iPhone Photography Essentials: Take Pro Photos With Your iPhone | Sean Dalton | Skillshare
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iPhone Photography Essentials: Take Pro Photos With Your iPhone

teacher avatar Sean Dalton, Travel Photographer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Course Introduction

      3:00

    • 2.

      The Best iPhone Models for Photography

      1:25

    • 3.

      Overview of iPhone Camera

      7:53

    • 4.

      iPhone Camera Setup

      7:09

    • 5.

      Focus Tapping, Exposure, and AE/AF Lock

      4:33

    • 6.

      The Creative Side of Photography

      0:45

    • 7.

      Lighting Basics

      6:02

    • 8.

      Mastering Composition

      7:49

    • 9.

      Storytelling

      5:23

    • 10.

      Do This to Become a Better Photographer

      1:41

    • 11.

      Intro to Practical Photography Lessons

      0:54

    • 12.

      Choosing the Best Lens

      3:22

    • 13.

      How to Take Long Exposures with Live Photos

      3:57

    • 14.

      The Power of Portrait Mode

      4:12

    • 15.

      Documenting Places with Pano Mode

      4:12

    • 16.

      Two Approaches to iPhone Editing

      1:55

    • 17.

      Quick Editing with Filter Apps

      10:21

    • 18.

      Editing in Lightroom Mobile

      17:36

    • 19.

      Next Steps

      2:36

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About This Class

Ready to start capturing professional looking photos using your iPhone camera? In this 95 minute course Sean covers everything you need to know about how to use your iPhone as a powerful photography tool. 

In this course you will learn:

  • The best iPhone Models for iPhone Photography
  • How to setup your iPhone to maximize its photo taking capabilities
  • The best settings for taking photos on the iPhone camera
  • The best apps for iPhone photography
  • How to find the best light to take photos in
  • How to capture perfect compositions
  • How to tell stories in every image you capture
  • How to edit your photos using free iPhone apps
  • And plenty of other tips and tricks to help you capture beautiful photos with your iPhone

This course is for:

  • Anyone who wants to capture professional looking photos without spending thousands of dollars on expensive cameras and lenses
  • Anyone who wants to maximize the potential of their iPhone camera

Course Resources

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Meet Your Teacher

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Sean Dalton

Travel Photographer

Top Teacher

Hey guys! I'm Sean.

For the last 5 years I've been traveling the world capturing as many photos as I possibly can. I'm drawn to a wide range of photography styles, and constantly striving to improve my art. Emotion and storytelling are two central pillars of my artwork, and I am always looking for new and interesting stories to tell via my camera.

I'm originally from San Francisco, California, but have spent the last few years chasing stories and light throughout Asia.

Most of what I teach relates to my background with travel and lifestyle photography, but I am constantly expanding my focus as I continue to grow as a photographer. I'm pumped that you are here, let's grow together!

