Editing and Monetizing your Smartphone Photography

1. Introduction: In recent years, a lot of people bought themselves fancy cameras and wherever they go, they carry their heavy gear with them just to take the perfect shot. Simultaneously, the quality of smartphone photos has increased significantly. It's never been easier to take exceptionally good pictures with the camera of your phone. I've been selling images through EyeEm's since the beginning of 2015. EyeEm, if you don't know it, it's a [inaudible] and based startup that started as a community for mobile photographers just like Instagram, and has since evolved into a stock image seller. Through collaborations with other work leading agencies such as Getty Images and I think a few other ones, my images are now available on multiple platforms, and I sell a couple of shots every month. Of course, it's not that I could live from that, but it's nice to have this little side income to supplement my freelance earnings. That's something that I do anyway. I take a lot of pictures for Instagram and then I just re-post them to EyeEm and Sullivan. Sometime ago, I conducted an interview about being a mobile photographer and people asked me regularly if it's still true that I only pick pictures with my smartphone. I do. I'm too lazy to pick a camera, carry around a tripod, and possibly multiple [inaudible] to get the perfect shot. I admire people who do. I'm just not the person to bother, I guess. Given all of the images I take and sell, I have been taking on an iPhone 5 and iPhone 6s and now an iPhone 8. I can truly say, if you own a smartphone, you have everything you need to take great images. My best selling photo, which is this one, can you see it? It's an iPhone 5 picture. It has sold so often by now that it could pay for a flight to New York and back to Europe again. In this class, I want to talk you for my approach to photography. What pictures I take, what I look for when taking photos, what apps I use to edit them, which is why the picture has sold so many times. It's been edited quite a lot. I use the apps to edit pictures in great detail so that you can follow. I hope you find this class inspiring and most of all, helpful. 2. Project: Take your favorite photo, or a photo you thought looked much nicer in real life that you didn't really manage to capture nicely and share the original with us as your project in this class. Don't forget to also share your edited versions, so that we can marvel at your edits. If you like, you can also tell us what apps you used to get to the final result. I can't wait to see your pictures. 3. Why smartphone photography?: From my perspective, being a mobile only photographer has many advantages. First of all, you always carry your phone in your pocket. It's easy to take out a phone. We are already so accustomed to. There's no need to fiddle around to get the aperture or the shutter speed right in order to produce a decent image. With a smartphone, you can just take a shot and figure out everything else later. I take a lot of pictures throughout the day, but mostly do it in passing. A friend once compared me to Vivian Maier, this incredible photographer from the forties, because just like her, I never make a big deal of taking a shot. There's a movie called Finding Vivian Maier, which if you're into photography, you would really enjoy. So anyway, to me a major advantage of photography with a smartphone is how easy it is to take a decent shot. I edit every single image with multiple apps, which takes a couple of seconds if you get accustomed to how you do it. My strategy, generally speaking, is to make the pictures look the way I see them in a reality, which in my opinion, is not how the original smartphone pictures ever look. I believe the image taken with a smartphone have colors that are always a little too dull and there's hardly ever any that they all look a little bit flat. So these following videos are here to explain to you how you can get the most out of a picture. 4. Composition: Now open the app Snapseed, which is valued in a majority of edits. It's the one in the top right corner, it's this one. While you can crop images in most apps, I always Snapseed because that's where I start editing all photos before I use other apps to get to the final result. While we often consider a picture to be good because of the object it captures and the colors, what makes or breaks an image is its composition. As you can see, this is the picture I mentioned before, the one that I've sold the most times. You can also see that I've significantly changed the atmosphere by changing the colors. But that's not the major reason why this image works so well. It makes a huge difference in whether a picture is going to be eye-catching or not based on how it's laid out. It's no coincidence Instagram images as clear because it's the easiest format for eye-catching images. You can create the composition after you shot the original photo and reduce it by one of the composition tricks while editing. Because when you usually take pictures with a phone, you of course have either landscape or portrait format, and then you can place whatever you are trying to place in the image by making it clear. You don't really have to think about when you're photographing, you can think about it once your editing. But whatever I'm about to say, all of this applies to portrait and landscape format photography as well. Before we talk about changing the colors and the depth of pictures, as you see in the image that I have here, let's talk about some simple composition tricks to help you create compelling pictures. Applying the