to the image and you can scroll through these. But most of the times they will not fit your particular photo, so I'm not a big fan of this feature. So I'm gonna tap on X at the top right and I'm not gonna use these
predefined edits at all. Instead all the editing magic of Snapseed happens on the right-hand
side of the screen where you'll see this pencil icon. So if you tap there all these different
editing options come up and you can scroll through them and this is where you access
all the power of Snapseed. Now the one feature or the one module of Snapseed
that you'll be using the most is called Tune Image
and it's the first one. And this is really where most of the editing will take place and this is also what
you're going to learn about in this video. So I'm gonna go ahead
and tap on to an image and you'll see that the
Tune Image module comes up. Now at the bottom of the screen you have several different buttons. And the first button I'd like to show you is this button here that
looks like a magic wand. And if you tap there Snapseed
does an automatic adjustment where it just tries to guess what type of edit would
work best for this photo. So I tap this button and Snapseed already
edited the photo for me. And on the top right
hand corner of the screen there's an icon that I can
press to do a before and after. And as I'm holding down my finger you'll see the before state of the image and as I release my finger
you can see the after. Now the automatic function
hardly did anything here and most of the time I will not use it because I prefer to
edit my photos manually. So if I am not interested
in keeping the changes I made into an image, all I have to do is tap the X check mark at the bottom left-hand corner right here. And if I tap X I'm out of Tune Image and I'm back where we started and I haven't made any
changes to the photo yet. So let's open Tune Image again and this time we'll actually
do the edits ourselves. Now in order to access the
full editing power of Snapseed, pretty much all the modules
have different sliders. And the way you access these sliders is by swiping your finger
vertically across the screen. And as you do that all these
different effects come up and you can select any one
of these like brightness and then if you swipe your
finger horizontally like so you can increase brightness
or decrease brightness. And this is how pretty much all the modules of Snapseed work. So you swipe vertically
to find the right effect, you swipe horizontally to change the value of that particular effect. And now let's go through all
of these effects one by one and I'll explain what each of them does as we're editing this photo. So the first effect you'll find at the top is called brightness. And brightness essentially is how dark or how bright your image is going to be. So brightness goes down, the
image becomes really dark. The brightness goes up, the
image becomes really bright. And you'll see at top left that we can also see
the value of brightness. So now it's plus five, but we can go all the way up to plus 100 or all the way down to minus 100 and these are the values
of the individual sliders. So for this specific photo I think that the brightness
is fine the way it is, so I'm going to leave it at zero for now. I don't think this photo
is too dark or too bright so I don't see a point of
changing brightness at this point. So let's move on and let's
switch to the second effect and that is called contrast. So contrast essentially determines how different the brightest
parts of your image are from the darkest parts of your image. So let me increase contrast
and you'll see what I mean. Now as I'm increasing contrast you'll see that the image
is essentially reduced to a lot of white pixels and
a lot of black pixels. And that's not really pretty
but that's what contrast does. Or if we go down, you'll see that the image
becomes less contrasted and the difference between the brightest and the darkest pixels becomes
less and less pronounced. So that's not good either but that's what happens
when we decrease contrast. So if you increase it, it
becomes more contrasted, there's a lot of blacks, a lot of whites, not much in the middle. If you decrease it, the opposite happens. Now, for this specific image I'm also going to keep contrast
at zero at least for now. And the reason for that is that, you can get even more control over the contrast of your photo if you actually adjust the highlights and shadows of the photo separately, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. For now I will leave contrast at zero and I'll move on to the next adjustment which is called saturation. So saturation essentially determines how strong the colors of your photo are. If you increase saturation you'll see that the colors
really become more vibrant and it really starts to stand out more, so all the colors
essentially become stronger. Or if you decrease saturation
the opposite happens and if you go all the
way down to minus 100 you end up with a black and white photo. So this is also the easiest way to convert any photo to black and white. Now, this is a sunset photo and if there's one thing
that really makes it special it is the colors. You can see a lot of orange
tones, a lot of blues, the beautiful reflection and what makes this photo
work are the colors, and because of that I
want to actually go ahead and increase saturation here and the more we increase it
the stronger these colors get. Now a typical beginner mistake would be to go all in on saturation, to do 100 or 80 or any other crazy high value like that. And it can be tempting to
do this but it is a bad idea generally speaking to increase saturation or any of these effects too much. And the biggest beginner
mistake I see all the time is over editing photos. Now there are different editing styles and different approaches to editing but one approach I'd like you
to practice at least initially is to do the kind of edits