I'm active on Instagram, and you can also find me on YouTube.... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Course Introduction: One of the things I love so much about iPhone photography is just the power of having such an incredible camera in my pocket at all times. The iPhone really has become a legitimate camera for photographers in recent years and with just a little bit of knowledge, you can start taking absolutely beautiful images with your iPhone that look like they were taken with cameras that cost thousands of dollars. Hey everyone, and welcome to the iPhone photography essentials class. My name is Sean Dalton and I am a travel and lifestyle photographer, currently based out of Bali, Indonesia. I've been taking photos with the iPhone since 2013 and since then I've traveled the world capturing and sharing photos with my iPhone and learning the ins and outs of how the iPhone camera works and how to capture the best photos possible with it. Today in this course, I'm going to show you guys some of the things I've learned over the years and help you start taking beautiful images using your iPhone camera. I'd like to say that photography is about 15 percent understanding how your camera works and 85 percent understanding the creative principles that comprise a beautiful photograph. In this course, we're going to cover both of those factors in detail. I'm going to teach you how to use your camera and all the most important features and I'm also going to teach you the most important photographic concepts that will help you become an amazing photographer. If you don't have an iPhone, that's totally fine. You can follow along with any similar device that you might have. However, this course is based around the iPhone and iOS. In this course we're going to start off with the basics. I'm going to show you guys the iPhone's most important features and talk about all the most important technical aspects of the iPhone camera and how you can use the camera to capture the best images possible. Next, we move on to the creative concepts of photography like lighting and composition and storytelling and how understanding these factors can really help you capture beautiful images and help you stand out as a photographer. After that, we're going to head outside and we're going to do some live action shooting where I'm going to highlight some of the best features of the iPhone camera and also just show you how I take photos using my iPhone. Lastly, we're going to head back to the studio where we're going to edit some of those photos that we captured and show you guys how you can edit a photo to really bring out the natural colors and the detail and just make it much more appealing for your viewer. This course is packed with examples and animations so you guys can follow along easily. I'm also including some detailed PDF notes, so you guys don't have to take notes at all during the course. You can just sit back, relax, and enjoy the content. This class was designed for anybody that wants to capture beautiful and professional looking images without spending thousands of dollars on an expensive camera and lenses. Maybe you want to capture beautiful images to share with your family and friends or maybe you just want to learn how to document everyday life in a more beautiful way. But no matter who you are, this course is going to teach you how to capture beautiful images using your iPhone. If you guys are ready to get started and you're ready to capture some beautiful images with your iPhone, go ahead and enroll in the class. I don't know about you, but I'm super excited to dive into this content. Enough talking, let's dive into the very first lesson and I'll see you guys in the course. 2. The Best iPhone Models for Photography: All right guys, in this first lesson, I want to talk about iPhone models. One of the questions that I get asked all the time is "Sean, what's the best iPhone to take good photos?" I have an older phone, I have an iPhone 5 or I have an iPhone 6. I'm afraid that it's just not good enough for capturing good photos. To answer that question, every iPhone on the market right now, relatively speaking, can take amazing photos. If you haven't iPhone 5, an iPhone 6, honestly, that's totally fine to capture some really good images. Of course, if you have one of the newer iPhones, yes, you're going to capture relatively better photos because it just has more capabilities. It has a better sensor. But one of the things you'll learn later on in this course is the technical side of photography, the actual camera is such a small piece of the puzzle when it comes to what makes a good photo, what makes a beautiful and compelling image, so you don't need to have an amazing camera, amazing phone to take beautiful images, so don't worry if you have an older iPhone model, you're totally fine. This course is still for you and you can still capture some amazing photos with the iPhone model that you have. Then later down the line when you get to upgrade, when you finally get a new phone and you have that new camera, it's going to even seem that much better, so don't worry if you have an older iPhone, I promise it's going to be more than capable of capturing some really beautiful images. 3. Overview of iPhone Camera: In this lesson, I want to take a second to talk about the iPhone camera and some of its most important features. Now, right off the bat, one of the questions I often get is, "Sean, which app should I be taking photos in?" The answer to that question is the native iPhone camera app is the best camera app for taking photos on your iPhone, and that's for a few different reasons: it's incredibly easy to access, it's fast, and it just has a lot of really great features that you don't necessarily need to go find in another app. So don't worry about third-party apps, the native camera app on the iPhone is amazing for taking really awesome photos. Now, in terms of opening the camera, obviously, if you have your phone open, you can just tap the camera app and that's going to open it up. I like to keep my camera app on the bottom bar, the Home bar, of my iPhone so I can just quickly open that app and be ready to capture whatever I want to capture. Another way to do it from your lock screen, and I also do this a lot too because I don't always want to unlock my phone to capture photo, all you have to do is tap and hold the bottom right-hand corner. There should be a little camera icon there. If you have a newer iPhone, that will open it up. If you have a Home button on your iPhone or you have an older iPhone model, you can just swipe from right to left, and that is going to open up your camera as well. Now, once you open up your camera, it's going to look something similar to this. It's not going to look exactly the same, this really depends on the iPhone model that you have. But relatively speaking, it's going to be pretty similar to what you're seeing here. Now, let's just focus on this bottom area for a second. You can see here there's a little button, and you just tap that and take a photo. All right, guys, well, that's how you capture good photos with your iPhone. I hope you enjoyed the course and I'll see you next time. Just kidding, you're not getting off that easy. There's a lot we have to cover in this course. But jokes aside, that is one way to capture a photo with the iPhone, you just tap in the middle. You can also tilt to the side and take a photo with the volume buttons, either the bottom or the top volume buttons. You can take a photo that way as well. I like to do that when I'm shooting things like landscapes. Right above the shutter button, you're going to see a few different modes, and these are your actual photo modes. You'll see photo right in the middle, you'll see portrait, pano will be off to the right, and then you have the video modes on the left, so video, slow-mo, etc. We're not going to be worrying about those in this course. In fact, when it comes to iPhone photography, there's really only two, maybe three photo modes that we use when we're capturing photos. The first one, of course, is the default photo mode, the one that we're on now. This mode just really captures amazing images, and most of the time you're going to be shooting in photo mode. Portrait mode is a really awesome feature that uses AI to actually blur the background in your photo and create a shallow depth of field. We'll talk about what that means later on in the course. But in short, it just gives your photos a really cool professional look. It's a feature that makes the iPhone an incredible, incredible camera. Then pano mode, panorama, basically allows you to take a really long photo, it takes a bunch of photos and stitches them together. I think that's a really good photo mode for documenting certain scenes. We'll discuss that later on in this course as well. Right above the photo mode, on my phone, you can see there's a one times, there's a 0.5, and there's a two. These are referring to the lenses on the camera. Depending on your iPhone model, you might have one lens, you might have two lenses, you might have three lenses. That's really going to dictate what you see here. If you're not sure how many lenses that you have, you can simply just turn over your phone and look. On this phone, the iPhone 11 Pro Max, I have three cameras, three lenses. I have the one times lens, which is the normal lens that every iPhone has. This is probably the best and the most useful lens that you have on your phone. I also have a telephoto lens, or a two times lens, which means it's much more zoomed in, so I can zoom in closer to things and capture photos really close-up. That's great for things like portraits and shooting food and stuff like that. Then it also have an ultra-wide lens, which is the 0.5 times lens. What this is, it's very wide, so it shows a lot of the scene, so it's really cool for things like landscapes and really capturing, maybe, inside of a room or somewhere that's small. That lens is very good for that. Older iPhone models will only have the one times lens, some of the newer ones, like I said, they'll have the two times and the ultra-wide 0.5 times, but ultimately, it doesn't actually matter if you have those other lenses. It's useful, they're really cool, creative tools, but the one times lens is what you're going to be using most of the time, anyways. So if you have an older iPhone model, don't worry at all, you're going to be able to capture really good photos with that one times camera mode. With those features out of the way, we covered how to take a photo, some of the photo modes, as well as the lenses, which are pretty crucial pieces of the puzzle. Now I want you to go ahead and actually swipe up on your phone, and this is going to reveal a few different settings that are pretty important for photography. Let's start off at the far left and work our way over to the right. I'm going to highlight some of the most important features and how they can be used in everyday shooting. This might look slightly different, depending on your iPhone model, but for the most part, it should be pretty similar. On the far left here, we have flash, and this allows us to turn our flash on, off, or auto. I like to leave it on auto because I think the iPhone does a great job at choosing when to fire the flash. The next thing we have here is turn Live Photo on and off. In the next section, I'm actually going to explain what that is, what a Live Photo is and why I think you should turn them on, but you can toggle that feature here. Now, the next thing here is the aspect ratio. The aspect ratio is basically the size of the frame that you're shooting. I like to shoot in a four by three aspect ratio. I think that just looks the best. It's the most natural-looking and it's the easiest to edit and share online, so I shoot with four by three. You can shoot in square, which is pretty cool for an artistic effect; and you can shoot in 16 by nine, which is great for things like landscape photos because it's very wide. But like I said, I like to shoot in four by three because I think that's the most practical. Next, you're going to have the exposure slider here, and this is basically going to change how dark or how light your photo is. Next, you have a timer, so if you're taking a group photo or something like that, you could set your phone down and turn the timer on, pretty easy. Then the next mode here, which I think is overlooked by a lot of people, but I think it's so, so cool, it's basically the built-in filter mode within the camera app. You can actually shoot with a filter already applied to the scene so when you capture the photo, the filter is already applied, which I think is so cool. There's a lot of really good ones here. My personal favorites are dramatic and noir. I really love the film noir look, it's a really cool high-contrast black and white look. I think it just really opens up a lot of creative opportunities with the iPhone. So if you're out shooting, you're bored by how the colors look in your image and you don't really want to spend all that time editing, you can just jump in here and shoot with one of these cool photo modes, and that will greatly change the look of your photo. Like I said, my favorites are noir and dramatic. I think those look really good. Now, on the far right, you're also going to see another feature called HDR. We're also going to be talking about what that is in the next section, but you can turn it on and off here. Now, you also do have some features on the top that you can easily turn on and off. You have Live Photos there, you can tap that, turn it on and off, HDR, and the flash as well. Those are some of the things that you might need access to quickly. Like I said, in the next section, we're going to talk about HDR and Live Photos, and if you should be turning those on or off. Now, with the basics of the camera app out of the way, let's jump into some of the features that I think you should enable or disable in order to set up your phone to capture perfect photos. 