rule of first is probably the simplest way to make a picture stand out. The trick is to imagine the image is divided in nine equals segments by two vertical and two horizontal lines. What do I mean? I'm going to open a picture of my dog to show you what I mean, so here. Then I go into here to Tools in the center down there. The second row, the first tool is cropping. Here you can see I have those nine squares in my square. You can use cropping to edit in a different way, if I decide to go with the square. I can show you what I mean by changing the composition and really positioning an object in an image. The rule of first says that you should position the most important elements in your scene along these lines that you can see or at the point where they intersect. Doing so will add balance and interest to your photo. Balance is generally the key to a good image as you can imagine. It might be that you took a picture of a nice-looking object or a dog as I did here, and naturally you want to position that main object on your image in the center of your shot. If I do that, I'll make it a bit smaller and make my dog the center of the image. It looks boring, I'm not such a fan of the image even though the dog is cute. Then I go back into Tools to show you what I mean. It really changes the composition if I for example make the dog in the center and don't really align it. It's a nice image, but it doesn't really cut it as much. I go back again to do this and here I will make sure that you don't see my legs and my socks here. Instead, I make it a little bit smaller. Then I align the lines with the eye of the dog and with the legs of my dog. Here I think and maybe you don't think the same way, but I think the image looks so much more compelling, so I'll save it for later. Generally speaking, I think it might make for a much more interesting picture if you place the main subject off-center with the rule of first, as I did with the dog. But then as not to make the picture look empty, place a less important object to counterbalance. If there was just a sofa, and not only the dog on the sofa but just the dog, it would be a bit boring. But it counterbalances because there's the couch table and then there's this little poof, the brown one, in the bottom right corner. There is a nice balance and the picture is evenly busy because it's quite a busy image. If you take a picture capturing some lines for example, roads, I'm going to open a picture that I took in the park. Great. If you take a picture capturing some lines such as roads or let's say when you take pictures of buildings, think about the angles. How and where the significant lines and edges in the image leads to and how they end. I often crop images to a square to make sure the lines end in the corners. Again, I go back into the cropping and then I can change this. But I can also make sure that the people on the image are here at the extra line, so the biggest looking person is right in the line. Then I might make it a little bit smaller and really align here. See the bottom-right corner, it really aligns with a bit as train path. I'll probably rotate it a little bit to really make sure that it's looking right, but here you can see I just make sure that it ends via to the end. When there's significant edges into pictures, I usually aim to have a 45 degree or a 140 degree angle because these angles make images look more striking. This one because it's still very flat, isn't as exciting right now, but you will see later on that you can really change how these images look. I'll save a copy of this one as well. Another type of picture that always seem to work are photos capturing linear, which is the central perspective. People love images that have depth and are easy on the eye. Again, I'll go in and open an image from my device and I'll open the one that you see in the background. Here again, I would make sure to align those lines with those two buildings on the side, and I would make sure that this point is right in the middle of the picture. I make it a little bit smaller. Here you go, this is how I would cut it. Last but not least, your viewpoint as a photographer matters too. It makes a huge difference whether you take a picture from your eye angle, if you squat down and shoot an image from a child's perspective or if you choose a high angle. This is of course something you wouldn't be able to change in post production. You can tilt images, but still, if you want to have a specific angle, you should really work for it. Maybe it's a tip you want to keep in mind when you are out and capturing your surroundings. One more thing regarding the composition of pictures, if I'm not satisfied with how different objects on my image pop, I might use the app that I don't even know how to pronounce is S-K-R-W-T. I'll save this again. I'll open the app it's the one right underneath in the middle on the right here. Here, I usually tend to fix perspectives and I would, for example fix the perspective of this one. Because this one is not quite right, so I would maybe change it like this and maybe I feel like this would work much better. Then with this app, you can tilt images to the side, up and down and you can even recreate different lens effects such as the wide-angle, fisheye or GoPro, which is this. Can you see the first one row here when you click on it? You have to wide-angle, you have the fisheye, and you have GoPro. If I go with the wide-angle, see, I completely change how it seems, the same with fisheye, the same with GoPro, it completely changes the perspective. You can see it here, yeah. You can fix if you are trying to photograph architecture, this is really a useful. Most of all, something that's also available within Snapseed, you can rotate images to adapt angles if you are not really happy with how they now look. After you have applied the effects of the SKRWT effects, it's incredibly helpful if you shoot interiors or exteriors with a lot of lines and symmetrical views. I can imagine that if you used to get frustrated about lines and never getting them right, downloading this app might be an actual relief. 