that really improve the image but that you cannot necessarily see. In other words, when
someone looks at your photo I don't want that person
to first notice the edit. I want them to first notice the photo and then if they start thinking about it they might realize that
the photo has been edited. But you don't want the
edit to stand out more than the photo itself. And because of that I'm not gonna increase saturation too much and I'll stick to a relatively
modest value of plus 40. It's still a big
improvement compared to zero so if I tap on the before and
after icon that's top right and if I hold my finger there you'll see the before version of the photo and as I release my finger
you can see the after. And it's clearly an improvement but at this point it's not too much and the edit does not look unnatural, and that's the goal here. But now let's move on to the next effect and that is called ambiance. So ambiance is kind of interesting because it modifies both the exposure and the color at the same time. So let me show you what it does. If you increase ambiance
two things will happen. One is that the natural
contrast of the image goes down so there will be less blacks
and less whites in the image. So the contrast is decreased
as you increase ambiance. But at the same time ambiance
also increases the saturation of the colors that are sort
of in the middle of the photo. So the mid-tones which are neither the darkest parts of the image nor the brightest parts of the image increase in saturation
as you increase ambiance. And if you go into negative direction the opposite will happen. So if you go all the way down to minus 100 the image becomes more contrast and the saturation also goes down. Now you typically don't decrease
ambiance most of the time but it can be very tempting to increase it because the image appears
to get better as you do it. And a typical beginner mistake again would be to increase ambiance too much. So we're now at plus 100 and
it might seem like a good idea. But two things happen when
you increase it so much. Number one, the colors get unnatural which you can clearly see now. And number two, if we really zoom in using two fingers as I'm doing now you'll see a whole bunch
of weird quality issues start to appear in the photo. For example, if we look
at this dark blue cloud and if we look at it really closely you'll see that there's a lot of green and a lot of purple in the dark blue cloud and that's not good, and also the overall level of
grain in the image goes up. So in general, increasing ambiance a lot is an easy way to reduce
the quality of your photo. So don't increase ambiance too much. I'll zoom out now and I'll try to find a
modest value of ambiance. I want to increase it just a little bit but I don't want to overdo this. And from my experience small values such as plus 15 to plus
30 tend to wear it best, but for now I'll just stick to plus 15 because I really don't
want to overdo ambiance and get any of the quality
loss associated with it. And now let's continue and the next effect is called highlights. And highlights is really interesting. And what it does is essentially it effects the brightest parts of the image only. So with the highlight slider,
if you go all the way up, the brightest part of the
image become even brighter and you can now see that
all the bright parts of the sky are almost white or if you go down the opposite will happen and the brightest parts of the
image actually become darker. Now this can be a very good
way to affect your photo. And for this photo I want to
slightly increase highlights. It might seem a bit counterintuitive. Like why would you want to increase them? Especially considering that the image almost starts
look better as you go down. But the reason I want to increase them is because of contrast. And generally speaking from my experience I can tell you that images that are higher in contrast tend to look better to the human eye. Now you don't want to overdo this but most of the time
you can improve a photo by adding just a little
bit more extra contrast. And the way I like to
add extra contrast is by essentially increasing highlights and then decreasing shadows a little bit. So if I go too high on the highlights you'll see that all the
oranges disappear from the sky. So there were a lot of orange tones and now they're all
gone and that's not good because these oranges really
make this photo more beautiful. But if I increase highlights
just a little bit to plus 15 the oranges don't really disappear but the image becomes just
a little bit more contrasted which is what I want. And now let's go to shadows. And shadows is just like highlights except it only affects the
darkest parts of your image or the shadows. So with shadows you can increase it. And increasing shadows essentially makes the shadows brighter, so look closely at the bottom
of the image where it's darker or look at the dark clouds. And as we increase shadows you'll see that the
dark parts of the image actually become brighter. Or if we go in the other direction and if we decrease shadows the shadows become even darker until eventually they're completely black. Now for all of these effects the key is to use them in moderation. And my experience shows that
most images can be improved by slightly decreasing shadows but you don't want to overdo this. And for this photo I've
played around with it before and I found that the value of minus five is what I was looking for. It's a tiny change but it's just enough to add this photo a little bit extra punchiness so that the natural contrast is bigger. And now we're almost done but the last effect I want you to look at is called the warmth. So warmth is similar to white balance if you're familiar with that idea. But essentially warmth determines how warm your image feels to the viewer. And if you go to the left
the image becomes bluer and blue means cold in photography. So if you go to the left