4. iPhone Camera Setup: Now that we have a good understanding of the overall iPhone camera and some of his most important features that we're going to be using, now let's get into the setup and talk about a few features that you should be enabling or disabling in order to capture better photos. So the first thing we're going do is turn the Live Photo Preserve Setting on. That means the iPhone will remember whether or not we enabled or disabled Live Photo mode, even if we closed the app. Otherwise, it's just going to enable live photos every time you open the app. A live photo is essentially, instead of taking a single photo, the camera actually records 1.5 seconds of video before you take the photo, and 1.5 seconds of video after you take the photo. This is really great for taking a photo of a moving subject, or maybe you're taking a photo of a person, or a model, and they blink. You don't have to worry about their blink anymore because you can just scroll through and editing and select a different frame to edit, and you can select a framework where they're not blinking. It's also really great for just memories. Short videos are better for memories than photos; they capture more detail, they have audio, they have movement, and it's really cool going back and looking at old live photos. I'm glad that I left this feature on, because it allows me to see more of some of the things that I've done in my life. It can also be used creatively, which is so cool. You can take a long exposure photo using the live photo mode, and I have a lesson later on in this class where I'm going to show you guys how to do that. However, live photos do take up about twice as much space as a normal photo. So if you are heavily concerned about iPhone space, then I would recommend turning this off. However, I really do urge you to leave it on; they're not that much bigger, and I think it is that much cooler to have a short-form video, and it doesn't negatively impact the quality of your photo by having live photos on. I did a bunch of tests, so don't worry, I recommend keeping my photos on. However, if you do want to turn it off, we need to make sure we turn the preserved setting on. So in order to do that, all we have to do is go to Settings, scroll down to Camera, go to Preserve Settings, and then on Live Photo down below, hit on. This is basically just going to tell the camera to remember if we enabled or disabled it. So it will more of just re-enable it every time you open the camera app. Now the second thing we need to do is turn the auto or smart HDR feature off. iPhone models after the iPhone XS have a feature called smart HDR, and iPhone models before that have a feature called auto HDR; we want to turn this off. But before I get into why we should disable this, let me first explain what HDR is. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. A photo with high dynamic range will maintain a lot of detail in the highlights, and in the shadows, where a photo with low dynamic range won't have a lot of detail, and the shadows, they actually might appear black, and the highlights might appear white, so there's not going to be a lot of detail in the highlights as well. One of the reasons why we want to maintain a lot of detail in our images is because we can just see more things in our photo, and often we really want that as photographers. When the HDR mode on our cameras is enabled, the iPhone actually captures three different photos at different exposures. It'll capture one photo with a dark exposure; to expose for the brightest areas of the image, it will capture a normal photo right in the middle to capture the mid-tones, and then it will capture a bright photo to make sure that it's getting all the information from the darker areas of the image. Then it just stitches those images together to create a really high dynamic range image. The reason why we want to turn smart HDR, or auto HDR, off in our settings is because that allows us to then enable or disable HDR within the actual camera app. If we don't disable that feature, then the iPhone is just going to choose every time we take a photo, and we're not going to have the ability to actually manually override it and turn the feature on or off. Now most of the time, I honestly really like shooting with HDR; it looks really cool, and it just creates these images that are amazing. However, there are times when I'd like to turn this setting off. For example, if you want to maintain the contrast in a scene, if you're shooting a high contrast scene and you really want to maintain that high contrast, you can turn this feature off. To turn off smart HDR, or auto HDR, depending on your iPhone model, all you have to do is go to Settings, Camera, and then toggle Smart HDR or Auto HDR off. Now when you open the camera app, you'll see in the top right hand corner, or you can swipe up and see HDR on the far right, and then you can just enable or disable that. Now I really urge you to go outside and actually experiment with this. Take a few photos with HDR enabled and disabled and see which one you like better. The 3rd thing we're going do is turn a grid mode on, and grid mode basically puts a few different lines within our frame to help us compose our shots in a better way. To enable grid mode, it's pretty simple. All you have to do once again is go to Settings, Camera, scroll down and just turn Grid on, and then when you open your camera app, you'll see those lines in your frame. This is really great for composition, so I definitely recommend turning this on. Now there is one more thing that I wanted to mention; it's called the iPhone ProRAW mode. This is a newer mode that iPhone has recently added to their phones, and it's only available in the newest iPhone models. Now ProRAW mode is essentially a feature that allows you to shoot RAW photos on your iPhone camera. Now this is amazing for photographers because it gives them the ability to capture a ton of different detail in a scene, and they can really edit that photo and make a ton of changes to it in the editing process. However, these photos are incredibly large; they're like 25 megabytes. They're massive, they take up a lot of space on your phone and they also look terrible if you don't edit them; they're really dark and gray. Honestly, for most people the ProRAW mode does not make a lot of sense to shoot with. If you do have a newer iPhone, and you do have ProRAW, you can go ahead and try it out. But personally, it's not the mode I would use, because I think the JPEG photos that come from the camera app look great and you can already edit them a ton; like I'm going to show you how to do later on in this course. So if you have ProRAW, cool, you can mess around with it, but I don't think that technology is quite there yet. So if you don't have it, don't worry, I don't shoot with it, and I think the JPEG photos that come from the camera look great. One last tip for iPhone setup before you start shooting is to clean your lens. One of the biggest mistakes I see in photos is somebody to take a photo and there's all these weird highlights, and it just doesn't look good at all, and that's because their lenses aren't clean. To clean your lens, all you have to do is just use your shirt, give it a few wipes, and you're good to go. You shirt it's not going to scratch it; these things are made of really intense glass, so don't worry about that. Give it a wipe and your photos are going to look a lot cleaner. All right guys, with the setup out of the way, now I'm going to talk about how you can get super sharp and well exposed images using Auto Exposure, Auto Focus, and Focus mode. So let's get into that lesson now. 5. Focus Tapping, Exposure, and AE/AF Lock: When it comes to actually capturing photos with our iPhones, there's a few things that we need to be thinking about. Obviously, we need to make sure our subject matter or whatever is in our scene looks good. But besides that, there are two things within our camera that we need to get right. Those two things are focus and exposure. Luckily, the iPhone makes it super easy for us to get perfect focus and perfect exposure in our photos. First off, let's define focus and exposure, and let's start off with focus. Focus is basically the part of your image that appears sharp and in focus. If your photo is out of focus, it's going to look blurry. When you take a photo with your phone, you need to make sure that you're focusing on the most important part of your image. This might be the face of a person, this could be a plate of food, this could be your pet. Whatever you're taking a photo of, you need to look at that photo, find the most important part of that image. That's what you're going to want to be focusing on. Now the iPhone actually has an amazing autofocus feature, and most of the time we didn't even need to do anything. All we have to do is open the app and the camera is going to focus on whatever is in the scene. However, if you're shooting something close up, we call this macro photography. The iPhone might not select the right focus points, so that's when you need to manually focus using the camera app. To do this, all you have to do is physically tap on the part of the screen that you want to be in focus. That will tell the iPhone to autofocus in that spot. You can try this yourself. Put something in front of you, open up your camera app, tap on the subject, and then tap on the background and watch how the iPhone switches focus between your main subject in the background. Now when you tap to focus, you might also notice a little sun symbol on the right of the little box. This is just the iPhone telling you that it's also exposing your image for the area that you just tapped. You can also tap and drag up or down to increase or decrease the exposure of your image. Dragging up will increase the exposure and dragging down will decrease the exposure. Exposure is essentially how bright or how dark your photo is. A photo that has too much light entering the camera will appear too bright and we call that overexposed, and a photo that doesn't have enough light entering the camera might appear overly dark and we call that underexposed. Now there isn't necessarily a right or wrong with exposure. This is very much a creative thing. Some photos look really cool, underexposed and some photos look really cool overexposed. That's a very much a creative thing, especially when we start getting into emotions and what kind of emotions do you want to elicit with your photos and what kind of stories do you want to tell. Exposure is a creative thing. However, for the most part, we do usually just want to expose normally, which means we just have a balanced amount of light entering the camera. The iPhone also has an auto exposure features. Most of the time we don't even need to adjust or expose there anyways. Usually, we can just open up the phone and the camera is going to auto expose the scene and it's going to look really good 99 percent of the time. However, the tap and drag up or down feature is great if you want to focus on one part of the image, such as a cup in the foreground. But you want to expose for something in the back of the image like a sky or a bright window. In that situation, you would just tap on the cup to focus, and then you would bring the exposure down to balance out the exposure of the light coming in the window. You can also adjust your exposure by just swiping up in the camera app and sliding the exposure slider from left to right. This is great if you want to adjust your exposure, but you don't want to mess with the focus of your image. You don't even have to tap the screen, you can just drag that slider up or down to increase or decrease the exposure. Now besides focused tapping and dragging up or down to adjust the exposure, there's another great feature called AE/AF lock. This feature stands for auto exposure autofocus lock. In order to use this feature, all you have to do is tap and hold on a part of the screen that you want to be in focus. Hold there for a few seconds and then AE/AF lock will show up on the phone. That just basically means that the iPhone has locked focus and exposure on that point. Then you can move your phone around as much as you want, recompose the image, and your focus and your exposure is going to stay exactly the same. This is really useful if you just want to focus on one thing and then recompose the shot and try out a bunch of different compositions. This is a great iPhone camera feature to know about. If you can master these few simple features, I promise you're going to be an expert iPhone photographer. They're pretty simple, but grasping them is of utmost important. With that said guys, we're done with the technical side of the iPhone photography. Let's jump into the creative side. 6. The Creative Side of Photography: Up until now, we've covered the technical side of iPhone photography. How to use the camera, the most important features, and some of the things that you should know about. While the technical side of iPhone photography is important for capturing photos, in truth, we only need to know enough of this technical knowledge in order to make sure the camera isn't a barrier for us to capturing our artistic vision. The creative side of photography is where we truly stand out as artists, and it's a much more important part of the photographic process than just understanding how to use a camera. In the next few lessons, we're going to be covering the more creative side of photography. We're going to talk about lighting and composition and storytelling and style and all of these things, and how they play a role into you when you're taking photos with your iPhone. 