5. Crispness: Let's get back to my favorite app Snapseed. Once I crop an image to make a certain element pop based on the composition rules, I usually click the tool "Drama". Drama is in the fourth row, it's the cloud, so click on it. As you can see, you have different kinds of drama. You have drama one, and then drama two, bright one, bright two. You have dark, you have dark two, you have all these different sorts. I usually use drama one. Drama makes pictures look sharper, often to a degree but they don't look very natural. I only use drama a little bit. As you can see, when I tap the screen and I swipe up and down, can you see it? I can adapt the filter strength and a saturation of the image. I usually turn down the filter strength, but I turn up the saturation. I try to make the colors look as natural as possible, but I always use this filter because I attempt to change the contrast, brightness and saturation of various objects within images. Another tool I like to use within the Snapseed app is, Details, which is the second one in the first row. See the triangle, that's Details. With Details, it allows you to add structure and increase the sharpness of the overall image even more. I can go down and up for a little bit of structure and I can also do sharpening. If I'm not satisfied with the tone of the lights because an image seems to be too yellow, I might adapt the white balance with total white balance as well. White balance is in the first row, in the right top corner, white balance. Here you can see, I can take away this yellowishness or I can increase the tone of yellow that the image has. I tone it a little bit down, look at this. Distal is mostly useful for interior images, I think. Whenever I capture people, I always add or maybe I remove color from their faces and arms. I like to make people look peachy and full of life and they'll of course, also appreciate it. If someone has a pimple, I might remove that too but I will get to that later. 6. Depth: Depending on what image you have in front of you, I often like to adapt the contrast and brightness to highlight various parts of the image I'm editing. These three charts I might make what's closest to me darker by tuning down the brightness, and additionally, I might increase contrast to give the image depth. So yeah, I go to selective. It's the third row the first circle with a dot in it. Then I might tap here, expand what I'm actually doing and then I would turn down the brightness by swiping to the left. I might increase the contrast by swiping to the right. I might do it again and then click on the building here and then make the building a bit lighter and also increase the contrast of it, and then I might tap here on this building and also increase the brightness and the contrast. Sometimes I would also increase the saturation, but here I think the saturation is quite right, and then I would tap in the middle and that's very much what changes the perspective, so I go down with the brightness, but I also increase the contrast, which makes sense, especially when you have objects that you want to highlight. Like here, this orange thing might also get a little bit more contrast and here I might make it darker again. You already changed how all these things look. You might also change the sky a little bit here. As you can see with the small change I just made, it looks like I'm looking towards something that's further away. Sometimes I make the back of an image darker, sometimes I make it lighter. It really depends on the image and what I'm trying to achieve. What's important to me is that, I edit the images to guide the eyes towards something specific. If I'm editing an image that has an actual frame, I'll open one. So an image with an actual frame. Let's go back to this one. I make the frame darker. So here we have those trees and I would make the trees darker and I would also make here the trees darker. Maybe increase contrasts. Maybe I should also increase the contrast here. It's always swiping left and right, and I'll definitely make this lighter, but also, I'll reduce the contrast. So you really play with the different elements of the image and then you create certain spots where the eyes were guided towards that specific something. A frame, generally speaking, might be a window I'm looking through or branches that make for an actual frame. When I am looking at an image, I always try to decide whether they are different layers captured that I could potentially highlight. So I really try to guide the eyes. If there are people in an image, I usually highlight them too. I would go in selective again, and I would make the people much lighter and now you can already see as if they would be stepping out of the image. With people, I might also increase the saturation to really make them shine and then behind them, I would make it a bit darker so that it truly looks like they're stepping out of something. I would say that people like to look at other people and it also puts the scale of buildings into perspective. So when you have buildings, somewhere and you have people there, if you make people look at the people, it