you're getting a colder image or if you go to the right
you're getting this golden glow and the more to the right you go the more yellow the image
essentially becomes. So for sunsets, generally speaking you
want to increase warmth because sunsets are very warm naturally but the trick once again
is to not overdo this. It can be tempting to go up to plus 40 and it does look kind of nice. But the reason I don't
want to go that high is because I still want the blue sky and the blue clouds to be blue, but I want this blue to be complemented by even stronger warm tones. And as I was playing around with this I found that a value of
plus 15 works really nice. Because now what happens is that the warm parts of the
image are even warmer but the blue still looks relatively blue which is the natural way it should look. And now I can essentially
make this image warmer. It looks nicer but the blue is still blue and I want the blue to look natural. Now please understand that
each photo is different and editing your photos into an image is essentially a circular process. You change one value then
you go to the next one then the next one. And when you're done you go back and you change some of
the early values again. And you keep doing this
until you get the look that you're happy about. Now I've edited this photo before, so I'm not gonna go back. I already know that I really
like this combination of values and that's because I played
around with this photo for a few minutes. So when you're doing these edits yourself, the way you want to do this is that you just go through all them once to find a good combination
that you're happy about and then you go through
all the edits again and you adjust them some
more until you get to a combination that you really like. So it's a circular process, it's a bit of trial and error, but if you try it enough times to develop a good intuition about what works really good for each photo. And in case you're still not
fully confident about this don't worry because we'll
be returning to Tune Image many, many times throughout this course. But now let's see what we've
been able to accomplish. So I'm gonna tap my finger on
the before and after switch at the top right. So as I'm holding down my
finger you can see the before which is nice but the
colors aren't quite there. And as I release my finger
you can see the after version and the clouds look so much better. Now one final thing I'd like you to do before applying these effects is to just really zoom
in and zoom in a lot don't just zoom in a little bit and see what you've done to
the quality of the image. So zoom in and then do
a before and after again and see how much the quality of your image has been affected by your edits. As a general rule, the more you edit your photos the worse the quality will become and you'll start seeing
unnatural colors, grain and potentially other problems. Now for this photo I don't think we've really introduced any problems at all, I'm really happy with this edit. But getting the habit of
zooming in to check the quality before you finalize your edits. Now I'm happy with this, so I'm not gonna change anything else. And all I have to do now
is tap the okay check mark at the bottom right hand corner. And once I tap my finger there everything we did in Tune Image is applied and you can see now in the home screen we have a photo that's
already been edited. Now if we wanted to keep editing we would tap the pencil icon again and we can now select
any of the other effects and we can keep going. Or if we feel like we're done then you tap on the bottom
right hand corner here and you have these different
options for saving your photos. So let me quickly explain how
these options are different. So the first option is to save, if you tap that Snapseed
will try to modify your photo and you'll get this prompt asking if you actually want to modify the image. Now, I don't like doing this. The benefit of doing it is that you will not have multiple versions of the same photo on your iPhone so it's actually going to be cleaner. But as a photo artist I like
to always keep a clean version of the original photo and because of that I don't
typically modify the photos. I don't allow this, I
don't use this option, and I'll save both the original
and a separate edited photo. Now just in case you do modify
your photo, don't worry, because all the edits you do
in Snapseed can be reversed. So it's non-destructive editing which essentially means that
if you're tired of the edit you can just remove it altogether and return to the original. But still I don't like
overwriting the originals so I always use the second
option which is save a copy. When you use this option Snapseed creates a new
version of the same photo with all the edits applied and you can still remove the edits if you choose to do so later. Now the third option for
saving is called expert and if you use this option then Snapseed will again create a new version of the same photo but you will not be able
to cancel the edits. So there's really no
need to use the expert and save a copy is the option I recommend you use all the time. Congratulations. You now know more about photo editing than 99% of people will ever know. And if you just use the simple techniques that you learn in this video you can literally improve any
photo that you've ever taken, it's that powerful. Now we'll return to the Tuned
Image module of Snapseed many many times throughout the course. So if you didn't fully understand
something, don't worry, we'll be using Tuned Image a lot because that's probably the
most powerful editing module there is in Snapseed or frankly
in any other application I've come across. So the important thing is this, you're now fully equipped to start editing and I want you to get
started straightaway. There's no reason to wait. Start editing your photos now and I'll see you in the next video where I'll tell you about your first photo editing assignment.