7. Lighting Basics: The first creative part of photography we're going to talk about is lighting. Lighting is of utmost importance when it comes to photography. Cameras actually capture light. That's how an image is created. The light comes into the camera and it's recorded on what's called a sensor and that sensor creates the image that we see. Thus, I think it goes without saying that lighting is absolutely essential for photography. When it comes to understanding lighting, I like to say that there's three things that you should understand. The quality of the light source, the strength of the light source, and the direction of the light source. Let's start off with the top with the quality of the light source. What do I mean by that? Well, I mean that, not all light sources are created equal. The best way to explain this is to give an example. I want you to imagine a public bathroom in New York City. Think of the lighting in there, and imagine what that lighting looks like. Then imagine the light on a sunset, on a beach, and just think about how golden and beautiful that sunlight is as compared to this weird, flashy, blue light that you would see in a public bathroom in New York City. It's not the same at all. In fact, it's completely different. Both of those things are light sources, but the light from the sun is much more beautiful and effective for taking photos. When it comes to quality of the light source, all you have to know is that you should be shooting with light from the sun. We call this natural light. Natural light is amazing and I recommend always trying to shoot with natural light if you can. Of course, you're going to be shooting inside sometimes. But if you are shooting inside, I recommend shooting near a window or just trying to find a place where the sun is finding its way into your scene because it just really makes your scene look amazing. However, the thing with natural light is, it's very unpredictable. There's a lot of different factors, like weather and time of the day, that are going to determine how strong the light from the sun is. This leads me on to point number 2, which is the strength of the light source. When we're talking about the strength of the light source, we're basically talking about, whether the light is hard or soft. Hard light would be light from the sun in the middle of a sunny day. It's really strong, you have really dark shadows and it's hot, and it just creates really, high contrast scenes. On the flip side of that, if you're shooting on a cloudy day, you're going to have much more soft and diffused lighting. This is some of the best lighting for photography is shooting on a cloudy day. The reason for that is because it makes that light source much, much softer. As photographers, trust me when I say that we love soft light, especially when you're shooting things like portraits. If you're shooting a portrait in the middle of a sunny day, you're going to get a lot of shadows under the eyes, under the nose. It's just not flattering at all. Whereas if you're shooting a portrait on a cloudy day, on an overcast day, it's going to really complement your model in a much better way. I always recommend shooting on a cloudy day. If it's raining outside, awesome, go outside and shoot because you can come up with some really cool stuff. Hands down, the best light of the day is sunrise and sunset. I'm sure you've heard this before. The reason why we like to shoot at sunrise or sunset is because, at that time, the light from the sun is coming in at the side and it's very soft, and beautiful and complementing. It just looks amazing and it makes everything look 3D. It adds so much color and it just looks beautiful. As a landscape photographer, and a portrait photographer, I love shooting around sunrise and sunset. One of the things about shooting at sunset or sunrise is, the sun is not all the way up in the sky. It's off to the side. When the sun isn't all the way up in the sky, that light is very much directional. That leads me onto lighting point number 3, which is the direction of the light source. When I say the direction of the light source, I mean where the light source is in accordance to you, and where the light source is in accordance to your subject. This is going to change the way your photo looks so much. For example, if you're taking a photo into the sun, the sun is behind your subject, that's going to result in a very high contrast scene. Your subject might appear very dark, and the sky might appear very bright. If you're shooting a silhouette, for example, that would be shooting into the light. If you're shooting with the sun behind you, and your subject is in front of you, I'd like to say you're shooting with the light. That would result in a very flat looking image because, everything is lit up the exact same. There's not going to be any shadows, because the sun is directly behind you, so everything is lit perfectly. That looks good, but I also think it makes images look a little bit flat. My favorite direction to shoot in is with the sun to side of your subject. The reason for that is because it's going to create shadows on the opposite side of your subject's face and it's just going to make your scene look much more 3D and much more interesting. Here are three photos shot at the exact same time. I just shifted myself around my subject to show you the differences in lighting, and you can see how much different these photos look based on the direction of the light source. My particular favorite is with the light source to the side of my subject, because it just makes things look much more 3D and much more interesting. Those are the three factors of lighting. Just to recap, the quality of the light source, I always recommend shooting with natural light from the sun. The strength of the light source. Strong light or hard light, versus soft light and how that really changes the contrast of the scene, as well as how weather and time of day can really impact that strength of the light source. Lastly, the direction of the light source. Where the light source is in accordance to you and where the light source is in accordance to your subject. If this all seems a little bit too much for you guys, don't worry at all. If you're even thinking about lighting, you're going to be way ahead of most photographers because it's something that so many people neglect, even though it's so important for capturing good photos. 8. Mastering Composition: The next thing we're going to talk about is composition. You've probably heard of composition before. I've mentioned it a few times throughout this course already. But composition is essentially how you arrange the objects or the elements within your frame. Now, when it comes to composition, and then when it comes to teaching composition, there's so much that you could get into. You can really just dive into all these different types of compositions and how you should do things and all these different rules, but I think that it's very easy to over teach composition and it's actually more important to just understand some of the fundamental principles of a composition, so that it will allow you to think outside the box and let your creative side shine and come up with really unique and interesting compositions. In this lesson, I'm going to cover five of the most fundamental pieces of composition and how you can use them to really create compelling and beautiful images. The first compositional topic I want to talk about is the idea of perspective. This is probably the most important concept when it comes to composition. Perspective in photography basically means how you orient yourself in accordance to your subject. You can adjust your perspective by moving closer to your subject, further away, you can go above your subjects or go below your subjects, you can go to the left or to the right of your subjects. Anytime you move in any direction, that's going to adjust your perspective. One of the biggest mistakes I see beginner photographers make is shooting everything from one perspective, and that is at eye level. They look and they take everything with their phone right here and they just take photos right here. They don't move around, they don't go low, then I'll go high, they shoot everything at eye level. This gets very repetitive and very boring and it doesn't look interesting. You can just simply adjust your perspective to greatly change the outcome of the photo. Here's a few examples of popular perspectives that you can use to change the way your subject is portrayed and just change the overall look of the image as well. You can shoot below your subjects, and we call this worm's eye view. This makes your subject look very big, and very grand, and very powerful. You can shoot from above your subject, and we call this bird's eye view. This makes your subject look smaller. You can shoot them straight on and this is just more of a realistic depiction of them. You can also shoot from the side, you can backup, you can go closer. All of these different shifts in perspective is going to create a much different image. When I'm shooting, I like to constantly be moving around and shifting my perspective and trying to find new interesting compositions and I really urge you to do this too. Really get flexible, and move around, and try different things, because it's really going to help you capture much more unique and interesting compositions. The next concept I want to talk about is the idea of leading lines. Leading lines are lines within our image that just naturally guide our eyes to our main subject or to a focal point within our image. They really help create a cohesive photo and then make it easy for our eyes to navigate throughout an image. For example, you can see in this image the lines of the road are leading, not only to our main subject in the middle, but also all the way to the background, and it's just allowing our eyes to really naturally flow through this image. That's why we like images that look like this; it's because these leading lines are just making it easy for us to know what to look at. Now, leading lines appear everywhere. They're in nature, they're in landscapes, and they're also in modern cities. You can find man-made leading lines as well. There's leading lines everywhere and I urge you, when you're looking at your compositions, is to look at some of the things in your frame and see if there are any lines leading to your subjects because that will make your composition look much more compelling. The 3rd composition topic I want to talk about is this idea of rule of thirds. Maybe you've heard this before. This is a really popular compositional technique. Essentially the rule of thirds just allows us to look at our frame differently. To understand the rule of thirds, we need to divide our frame into thirds. That's why we enable the grid on our phone. It's because by enabling the grid, we're dividing our frame into thirds, and this makes it easy for us to know where to place our subjects within the frame. The rule of thirds tells us, essentially, that we should place our subjects in the third of the frame or in other words, where the lines intersect on the grid of our iPhones. By putting our main subjects on these intersecting lines, it just looks more natural to the human eye and it makes it easy for our eyes to navigate throughout the scene, find our subjects, and it also leaves enough negative space in the corners to make sure our subject is comfortably fitting within the frame. An example I like to give to show the rule of thirds, is to talk about a flat-laid food photo. You're shooting straight down and you're shooting a bunch of different dishes of food, one of the best things you can do is place all of those different food items or different objects in the scene in the 1/3 of the frame. You can put one in the middle and then you can put different things on the intersecting lines. The rule of thirds is a great topic to know and I urge you to use those grid lines on your phones and make sure you're placing your subjects or the most important parts of your image where those lines are intersecting. The next concept is framing. Framing is when we use objects or structures within our environment or within our scene to frame or create a border around our main subject. By adding a frame, this really just helps us focus on the main subject and helps eliminate some of the distractions within our scene. A frame can be really anything at all. It can be natural such as some leaves in the foreground, or it could be man-made, so a window, putting somebody behind a window and using the window in the foreground can help frame your subject and make it easy for the viewer to know what the most important part of the photo is. A good way to frame your subject is to just look for things around you that you can use in your foreground to help frame your subject. For example, if I'm shooting a portrait or something and I'm finding the scene to be a little flat, I can look around, maybe find a bush and maybe shoot through the bush, or behind the bush, and use the leaves to create a frame around my subject, and that would just really help us focus on our main subject. Doing this can also help add a lot of depth to our scene, and that leads me on to our 5th concept of composition which is depth. Depth is super important for composition because it gives us an idea of how big and how small things actually are within a frame. If we don't have any depth in our photos, our photos look flat, they look boring. We can achieve depth in our image by making sure we have a very clear foreground, mid ground, and background. The foreground are the objects within your frame that are closest to the camera, the midground are what's in the middle of the scene, and the background are further away. In this landscape photo, for example, in the foreground we see this grass, in the midground we see the river, and in the background we see the mountains. Another great way to add depth into your scene is just to drop down low and use the ground as the foreground in your scene. Another great way to add depth in your scene is just to find something to shoot behind. Just like with framing where you're looking around, trying to find a plant or something to shoot behind, you can just step behind something and use whatever that object is in the foreground to help create a lot of depth and interest in your scene. Adding depth into your scene is one of the things that's going to make your photos look super pro. So I recommend trying to have depth in every photo that you take because it's going to make your photos look much more interesting. Now, if you can understand these five compositional topics, you're going to be able to create some really awesome compositions. Like I said before, they're not rules, they're just guidelines. If you confine find to all these rules and all these principles, I think you're really going to have a hard time setting yourself apart and coming up with really creative things. This is a creative thing, really stretch your mind, and try new things and I think it's going to be really helpful for you. But that's enough composition. In the next lesson, I want to talk about storytelling and how it's arguably the most important factor in any photo. Let's move on to that lesson now. 9. Storytelling: In this lesson, I want to talk about storytelling and why I think it's the most important factor when it comes to capturing impactful images. When it comes to photography, the goal with every photo that we take is to create something beautiful, but it's also to create something that makes people feel something, and imagine something, and let their minds create this idea of what was happening at that moment in time. We want to make them imagine like they're actually there, that they were there when we took that photo. We do this by composing our shots in a way that tells our story. The greatest photos of human history aren't the most beautiful aesthetic photos ever. Some of them are, but the most important photos in human history are photos that just accurately depicted a moment and they tell the story of what was happening at a very specific moment in time. Some of the best photos in history were taken on horrible old cameras, but it doesn't matter because those things don't matter. What matters is the story, and that is what's coming through, and that's why people still love those photos today. Now the story of an image is composed of many different things. I think the most obvious thing is the subject matter of a photo. Like the actual things that are happening in that scene. The moment in time that it was captured. A birthday party, for example, the subject matter, you're going to have a cake, you're going to have some little birthday hats or whatever, some candles. Those things all contribute to this idea that you're telling the story of someone's birthday and the subject matter makes that easy to get that across. For