changes the perspective of how tall the building seems to be. I'll save this one as well. Let's go to the interior. So if I shoot objects and I want to make them stand out, I usually tune up the brightness and contrast, sometimes even the saturation. I might also make the ground on the image or even the entire background darker. As you could see or tuned down to contrast to make the main objects stand out a bit more. So let's show it to you on this one image. So here you have those edges, right? So you have the edge here. I would again make the contrast much higher. Reduce, well no, I would also increase the brightness and then I would go again into selective and take this edge, and also increase the contrast and also increase the brightness of it and then in the back, I would make sure that the trees have the right green, so I would increase the saturation and then maybe decrease the brightness. You see it as you edit what works and what doesn't. You have people here and I think people should always remain the most important part and I can already see how it changes what you're looking at. It looks a little bit more orange on the screen than it does on my image, but generally, you can see that there's already a guidance towards those people in the back. Here is a little bit of light, and let's make life a little more shiny. So that's it. That's how I change depth of images. 7. Retouching: By now your image should already look much better than just a couple of minutes ago. I can promise you the more you edit images, the faster you'll become. At some point, you won't even notice the extra time you are taking before you share a photo in Instagram, Facebook, or IM, or somewhere else even. To develop a coherent language and a coherent visual language in your photos, it makes sense to follow a certain procedure. The editing, they'll be more or less an automated process. I don't really play around with different stuff, I always do the same thing. With some pictures, It might be that there are certain elements that make the photo feel cluttered or that you would just prefer to get rid of. It might be the cables above the street, a sign in nature, a plaque on the wall, or something similar you want to remove. In those situations, I use the app Retouch. For Retouch, it's the bottom one in the middle here, Retouch. You can go into your album and you can quickly just open an image and I'll open this one. With Quick Repair, you can just swipe over the object you want to see removed and it will be gone in a second. Quick Repair is this one and I'll just do this and suddenly it's gone. Object removal is a tool to get rid of more complex objects in a busier environment, or if it's very close to another line, another color, you might have to play with it a little bit more. I'll just make this much bigger. Then I'll show you that if I go on Object removal, it's not really going to work. See, it becomes very nasty, so I'll go back. What I do is I will clone stamp. I'll go up here and then I'll just swipe it away. You also have to make sure that you go in the right direction because you can already see that I'm doing something that I don't want to be doing. I'm slowly swiping this away. Again, it just follows me around. I swipe this, it's like around the edges, you really have to be more careful. I go here as well and just swipe this one away, and then I go even in a bit more closer and swipe this one. Here, you can see some stains. In that case, I would still do a little bit of quick repair to remove these lines where you change something. It might unfortunately also be sometimes that you won't be able to remove something. We thought it seeming unnatural on the picture. That's where I use the Clone Stamp tool. Mostly when I'm trying to turn in and art into a plane surface, for example, that would've really painstakingly slowly remove all the elements. I'm not sure if I have a straight shot, but there is this amazing thing which is Line Remover. There you really just swipe over the line and it disappears. A more tricky situation with editing is when you feel like you need a little more background than when you have to make the photo look intriguing. In those situations, consider buying the app AntiCrop. I cannot use it on this phone anymore. Maybe you have an older version and then you'll be able to use it. It's a great app. You can really extend backgrounds and make them seem much bigger. It doesn't work with every image because for it to look natural, your background must be more or less plain. Sometimes you've extended a picture, you might still need to use the app Retouch to make the extension look like a part of the original image. I really hope that AntiCrop gets updated because it would be a shame if they just didn't do that. Sometimes after we extended a picture, you might still need to use the app Retouch, as I said, to make the extension look like a part of the original image. I know you might now think, I should have mentioned this app and procedure already in the video on composition. However, given how rarely I personally use this app, I thought I would just drop the info about this app in here as the little goodie. Now as you can see, it doesn't work anyway, but I still want to keep it in the video. Good, let's move on to the atmosphere. 8. Atmosphere: We are almost at the end of this little editing tutorial and only now I'm ready to talk to you about filters. I know that the usual procedure of sharing an image online is to take it and then put a filter on it before posting it. I really enjoy using focus, and I usually have a few I use regularly, it's not that I just change everything else or just only use the filters and don't do anything else to the pictures, I do all of that. Mostly even before I use the filter, I might adapt the brightness of the image in the color story app, color story app is the one in the top right corner. It's a free app, but then you have to pay for packages inside. I'm not so sure it right now, and then I'll choose this image, which is the one that we've already been using. The reason why I use color story to change to lightness is because it makes images look lighter. Vapor bleaching off the colorless, so I can show this to you, you continue here and then you go to tools and then you go to adjust, and then you go to bright so brightness. It might be that you make it a little bit lighter. Some people like that. I usually only make it slightly lighter. Sometimes once I've changed a brightness, I'm already happy with the picture and don't add any more filters. Sometimes I use the glamour glow tool in the snip seat app to change the saturation and the glow of an image. I'm going to show you that. I'll go back to snack seat and then open. Let's open this image again. Here it is, let's open. Let's do this picture. I go to Tools and then I might add a little bit of glow. If I do this, it looks pretty vintage. It's like this is the glow tool in the snacks eat app. Then with some pictures, I also use filters. I might go to different apps again, as already mentioned, I have a couple of filters I use regularly, and it would be wrong of me to say, this are the ultimate filters that work and make every image better. I've come to realize that every city, every country has a different type of natural sunlight and a different color skin. My Vienna pictures, for example, always turn out a little bit more Grey, and my pictures in of Prague might have a slight orange tone for some reason. In Iceland, a lot of the pictures I took tone out to be lush green, and when I'm closer to see the images, I'd take my turn out a bit more, just like bright bloom. Then of course, pictures I take into Winter Light might have a very different color scheme to the photos I showed in the summer. That's also something that you have to consider. Instead of suppressing the natural color shades of the environment captured in the image, I always try to embrace the colors and make them look Lusher. I simply strive to make colors pop so that you just look at them. Of course, someone who is editing the very same image as I do might create a very different and result compared to my edit. I'll now open a VSCO Cam, and in the VSCO Cam, I might do this picture, and now you can see that I have all these different filters that I might apply, so it might be this one the C1 or the f E1, it looks very different It might be E2, I would just like flip fruit and just look what it works for me. I definitely like the E5 because it's a little bit more orange, and then you can change how strong the filter is. F2 has always been one of my favorites. I would go in and make it a little bit less obvious, and here you can already see that image just look so much brighter, and then the original picture which you have in the background of the screen. It's such a different experience. It's so much more. It's so much stronger to see those colors of the image enhanced by the filter. Then applying a filter, I decide for the overall atmosphere I wanted to create and then look for a suitable filter that helps me get to the result I like. Sometimes I find a suitable filter, but decide to decrease the capacity in which it's applied to the images as you could see that I'm editing. You will have to play around a bit to find your favorites filters and your favorite app to create images that fit your style. As I said, VSCO Cam is great. I might use color story as well, so those are my two favorite ones. Now, do you already have an image you would like to share? Please do, In the Project Gallery we can take a look at all your pictures that you've taken. Maybe also sharing to your Instagram profile. I would love to check out your profile because it's always nice to discover interesting new a constant social media. Now, to finish this, I might also take this one and play around with this to give you some lost perspectives of what you can do out of an image. I remember I was using this one, h b2. That was the one that make that image really pop. But I also remember that I made the picture a bit darker, and you see that this image just grips you much more than the original used too. Good, I really hope that you have already started looking for your images and started uploading them to the project gallery, and now I'll talk more about better tricks. 9. Weather tricks: Let's talk about extreme better conditions because they often have to capture and miss the outdoor scene might look stunning in real life and when you tried to capture it with your phone, you never quite capture the actual atmosphere as you see it with your eyes. It might also be that a place looks incredibly sunny but then on the picture you take the sunlight somehow isn't quite there. And there are steps that you can use to fix it. If you wanted to add or enhance fog in an image, I can recommend the FLD, it's one in the top left corner. So you can open it here and then you can tap on an image and then you can see that down here you have all these different possibilities. You have rain, you have snow, you have shimmer. Everything's here. So I usually use this app for fog. And you can already see that you just like edit a little fog and then you'd change the opacity or like you increase it so that it looks like pretty unnatural. You