example, in these photos here, was a photoshoot I did with my friend, and I shot and edited all these photos using the iPhone, but we really wanted to create the story of her hanging out on the beach on a summer day, she going to to for a surf, she's relaxing. That's the story that we wanted to tell and we used subject matter to create that story. We shot on the beach, we gave her a surfboard, we put her in a bikini and all those things helps add to the story. One of the easiest ways to tell a story in your photo, is just to have another person in it. As humans, we're emotional beings and we understand the emotions of others. If we capture emotions in our photos, that's very easy for the viewer to understand and they can understand what's happening in that moment, or why that person was feeling sad, or why that person was happy, so capturing the emotions of the people in our scene is a really great way to tell stories in our photos. Another great tip for adding story to our photos, is by creating a sense of mystery, maybe leaving something out of the scene and allow your viewer some room for interpretation to figure out what's happening in that scene. You can do this by having your subject look off camera. They're looking at something that the viewer isn't really sure what they're looking at. Or just leaving out some sort that the viewer has to guess what's happening. Leaving out details can really add a sense of mystery that can help add story to your photos. But story goes much further than that as well. Yes, it is capturing a moment in time, that is storytelling and leaving things out and capturing emotions. But also the stylistic factors of your photo also can really help add to the story that your image is telling. Things like lighting, and composition, and colors, those all play a really big role in story. For example, a photo that's darker underexposed is going to elicit very different emotions than a photo that's very bright and airy looking. The dark photo might be scary, a little bit solemn, scary, moody, whereas a bright photo might be happy, gentle, soft. There's different emotions attached to different exposures. The same thing goes with composition. A really close crop on a face is going to be much more suspenseful than a photo that shows a lot more of the scene. That's why you see like in scary movies, a lot of the videographers like to go really tight crops on the face because it makes people feel a little bit suspenseful, but they're not really sure what's happening, so composition plays a big role. Colors play a big role as well. They're highly associated with emotion. Colors like red and orange are very fierce colors, they're strong colors, they're powerful colors. Whereas colors like green or blue are more trusting, more natural, so those can also have a big impact on the emotion and the story of your image. When it com4es to story, you can really go on and on and on. There's so many different factors that can contribute to the story of your image. I also think it's important to note that not every image has to have a story. You don't always need to capture this incredibly important moment in time. Sometimes things just look beautiful, and they just look aesthetic and that's all that matters. We like things that look beautiful and not everything has to have a deeper meaning. The point of this lesson is just to help you think about story, because a photo that is beautiful and tells a story is going to be more impactful than a photo that's just beautiful. Think about the story that you want to tell in your photo, think about all the different elements in it, the actual moment that's happening, the subject matter, the lighting, the composition, the emotions, those are all very important when it comes to story. But now that we've talked about storytelling, I want to cover a few more different concepts before we move on to the practical side of this course, we're going to go out and capture some photos out and about. Let's move on to those lessons now. 10. Do This to Become a Better Photographer: I wanted to add this short lesson to talk about what I think is the most important factor to becoming a better photographer and taking better photos. For me, the most important factor is actually going out and shooting, and taking photos. The more you go out and shoot, the more you try to shoot different things, the better photographer you're going to become. I always like to say, try to shoot every day if you can. Try to take a single photo a day, and not just any photo. When I say take a photo, I mean take one photo where you're actually thinking about the scene, where you're thinking about the composition, and you're thinking about the lighting, and the story, and all those different factors that we talked about in the creative section of this course. Take one photo a day where you're really contemplating those things and really thinking about the photo that you want to capture. This really is the best way to become a talented photographer. I urge you to get out and just to go and take some photos. One way I like to do this is to go out with friends. It makes it so much more enjoyable to go out with friends. Also, you can see how they're taking photos and what kind of techniques they're using to capture good images. Hit up a few of your friends that are really interested in capturing photos as well, whether they have an iPhone or they have a professional camera, it doesn't matter. The photography principles remain the same. A good photo is a good photo regardless of the camera that it was taken on. I urge you to find some friends, go out, take some photos, have some adventures. It's fun, it's creative, and it really does help you become a much more talented photographer. I just wanted to leave this in there because I hope it inspires you in some way to go out and shoot. Even if you're just taking one photo a day, that's the best way to improve. If you can do more than that, that's awesome. The more photos you take, the better photographer you're going to be. 11. Intro to Practical Photography Lessons: Hey, guys, what's up and welcome to the practical section of this course. Over the next few lessons, we're actually going to be heading outside and capturing photos in a few different scenarios. The focus of this section is practicality. Actually going outside hands-on with our iPhone and actually capturing some photos here on video. I'm going to walk you guys through some of the shoots that we're doing today, walk you through the shots that I'm taking and just explain some of the more practical features of the iPhone and how you can use them to take great photos. We're going to be covering things like: portrait mode, panoramic mode, night mode, how to choose the best lens on your iPhone if you have multiple lenses, just different things like that and we're going to be covering those in a practical setting. Just outside shooting and being creative. I hope you guys have paid attention up until now because we're going to be using some of the principles that we discussed earlier on in this course out and about what we're shooting today. But enough talking, guys, if you're ready to get started, I certainly am. So let's head out and take some cool photos. 12. Choosing the Best Lens: Hey, guys. We're at this awesome hotel here in Bali. It's called Hideout. It's this beautiful little cabin situated right on the river. I think this is the perfect place to talk about how to choose the best lens to use while you're out and about shooting. Depending on what iPhone model you have, you might only have a one times lens, but you also might have a two times lens and maybe even a 0.5 times ultra wide lens. If you're not sure what those do and you're not sure when to switch between them, don't worry at all, we're going to be covering that today. Why don't we take a few photos of this really cool cabin, and I'll show you guys the differences between each lens in each focal length. Guys, I've chosen this spot, I've scouted the scene and this is the composition that I want to capture. I'm standing right here because I think it's a great place to show you how the focal length of the lens of my camera can greatly affect the outcome of our photo here. I'm going to start things off. I'm going to shoot this right here, this really cool cabin. The one times lens. You can see that's just a general photo and I can back up a little bit if I want to, get some of those leaves up here into the frame. You can see it's good. It's right in the middle, it's solid, it looks great. Now if I go to the 0.5 times lens, our composition opens up dramatically. We have so much more in our scene. You can see this tree wrapping up around the right and just framing our subject in the middle here really nicely. I can go ahead and take that picture. Exposure looks great. I really like the wide-angle in this particular shot, especially when I look up like this because it shows us this crazy, beautiful canopy that we have in our scene here. I'm really impressed with this here. Now if I go to the two times, which is more zoomed in, we can't see a lot of that. We see just what's immediately around it and then we see a really close up view of our subject. Now if I step back here, I can get behind some plants and add some really cool foreground elements to our scene, which adds a lot of depth. This is why I really like the two times in situations like these, where I want to add a lot of depth to our scene. The two times will allow me to do that. But in most situations, the 0.5 times is going to be great and if you do want to capture more of the scene, showing more composition, you can use the 0.5 times, which is much wider, and then the two times is great for having compression and things like that. That's just a quick overview of how to choose each lens. The main consideration you should be thinking about is just how do you want your composition to look? What kind of elements do you want to include in your scene and what kind of elements do you want to exclude from your scene? If you're shooting super zoomed in, that might eliminate some of the other things in your composition. For example, when I was shooting at two times, you couldn't see this beautiful canopy at all, but when I was shooting at 0.5 times, there's other trade off with things like depth. We didn't have as much depth as the two times lens. I just want you guys to be thinking when you're out and about shooting and you're not sure what lens to use, try them all and just give each one a shot and look at the results and see which one you like better. I think the more you do that, you'll find your niche and you'll find which lens that you like to use the most. If you only have the one times lens, I'm going to say it like I've said it so many times in this course, don't worry, the one times lens is amazing and it gets the job done in most situations. But I hope this quick little lesson was helpful for you guys. Now let's move on to the next lesson. 13. How to Take Long Exposures with Live Photos: Hey, guys. In this video, I want to show you how to capture some really cool long exposure photos using the live photo mode on your cameras. Earlier on in this course, I said you should have live photos enabled when you can, and that's for a few different reasons. It's great for storing memories, and you can also do some really cool creative things with it. This is one of those cool creative things. A long exposure photo in photography is basically a photo that has a very long shutter speed. That basically means the sensor's open for a long period of time, allowing movement to show in our photos. A lot of professional photographers will use this when they want to show dynamic movement in their photos. Today, we're going to be capturing some long-exposure photos of this river next to me using the live photo feature. Let me show you guys how to do that now. In order to take these photos, there's a few things that we need to make sure of. First of all, we need to make sure that we have live photo enabled. I showed you guys how to do that earlier on in this course. But just to recap, you can swipe up, tap the little live icon there, and then just hit live "On", and that's going to make sure that your live is enabled. The next thing we want to make sure is within our scene. We want to have a moving subject, something like water or a car or a person walking by, and they need to be going relatively quick enough to have a cool effect on this image. We have water over here, and it's moving, it's moving pretty fast, enough to get some cool motion blur. But we have to have a moving subject, but we also have to have things in our scene that aren't moving. For example, in this scene, we have the water's moving, but on the sides here, that's not moving. That's important because we need an anchor point for our image. When we capture this photo, we're going to be holding as still as possible for about three seconds because a live photo records 1.5 seconds of video before the photo's taken and 1.5 seconds of video after the photo's taken. So were capturing this photo. We're going to hold still, as still as we can, for about two seconds, one, two, capture the photo, and then hold still for another two seconds. We'll do it again. One, two, photo, one, two. Basically, that allows us to capture a really clean three seconds of video that we can then turn into this long exposure photo. Once you capture your photo, you've hold still, you've made sure you have a nice moving subject, you've set up your composition, the lighting looks good, everything's good, capture your photo. Then you're going to want to navigate to the photo section of your phone, swipe up on the image, and then you'll see this little Effects tab where you can then choose Loop or Bounce or Long Exposure. What we want is the Long Exposure feature. That's basically going to take that video that it filmed and turn it into a long exposure photo, and that's going to do some really cool things to the movement of your image. If you were shaking, if your hands were shaking, everything's going to be blurry. But if you're standing perfectly still and you have part of your frame that's moving, like the ocean or a waterfall or a car, something in a city, you're going to get that really cool motion blur look like we have in this photo. I know this isn't the craziest waterfall you've ever seen, but it's a really good way to show you guys how to use this feature and to help you become a little bit more creative where you're out shooting in the field. So next time you're shooting and there's some water around or something's moving, and you want to capture a little bit of dynamic movement in your photo, I definitely recommend testing out this feature. It's only going to work if you have live photo on your phone and if your iPhone is updated to the latest software. But I just wanted to add this bite-size lesson because I think it's a cool way to help you guys think outside the box and stretch the limits of your iPhone's a little bit. These cameras are really amazing, and the fact that we can capture photos like this, which usually costs you a couple thousand dollars of camera in order to take a photo like that, the fact that we can do it on our iPhones now is incredible. But that's all for this bite-size lesson guys. I really hope you enjoyed it and I hope it was helpful for you. But let's move on to the next video. 14. The Power of Portrait Mode: Hey guys. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about portrait mode, which is one of my personal favorite camera modes on the iPhone. Portrait mode was released with the iPhone 7 Plus, and ever since then, all iPhone models after that have been released with it as well. Portrait mode essentially uses AI technology, to blur the background behind your main subject, so it gives your photos a really shallow depth of field, which means the background is very blurry. Typically, you can only get this look with really expensive cameras and lenses. Of course, portrait mode is awesome for portraits, but it's also awesome for a lot of other things as well. I like to shoot food with it. You can shoot products with it. You can shoot a lot of different stuff with it. It also happens to work incredibly well for shooting some of the amazing little creatures that we welcome into our families, otherwise known as pets. In this lesson, I'm going to show you guys the power of portrait mode, not taking portraits of human subjects, but rather taking portraits of our little kittens here at home, Bill and Sasha. Now our kittens have a ton of energy, and they're not easy to get a hold of, let alone do one take where I was filming them and showing you portrait mode at the same time. Instead, I had to hang out all day, wait for them to get tired, and then shoot some of the footage that you're going to be seeing in this lesson. Let's open up our phones. I'm going to show you guys how to use portrait mode and some of the cool features within it. To access portrait mode, all you have to do is, open the camera app and swipe from right to left. This is going to bring up portrait mode, and it's also going to switch you into the 2x lens. Portrait mode works the best, with the 2x lens, it creates an even more shallow depth of field. But some phones also allow you to do it with the one lens as well, which I think is really cool. Now for portrait mode to work, you need to be within 2-8 feet. If you're too far, your iPhone will tell you to get closer, and if you're too close your iPhone will tell you to move further away. The iPhone's autofocus feature will automatically recognize human and animal subjects, and it will automatically focus there. But you can also manually focus by focus tapping like I showed you earlier on in the course. Once the iPhone detects the subject and focuses on it, you're going to see that little natural light icon on the bottom turn yellow. That means portrait mode is ready to go and you can take the picture. Now speaking of that little natural light icon down there, this is just one of the several artificial light modes that comes with the portrait mode feature. I use the natural light mode most of the time because I think it looks the best. But there are also several other light modes that you can experiment with, like studio light, contour light, and several variations of stage light, which I don't really use simply because I just don't think they look very great. Now the cool thing about these light modes is, you can actually just adjust them after you capture the photo in editing. I don't worry about changing these at all while I'm shooting, I just leave it on natural light, and then if I want to experiment with the other light modes later, I can do that in editing. To do that, all you have to do is open the photo in the Photo's app, tap "Edit", and then you can just slide your finger across and test out the different light modes. There's also one more feature that can be adjusted before or after you take the photo, and that is the f-stop. The f-stop is also known as aperture, and this is just the small opening in your lens, that lets light through. The smaller the aperture number like f 1.4 or f 1.8, the more shallow depth of field you will have, meaning your range of focus is very small, and the background will be more blurry. The larger the number of the f-stop, like f 8 or f 16, the more depth the field you will have in your scene, which means your range of focus is larger and the background will be more in focus. You can adjust this before, after shooting in portrait mode, I personally like to just adjust it after I shoot using the slider. That way I can just focus on shooting and make sure I get the best composition as possible. As I said before, portrait mode can be used with many other things, not just portraits. You can see from these photos of the kittens that I'm taking, that it works pretty well. But you might notice that the corners of their ears or the edges of the ears, might appear a little bit blurry. That's just because the iPhone isn't correctly detecting that as part of their face or their head. It's actually detecting that as part of the background instead. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. If you're shooting people, it works really well. Typically when you shoot other objects, it works pretty well as well. But that's it for portrait mode guys. It's a really awesome feature, and I think you're going to love some of the results that you get from it. 15. Documenting Places with Pano Mode: Hey, guys. We've come down to the beach here in Bali. I'm going to show you guys a few cool tips for using the panoramic mode on your iPhone. Now, I'm the first to admit, I haven't always used the panoramic mode very much. There's a few reasons for that. It's not great at capturing movement. It has problems with lens distortion, so it makes things look really long and really weird. Also, because I have the ultra wide lens on my phone, I can shoot pretty wide anyways. I can shoot really wide photos to capture most of what I want to capture. But if you don't have the ultra wide lens on your phone, the panoramic mode is actually very useful for capturing really large scenes that their one-time's lens just simply can't capture. I'm going to show you guys the example of that right now. Here on the beach in our neighborhood in Bali, we have this really cool statue of one of the Hindu gods. I think it's a perfect example to show you how you can use the panoramic mode to make sure you capture everything. Now on my phone, I have the 0.5 times lens. I can just go to the 0.5 times lens and capture it. But if you don't, if you have a one-time and let's say you're standing a little bit closer, this composition is just two crops, there's not enough room, on the top here or the bottom. In this case, you could use pano mode. Pano mode basically takes a bunch of different photos and stitches them together and then makes one long photo. What I'm going to do here is turn my phone on the side. You can see that there's this little line in the middle of the screen. When you hit the Camera button first, then you need to start moving the phone like this, and then when you're done, you hit "Stop". You want to make sure that the arrow stays right in the middle of the line there. Let's try it here. I'm going to slowly start moving, hit the "Shutter" button, and then make sure the arrow is staying right in the middle of the line there. It's hard to do. Then hit "Stop" at the end. I'm going to try it again because I think I messed that up a little bit. Start going, hit once. Keep the same speed, and stop. Now we have an ultra-wide photo without using the ultra wide lens. That's a cool feature. However, like I said, it doesn't work well on people, it doesn't work well on movement, and there's just a lot of lens distortion. Which means it looks funky. That's why I think the best part about the panoramic mode is using it just for documentary purposes. When I go to a new city or somewhere cool and I want to remember that place, I'd like to just take a really long photo because the panoramic photos are very high resolutions. You can zoom in and see things and remember things that were happening on that specific day. It's just something I like to use to document my life. While it is cool that you can capture really wide photos, I'm going to show you how I would use the panoramic mode to just document a place that I think is really cool. We just happened to so be on our neighborhood beach that I really love. I'm going to show you guys how I would capture this beach using the panorama mode. This is, I think what the panoramic mode is really made for, a really long, large beach like this, that you just want to capture everything in one photo. The panoramic mode is perfect for doing just that. We're basically going to do the same type of thing. We're just going to start on one side here. Maybe all the way over here. Tap "Go", and then slowly just move our phone over, going the same speed and keeping the arrow in the middle of the line there. I think we'll stop right there. That's pretty good. Now you can see we have this ultra long photo of the beach. It's also very high resolution too. We have a lot of things in our scene that are really nice and sharp and in focus. You can do this anywhere. You could do this in the middle of a city. You could do this on a beach. You can do this in a room. It's just great for just remembering moments that you've had in your life. I've been using this feature a lot more recently, especially on my travels. Just going places and just documenting as much as I can because I know when I go back in five or 10 years and I look at those photos, I'll be like, oh, you know what? I'm really glad I took that panoramic photo because it just helped me document my life a little bit better on that trip. But that's it for this quick tutorial, guys. Let's move on to the next video. 16. Two Approaches to iPhone Editing: Alright right welcome to the editing section of this course. So far we've talked about the technical side of iPhone photography and the creative side of iPhone photography. We talked about shooting and how to take cool photos. But now let's turn the lens over and start talking about editing and how you can really edit some of the photos that you've taken to really bring out the natural colors that are within them and just make them look a lot better than how they look just out of camera. When it comes to editing on your iPhone, there's two trains of thought or two different approaches that you can take. The first approach is to just use quick and easy photo editing apps like VSCO and the built-in photo app on our iPhones. Now these apps are great because they're incredibly easy to use and usually all you have to do is tap, apply a filter, maybe make a few small changes, and then you're basically done. There's a ton of apps out there, but my personal favorites are the actual built-in photos app on the iPhone, which allows you to edit and apply filters and the VSCO app which is my all time favorite filter app for the iPhone and I think it creates some really beautiful edits. That's the first approach, the quick and easy filter approach which I think is great for a lot of people. The second approach that we're going to talk about is editing in a more advanced app called Adobe Lightroom Mobile. I actually have a separate course on editing in Adobe Lightroom Mobile. Essentially what the app is, it's just a very comprehensive editing app on the iPhone that allows us to make a ton of changes to our photo and really dial it in. We have a ton of control and we can really edit the photo to make it look exactly how we want it to look. In the next two videos, I'm going to show you both techniques. I'm going to show you how to edit using quick and easy editing apps like VSCO and the built-in photo app on the iPhone. Then the next video I'm going to talk about Adobe Lightroom Mobile and just show you a basic editing progression that you can follow to make sure that you get a perfect edit in that app every time. Without further ado guys, let's jump into these videos and start talking about how you can edit some really cool photos on your iPhone. 17. Quick Editing with Filter Apps: All right guys. As I stated in the last video, there's two different approaches to editing: the quick and easy way using filter apps and then Adobe Lightroom. In this lesson we're going to talk about how to edit the quick and easy way. Using the photos app or using the VSCO app, which both have pretty good filters. Let's just jump onto the phone now and I'm going to show you guys how I would edit a few photos using these apps. First things first, I just created a little folder of iPhone photos that I've taken over the years and titled it edit. Now I have all my photos here that I'm going to be editing in this course. I'm not going to be editing all of these photos but I'm going to choose a few to cover. In the photos, its pretty cool, if you're viewing a photo in order to edit it, all you have to do is tap "Edit" in the top right-hand corner and it pulls up this panel. This is a photo that I captured of my friend Jonas. We were in Komodo, Komodo Islands earlier this year. It's just a beautiful, stunning place, and I really like the colors in this image. It's not the best composition in the world, but I really like the colors and I think it has a lot of potential. Now when you open up a photo on your iPhone, there's a little icon in the top right-hand corner that says edit. When you tap that, it brings you into an editing interface on the iPhone photos app, and you can see right off the bat we have all these adjustments, exposure, shadows, contrasts, etc. Before we go and do those, let's look down at the bottom bar here. We have a few different features. On the far left, if I tap that, this is going to allow us to choose a different frame for our live photo. If you did shoot a live photo and your subject was blinking or something, you can go ahead and select a different part of the video and then select key photo, make key photo, and then you're done. That will actually change it and select your new keyframe, which I think is a really awesome feature. Next to that are the little editing modes that we were just on to the right of that. The third one is the filters. If you want to apply a filter, there's some pretty cool filters built into the app. I like dramatic warm, it looks really good on this photo, and then you can slide this slider down to basically reduce the effect of the filter. If you don't want it all the way strong, you can go down to like 75 and I think that looks pretty good. Then on the far right, you have the crop so you can straighten your photo and just adjust it