can also turn it upside down. I've kind of lost that now. So you can also turn it upside down and make it up here. Really it's up to you. With some pictures, i t doesn't quite work. In other pictures, it looks amazingly well. There are also other better filters however, and given that I like to make images look as natural as possible, I haven't quite used this app for anything else about the fog. I usually use color story for effects such as flare, but I always turn down the opacity of the filter to make it look as natural as possible. So color story, once again, it's in the top right corner here and I will open an image here and let's say I'll take this one. And then I would go into effects and flares. And then you can really see that you can put a little bit of sunshine or you can put this and then change to your opacity. You can do this one. I hardly ever use these apps on editing images, but I thought you might appreciate knowing about these tricks. Should you live somewhere in the countryside where you get to see fog regularly? Where I live, I can count the moments It was foggy but let me tell you this, I would absolutely love to see some foggy images in your project gallery. So please, please, please share your thoughts with us and the foggy ones get brownie points. Also I'll now talk a little bit more about selling images and how I do it. So there's not that much time left for you to share a project in the project gallery. Let's move on. 10. BONUS: Selling smartphone shots : As already mentioned in the class introduction, I also sell my smartphone images on a platform online. I've been an active seller since 2015 and it's not that I've been making a ton of money or that I have been selling a great variety of pictures I took over time. But generally speaking, stock images are what people often refer to as passive income. Something very irrelevant to freelancers. How does it work, right? Once an image sells and the more often it sells, the higher its rate and the more often that particular image might sell in the future. I'm saying this because I've already showed you the image that sold most often, but I must also say that I have more than 1,000 images listed on online market and it was 600 of those are also listed on Getty Images. That one image has made about a third of my overall income from stock photography that I've sold. Because out of those images, out of some 1,000 images, I've sold maybe over 20 different ones. I often hear people saying how they have tried to sell pictures and upload and thinking this is just a bespoke database, but they haven't sold a single image. This is why. Of course, you never know if a picture is marketable. But there are some rules that applied to make images more successful and those also more profitable. Generally speaking, images with real people in them are more valuable and also paid better. However you always have to require model rights to be able to sell them. Of course, you don't ever know what this image is being used for and so that's something that you have to decide for yourself if you're interested. Some of my most successful pictures are photos of foods. I basically arrange brunch or a picture of an ice cream cone in front of a corn baker. Corn can become super sellers overtime and make money as well. But a picture of a person in it is still going to sell probably more often. Then you also have seasonal pictures. But don't forget that [inaudible] agencies might no longer need those pictures. On the other hand, I took a picture in 2014 of a center that missed a train and then that's being selling every single year over on Christmas. To agencies Christmas images might be relevant in August and that's when you should upload such images to bespoke databases if you want to make seasonal photography your thing. They might sell every single year around the time, over and over again. One of the trends in recent years have been photos from the first-person perspective, Instagram like images, those that you think like that but you see your shoes. Instagram like images of how you experience your everyday plus I've realized that people prefer personal pictures. I've often sold pictures that have also been put up amongst my followers on Instagram. I have edited this book list class, this bonus video to explain that smartphone pictures of the same value like professional images and that they have market value specifically. Simultaneously I'm not dependent on my income from stock images. To me it's just a nice to have something you might want to experiment with yourself, but not something that you should build your strategy for making a sustainable income for the future. It's more a side income that might help you get a little bit of something every single month. 11. Final words: I hope you found this class valuable If you then already, I really hope you are now proud of your smartphone pictures. I hope I have convinced you that your smartphone is obligated to take cool shots, now and if you haven't already, it's finally time to share your edited shot pictures in your project gallery. One last thing and before I end this class, I have a couple of other classes here on this caption too, one about freelancing, one for freelancers that needs to build their own website and one about self-publishing and I'll also most likely be adding some classes in the future. So if you want to subscribe to my channel that will be really cool. If you want to follow me on Instagram, my handle is cuts mode and if you want to follow my dog her name is Orion less life. Thank you so much for watching to the very end and I wish you a beautiful day.