like this. You can also go ahead and adjust the aspect ratio up here for your crop so if you want to post on Instagram, you can do that three by four or you can do a square. This is a good feature just to make sure that your photo is ready to go before you post it, but I think the thing that makes the photos app really shine is it just gives us the ability to edit some of the more basic things that we might want to edit in our photo. For example, we have the ability to edit exposure. We can make it bright or dark and brilliance, which does some really cool things to the contrast and the tones of the image to really make certain colors pop and bring out details in certain areas of the image. We can also adjust the highlights, the shadows, ect. I think our photo right now, it already looks pretty good, but I'm just going to go through and just adjust these one by one, maybe reduce the contrast a bit. I'll probably leave it at four. I think the brightness is good black points, good. These are all just features that you can play around with. I think the best way to really understand them is just to test them out. You're not going to be using these editing features in every single photo. In fact, a lot of the time when I'm editing on my iPhone and if I am going to be editing in the photos app, I'll often just apply one of the filters, and I pretty much call it a day because they look awesome, especially those dramatic filters. Saturation is a good one. I urge you not to over saturate your photos. That's a common mistake with a lot of beginners, but it is handy to have if some of the colors in your images are looking a bit dull. Warmth is also a big one. If you want to make your image warmer or cooler, you can do that here with the warmth slider here, and then I also like to add a bit of vignetting in the corners just to put more of a focus on our subject. That's the quick and dirty of how to edit in the photos app. This isn't an app that I edit in all the time and that's why I'm not spending so much time on these photos. I just want to show you that it is possible if you don't want to use another app. However, now I'm going to edit a photo in one of my favorite apps, it's called VSCO. I've been using it for years and I think it's the best filter app that you can get on the iPhone for editing iPhone photos. So let's jump into that app now and I'm going to show you guys how to edit a few photos using this app. Right off the bat, when you open up VSCO, you can click in the middle here, these two little boxes, and that's going to bring up your recents in your camera roll. I already have a photo ready to go, so I'm going to double tap that. When you open a photo, it's going to say try these recommended presets. Then it's going to try to get you to basically buy the upgraded version of VSCO. You don't need to do that. There's some really awesome filters, free filters that are built in. What I'd like to do is instantly hit "Edit" on the bottom left-hand corner and then all the filters in the beginning are free so those are the ones that you have access to. Then you can just go and select these different filters and just see which one looks the best. As you can see, there's a lot of really cool filters for this photo. I captured this photo in Vermont in autumn of last year, so it was absolutely stunning, and all these photos look pretty good to be honest with you. I like to just go through each one and find a filter that looks the best. I think in this situation, it's going to be C1. If I want to adjust the strength of that, I can tap the little filter there and adjust the strength. Now the cool thing about VSCO is if you do become a paying subscriber, there's tons of awesome filters all based on old film stock. If you like the way film photography looks, this is actually a great app to try out because there's some really cool ones in there and I think it's definitely worth what you would pay for it. I am not currently paying for it because I have the filters that I really like to use, and I actually edit most of the time in Adobe Lightroom because I am a professional photographer and I just find that I have more control in that app. But if you are just planning on using one app, you want to make it easy, VSCO is a great app to do it with, and if you do become a paying member, I think it's definitely worth it. After you apply your filter in VSCO and you've made your adjustments, then you can just tap here on these little slider icons, and you're just going to see some very similar editing features that you saw in the photos app on Lightroom. We have exposure here make our photo bright or dark, contrast, so increasing the differences between the brightest areas and darker areas of our image, we can crop or straighten our photo. I've cropped it a little bit here. For Instagram, four by five is the best ratio for Instagram, so there's a little hack for you, just because it takes up more real estate. I always like to call my photos in four by five. I can sharpen photos here, however, I typically don't like to sharpen my iPhone photos because I think they're very sharp already. I don't like to add clarity either. Clarity basically increases contrast on the micro level, not something I like to add to my iPhone photos. We have saturation here, and then we have a feature called HS tone, which stands for highlights and shadows tone. It basically just allows us to adjust the tone of the highlights and shadows, so say for example, you want to pull out more detail in your shadows, you can drag the shadow slider up and it's the same thing for highlights in this image I think we're pretty good, so I'm just going to leave it there. We also have white balance, which is a very crucial slider and it basically just allows us to make our image cool or warm. I am going to keep it a little bit warm, but I don't want to go too warm because I want to keep some of those green blues in there. I'm going to go just maybe up one and leave it there. Then we have a skin tone feature, which is great if you're editing a portrait of a person. Then we have some other cool features like fade, split tone, which allows us to add colors into certain areas of the image and vignette, which is basically going to darken the corners image. These are all filters I really like, especially the fade filter if you want to make your image look a little bit more vintage, you can just slide this up and make it look nice and faded and I also like the grain feature here, which gives you some nice cool-looking film grain. Which if you're editing something like a portrait and you really want to bring out some of those classic textures you can do that there. Once you're done with that, the beauty of VSCO is you don't need to do a lot of these editing features. The filters alone look really awesome and often, because the iPhone is so good at selecting focus and selecting your exposure, most of the time I just apply a filter and I save the photo to my camera roll. To do that, once you're done editing, just hit next and then tap, save to camera roll, and you're basically good to go. That is basically the quick and easy photo editing method for those of you that aren't interested in really messing with all the different sliders and Adobe Lightroom Mobile. Sometimes I don't want to edit like that either. I just like to open up my photo and VSCO, slap on a filter, maybe adjust the exposure or contrast a little bit and call it a day. I'm not doing any extreme editing in those apps because I don't think they're necessarily built for it, but they really do yield some awesome results, and when I first started out on Instagram, I used the A6 filter for every single photo that I posted. You can do amazing things with the VSCO app and I definitely recommend it. But for those of you that like a little bit more control over your images, then I'm going to recommend that you edit in Adobe Lightroom Mobile. That's my favorite editing software and as a professional photographer, a lot of my workflow is actually on my phone now. I prefer to be editing my phone, sitting down, kicking back and relaxing, than actually sitting at a desk editing my photos. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you guys a very quick and easy basic editing workflow in Adobe Lightroom Mobile that will make sure you get awesome edits every time you use the app. Let's move on to that video now. 18. Editing in Lightroom Mobile: In this lesson, I'm going to show you guys how you can edit a few photos using Adobe Lightroom mobile. Now as I said before, Adobe Lightroom mobile is the gold standard for editing on the iPhone, simply because it gives us so much control over our images. If you guys really want to dive into Adobe Lightroom mobile and learn everything about it, I definitely recommend checking out my other course called Adobe Lightroom Mobile CC. In that course, I basically cover pretty much everything you need to know about editing in Adobe Lightroom mobile. In this course, I'm just going to be going over a basic editing progression and talking about the most important sliders in order to get a really good edit in the app. But if you guys do want to learn more, I recommend checking out that course. Let's just open up the app here and jump into it. I have some photos here in the app that I have shot over the past few months and some photos I'm really proud of, but I'm going to edit this one here. This is an iPhone photo that I shot in the Komodo islands and honestly it's a really, really cool photo. This is an island in the Komodo islands that is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. Even on an iPhone, it looks amazing. When it comes to editing in this app, well, there's a basic progression that I like to follow. There's not that much you need to do in order to get a really solid edit. The 1st thing I like to do is just go straight to this crop feature down here on the bottom left corner. Now I can just make sure my photo is nice and cropped and where it needs to be. You can straighten it, you can flip it vertically or horizontally. There's a lot of really great little features here. I'm not going to do anything to it. I think it's straight already. I think it looks really good, but that is something I recommend doing is making sure your photos are straight right off the bat. Next thing I'm going to do is slide over here and you're going to see a few things. You're going to see auto, light, color, effects, detail, optics, geometry, and then there's more off to the right. The four main ones you should really be worrying about in Adobe Lightroom mobile are light, color, effects, detail. We just tackle them one at a time. We start off in light, then we move on to color, effects, detail, etc. Oftentimes we're not using all the features, but I'm going to show you guys how to do that now, starting off with light. Light is basically talking about the exposure of our image, the contrast of our image, and basically the overall tones in our photo. I think our photo is a bit bright, so the 1st thing I'm going to do is just lower the exposure here just a little tiny bit. After I've done that, I'm going to move into the tone curve up here in the top right-hand corner. I think this is really daunting for a lot of people. But the tone curve essentially is dictating all the tones in our image. It can be confusing if you just play around with it a ton. But I like to basically do the same tone curve at every single one of my photos and that's called an S curve. I create three points. I put one down on the bottom and I drag it down, I keep one right in the middle, and then I put one on the top right and I drag it up. Then I take the corners and I drag those up and down respectively. Just looks like a little S. Then if I want to make it darker, I can drag the bottom down a little bit. Then if you drag the bottom left up, it will actually soften the blacks out a little bit, make your image vintage looking. I like to do that. I like to drag it up a little bit, but not too much and I think that looks pretty good. Basically that S curve is something I do in all my photos. It just adds a lot of contrast, a lot of interest to our scene. Already our photo is looking so much better. But we're going to stay in light here and I'm just going to go through each one of these sliders here. I'm going to increase the contrast a little bit. I'm going to reduce the highlights just a tiny bit to bring out some of the detail in the sky there. I'm going to increase the shadows to bring out some detail on the background there. I'm going to leave the whites where they are and I'm just going to bring the blacks. I'll probably leave the blacks where they are too. I think those look pretty good. That's basically how I would edit the light section here. Not a whole lot, just some basic adjustments. After you're done with that, you're going to move on to the color section. The color section is great because we have a lot of control over all the colors in our image individually as well as globally. Right off the bat, we have temperature here, we can make our image warm or cool. I like where it is, I'm not going to change that. I can adjust the tints or make it more green or more purple. We can adjust the vibrance here. Vibrance is affecting the less saturated colors in the image. It'll bring up some of the colors that are lagging behind, while saturation will just increase the saturation of all the colors in the image. I personally don't use that very much. If anything, I'll drag it down because I think oftentimes photos are just oversaturated. We're not going to get there yet. Before we do that, I'm actually going to move on to the mix. If you tap on the top right-hand corner, this is going to give us our HSL sliders, which I talked about a little bit in the last video. We have complete control over all these different colors here. If you see if I select green, we have a lot of greens in our image, I can go ahead and adjust the hue. The hue is the shade of the color and I can make it more blue or I can make it more yellow. I like our current shade of green, but I do think it might be a little bit saturated, so I can bring the saturation down a little bit. Then the luminance is the brightness of the color and I want to bring that down a little bit too because I think our greens are a little bit bright. I'm going to bring that down to like maybe just minus 15. Green is really one of our most dominant colors in the image. Yellow is another one. You can see there's a lot of yellow and those greens too. I like how they look, so I'm not really going to change them. But I do want to mess with the blues a little bit. I'm going to go over here to this blue slider and just see how it's going to affect my photo. It can make it purple or it can make it like a light blue. I think that blue is actually really nice. I don't know if I want to change it. But maybe desaturate a tiny, tiny bit because it's oversaturated in the corner there. I'll just desaturate it by like minus 10 or so. I think that looks great. I could work through all these different colors here, but that's not something I think I need to do. There's not a lot of reds in our photo. There's not going to be a little purple as you can see. But our dominant colors are, blue, green, and yellow, so I do want to touch on those. The HSL sliders are awesome. You can do so much with these sliders. You can really customize some of the colors in the image and is definitely something I recommend using if you are going to be editing in Adobe Lightroom. Once we start moving on to effects and detail, now we're really working with the texture of the photo. Things like sharpness, grain, texture, all those types of things. In the Effects tab, you can see we have texture slider which makes everything really sharp. We have clarity which is a similar effect. It just adds a bit more structure to our photo by increasing contrast at the minute level. We also have dehaze, which is really cool slider that gets rid of haze in your photo. If you're shooting on a hazy day, that's a really great feature. We also have vignette, which will create a little border around the edges. I like to add a slight vignette, maybe like minus 10 just to make it dark and then we have our vignette features here. This isn't something I often mess with. I think it looks good right out the gate there. I also like to add grain. Sometimes my photo is not typically to my landscapes, but if I'm shooting portraits, I like to add a bit of grain. I'm not going to do it in this photo, but in the next photo I'll show you how I would add grain to the image. After effects, we can move on to detail, and detail is essentially just sharpening. Sharpening is great. It basically just allows us to make our photos a little bit sharper and it's something I really like to use when I'm editing portraits, but not so much when I'm editing landscapes. I'll show you guys how to sharpen in the next image because that is a portrait. We also have noise reduction down here. If you are shooting at night and there's a lot of noise in your image, you can just slide this noise reduction slider and that is going to get rid of some of the noise, but it's also going to make your image look a little bit soft. I only recommend using the noise reduction feature if it's really dark and there's a lot of really bad noise in your photo, then I would use that to get rid of it. But effects and detail are pretty easy. They're not something I'm always heavily focusing on when I'm editing my images. The main ones are basically just light and color. So exposure, contrast, the things that we covered earlier, the tone curve, and then the different colors. If you can learn those two things within the app, you're going to be able to do so much. But there is one more feature in Adobe Lightroom mobile that really sets this app apart and is the selective adjustments feature in the bottom left or the far left. I believe this is only available to you if you're a paying subscriber to Adobe Creative Cloud. But this is definitely something I recommend if you guys are serious about editing on your phones. I'm just going to show you how it works. If you tap Selective here and then you tap the little plus in the corner, we have three different things. There's a brush, a radial filter, and a graduated filter. I'll show you guys what each one does. The graduated filter basically allows us to tap and drag and create a gradient over our scene. Then where it's showing us red, we can adjust the exposure in that area. I'm going to darken it up a little bit there. I think that looks great. We can also adjust color in that area if we want to. Tint, we can add color using this hue slider here. It's pretty incredible. I don't think we need to add color, but I do just want to lower the exposure there a little bit. I think that looks good. Then I'm going to do a few more here. I'm going to put some radial filters, which are basically big ovals. I'm going to put them on each side and I'm going to make it even darker. I'm also going to go into effects and reduce the clarity because I just don't think I should be focusing on the area so much. I think the pathway is more important. I'm going to hit "Okay". I'm going to do another one on this side. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to make it a little bit darker. I'm going to reduce the clarity here. This is making our photo look moody. I like it, it looks cool. Then I'm going to add one more here, long and skinny. I'm going to put it right over the pathway here. I am going to increase the exposure for this and brighten it up a little bit so our eyes really focus on that part of the image and then hit, "Okay". Now, this is our before and this is our after. You can see here, this pathway is so much more well-lit. I mean, it's bright and this side is dark, so the contrast is really nice. We call this burning and dodging when we are making dark areas of the image darker and bright areas of the image brighter. That's called burning and dodging. It's a very old classic photography technique. Now, the only other thing I want to change the selective adjustments is this blue area back here. I'm going to use the brush this time. I'm just going to brush over my finger, go to color and then just reduce the saturation a little bit. Now, it's not overly saturated in that corner. It looks really nice. That's basically how I would edit this photo. Here's the before and here's the after. The before is a really good photo. It's just a little bit bright. It's not punchy, it's not contrasty. Once we add just those basic adjustments using the light color and selective adjustments, you can just see how much better this photo looks. Now it's epic. It's a really cool photo. I'm going to show you guys one more here. This is a photo that I took of my friend Kelsey here in Bali. This was actually taken for a live iPhone photography course that I taught here on Skillshare. If you guys want to check that out, it's available on my profile. I've put a little link to it where I just cover more topics about iPhone photography. I'm going to talk about these images in particular, a little bit more. This image was shot with the two times lens in portrait mode. You can just see how sharp it is. I mean, it's incredible. The iPhone is insane and I really love this photo, the colors, the pose, everything about it is really good. First thing I'm going to do is go ahead and straighten it. Nice and easy. Then instead of just jumping straight into light and editing that ourselves, I'm going to go over here to the presets tab. Now, Lightroom presets are essentially just photo filters that anybody can create. Even you can create them. I have created some for myself that I like to use on my images. For example, I have a portrait pack that I use for my portraits. I have a travel pack that I use for my landscapes. I have a pack for my food, etc. All these presets are available for sale on my website. You guys can check those out. I'll put some links in the bio, but you can get presets anywhere. A lot of photographers have them. Also, there's built-in presets in the Lightroom app already. But I'm going to use these classic portrait presets here. I'm just going to tap each one and see what it does to the photo. You can see here that it's basically just adding a filter to the photo and changing the colors, changing the tones, and honestly, all these look really cool. I'm going to try Surfs Up. I think that one looks really good. I can't decide between that one or classic Fuji. Yeah, we'll go Surfs Up. Once I select that, then I can just hit the checkmark and it's applied. There's the before, there's the after. But I think a lot of people think that they're just done when they apply a preset. You can be, but I like to start at the top with our basic editing progression and work our way down. I go to light and just make sure that everything looks good for our photo, I'll just play around with each slider and see. I honestly think this looks really good. There's not like a whole lot I want to change, just testing it out. The tone curve, I'm not going to change the tone curve. This tone curve is a bit more advanced, so I don't think I need to change anything. I think it looks awesome. Move on to color. I think the color looks pretty good as well. Maybe go up on the vibrance a little bit, bring some of those colors out. That looks good. For the color mix, the HSL, where you can see what that does to her skin tones there. That's crazy. I'm not going to adjust that. I honestly don't think we need to change too much. Maybe just increase the saturation of the blues a little bit, just to bring that background out. That looks great, and that's pretty much it for color. Moving on to effects here, I like to bring my clarity down a little bit on my portraits just because I think it helps soften up the skin a little bit. I think it looks really nice. I also like to scroll down here and add a little bit of grain to my portraits here. Maybe around 1820. You can see if I zoom in here, what that's doing. There's zero and that's 18. It's basically just adding a little bit of film grain to our photo to give it a little bit of texture and give it that classic look that you would see in an old-school phone photo. I think it's a really nice artistic touch to portraits. I always like to add it to my portraits, especially if I have portraits that are a little bit darker, underexposed style, adding film grain, I think, looks really nice. Lastly, the detail here, I'm going to show you guys how it would sharpen a portrait. One of the cool things is you can zoom in on her face and just zoom in and make sure your photo is nice and sharp. But once you've got your subject sharp, then you can go down here to the masking tool, tap and hold on your image, and then drag that masking slider up. What this is basically do is masking out the areas that aren't going to be affected by the sharpening tool. You can see here only those white lines are going to be affected by this sharpening tool. The further I go, the less is being sharpened. I go to 72. Now, you can see Kelsey is nice and sharp, but we're not affecting the sharpness of the background. I don't really want the background to be sharp in this photo. I think that's perfect, honestly. That's basically how I would edit this photo. I don't think it needs any selective filters. The preset did a lot. It looks great out of the gate. Here's the before. Looks good, but it's a little bit flat, it's a little bit boring. Here's the after, high-contrast, more color and also emphasizing the colors that we want to emphasize, those yellows, those golden oranges, and those blues as well. Once again, in order to save that, you can just select up here and export to camera roll and that's just going to save that directly to your camera roll and you are good to go. As you guys can see, editing in Adobe Lightroom Mobile actually isn't that crazy. There's just a few things you need to know. If you follow that basic editing progression, I promise you're going to be able to create some really awesome edits using that app. But if you guys are interested in checking out those presets, there's a lot of presets available online. But if you are interested in mine in particular, I will have a link in the description of this course. You can check out all my packs. Every time you guys buy those, it supports me a lot as a creator. Thank you so much for everyone that already has and thank you for watching this editing section of the course. But that's it for the editing section of this course, guys. I'm excited to see your photos and see how you edit them. But let's move on to the next video. 19. Next Steps: Okay, guys. Well, that is officially the end of the iPhone photography essentials course. Thank you so much for sticking around and watching me talk to you for the past hour or so. There's a lot of content in this course, we covered a lot of different things, and I hope that you guys found it useful. If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm available here on Skillshare. If you have a question, I recommend leaving a discussion posts in the course here, we can all check that out. Other people can respond, I can respond, and that question will kind of live on the course for future students as well. That's a really great tool for more students coming in who are wanting to learn as well. Also remember there are class notes. If you ever want to refer back to anything, I have free class notes, you can download those in the class description, and those basically just cover everything I talked about in written form. That's a great tool if you're on the road, for example, and you want to recall something and you don't have the video readily available, just pull up in those notes and then you can read what I wrote about composition or lighting or whatever. If you guys do want to learn more from me as well, I have a ton of courses here on Skillshare. Some of the courses I recommend checking out are my photography essentials course. So if you are wanting to make the jump from shooting on a smartphone to a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, check out that course, it covers everything you need to know about how to take cool photos. If you want to learn more about iPhone editing as well, then you can check out that course on how to edit on your iPhone. If you're wanting to get more creative at home, I actually have a course that was shot here in this room on still life photography. If you're stuck at home and you want to create something and you want to feel inspired, I think that course is great because it'll just help you feel maybe motivated to capture some photos in and around your house. I also did a live course on Skillshare, which is available to watch now on my course page so you guys can navigate to my profile, check out my courses, and then from there you can see the live encore course where I talk about iPhone portrait photography. So that course is focused on portrait photography using the iPhone and it's really awesome. There's a lot of really cool things that I talk about and it's about an hour long. I also have tons of free photography content on my YouTube channel so you guys can head there and check out some of my YouTube content. There will also be a link in the description of this course. There's a lot of links in the description of this course, but I promise there's a lot of value in there for you guys as well. But that is it for me, guys. Thank you so much for sticking around and watching me up into this point. If you have any questions, like I said before, leave it at discussion posts or reach out, I'd love to chat. Thank you so much for watching the course, guys. I will hopefully see you in the next one.