Transcripts
1. Introduction: What You Will Learn: What's up? Welcome to the iPhone photography course. My name is Dale McManus, and I'm a professional photographer, videographer, and multi-award-winning YouTuber. I have a bachelor's degree in film science and nine years experience in the field of photography and filmmaking. Here's a few of my photos I've shot 100 percent with my iPhone. No fancy expensive camera apps, no additional lenses, just my phone. My number one rule in photography is 10 percent gear and 90 percent what's up here. If you don't have an iPhone, that's perfectly okay because the bulk of the principles that I teach in this course can be applied to any camera or phone. It's less about what you use and more about how you use it, but this course is designed around the latest iPhone and iOS. Throughout this course, I'll show you lots of example images, screen recordings, and graphics to better illustrate the course material and keep you engaged from start to finish. I'll also be adding a recap slide at the end of most of the lectures so that you can just sit back and enjoy the course material without having to worry about taking notes until the end. We will cover everything from setup, to shot composition, to editing your photos completely on your phone, and everything in-between. This course is designed for anyone that wants to become a skilled photographer and develop a more impressive portfolio or social media account without spending thousands of dollars on expensive cameras and lenses. In this course, you're going to learn a lot of great tips for becoming a better photographer with your iPhone. Here's just a few of the things that you're going to learn; how to take stunning photos by utilizing shot composition and how it affects your shots, how to optimize your iPhone camera settings for taking the best photos, how to create depth in your photography, how and why the best photographers tell stories in their photos, how to utilize natural light to properly light your subjects, how to professionally edit your photos in Lightroom on your iPhone, which is a completely free app. Whenever you're ready, let's jump right in.
2. Setup: Turn Off Live Photo: First we're going to talk about pre-shooting setup. Before you run out and put sunglasses on your dog and play paparazzi, we have to get you set up with the right settings. First, turn off Live Photo. Live Photo mode takes 1.5 second video with audio before and after tapping the Shutter button. You end up with three seconds of Live Photo that consists of maybe one good frame and another three seconds of awkward, smiling or blurry movement. If you want to show off your photos, you're likely going to be putting them on social media or a website or printing them out. Live Photo is going to be compressed into a single image anyway. Now, there is a great use for Live Photo mode to get a beautiful long exposure shot, but I'll be covering that later in this class. But for now, we won't need it because Live Photos take up more storage space on your phone. The reason is because they're not just a single photo, they're technically 45 images compiled into one short video. Let's turn it off because we're not going to need it. Just go to the Camera and tap this little dotted circle so that it's grayed out with a little slash through it.
3. Setup: Turn On HDR: Next, turn on HDR. HDR stands for high dynamic range. It's just a fancy word for capturing multiple exposures in the same shot. I could get into HDR for awhile, but all you really need to know for shooting HDR on your phone is that it takes a very bright image to properly expose for the shadows, a neutral image to expose for the mid-tones, and a dark image to properly expose for the highlights. It combines all of them into one balanced photo with well-lit highlights and well-lit shadows. This is very helpful for photo editing later, and keeping you from blowing out parts of your image with too much light. To turn it on, just go to the settings, navigate to camera, and turn on smart HDR at the bottom.
4. Setup: Turn On The Grid: Next, turn on the grid. The grid is very helpful for showing rule of thirds, which I'll be covering in a later lesson, as well as how to use it properly. The grid is also really helpful for getting a level frame with the horizon. To turn it on, just go to the settings, navigate to camera, and turn on the grid.
5. Focus Tapping, Exposure Control, & Lock Focus: Next, we have to go over focus tapping, exposure control, and lock focus. These are really important features that are pretty simple within the iPhone camera app. But a lot of people don't know that they're there or how to utilize them like they should. First, focus tapping. When an object is in focus, that means it's within the depth of field. The depth of field is another photography term for the range of sharpness within an image. You can have a large depth of field where everything is in focus, or you can have a small depth of field where one subject is in focus and the background is blurry much like professional digital cameras nowadays. Since the iPhone is completely touchscreen, Apple has integrated in autofocus which works fantastically for almost any shot. But if you're shooting macro, which is close up, you may need to change your focus. Start by putting the camera up-close to an object in your nearby surroundings. You can now tap on the screen in the background to focus on the back of the image, or you can tap on the subject in the foreground that's closer to the camera to put focus back on the subject. Next, exposure control. Once you've set your focus on an object in the frame, you can now slide your finger up or down on the screen to lighten or darken your image. The iPhone also has an auto exposure feature that automatically sets the proper exposure for whatever object you tap to focus. If you want to lock focus, Apple has also integrated a feature to lock the focus on whatever object that you select no matter if you change the camera position. Enable this by tapping and holding your finger on the subject of your choosing, and a yellow box will appear on the screen that says AE/AF Lock, which stands for auto exposure and autofocus lock. Also, quick tip, never use digital zoom. This is when you use two fingers to zoom in and it greatly decreases the resolution of your image. This turns an HD photo into a blurry mess. If you need to get a better shot, just simply walk closer to the subject or if you have one of the newer iPhones with multiple lenses on it like this one, there's a function to change to a longer lens by clicking on the number 2 option in photo mode.
6. Shot Composition: What is it?: Now onto one of the most important aspects of photography, shot composition. Shot composition is the make it or break it between professionalism and amateur hour. You could take the trip of a lifetime and tell you're subject to go stand in front of a landscape so beautiful it could be a MacBook screen saver, and take a photo that even your mother wouldn't want to hang on the fridge. This is because it wasn't taken with proper shot composition. So what is shot composition? Well, first let's start with a shot. A shot is just a frame arranged with objects and shapes to make up a composition. Shot composition is just arranging these objects and shapes with purpose. Let's face it. Humans are impatient creatures. In the first quarter second that our eyes look at a picture we subconsciously gather the most important parts of that image before our brains even have time to catch up. When you look at an uncomposed image, your eyes take too long to find the subject thus judging the photo as bad. When you look at a composed image, your eyes take less time to find the subject and gather the information thus saving your brain time. Your brain likes this. This is why learning about shot composition is so important, because it helps guide the viewer's eyes through the image as quickly as possible. With that being said, here are four basic types of shot composition I want you to commit to memory. Head on to the next lesson to find out.
7. Shot Composition: Perspective: Number 1, perspective. You can use different angles to change the feeling of any shot. If there's a shot that you want, but the first attempt was iffy, then a simple change of perspective may get you what you're looking for. There's four basic types of perspective: low angle, high angle, lateral movement, and first person POV. Low angle brings the viewer back to a child's perspective. The world seem so much bigger, and your subject is much more superior at this angle. This angle is achieved by simply being lower to the ground than your subject and shooting up at it. Take this city, for example. The lower that you shoot, the bigger the city looks. Typically, when we look up to something, we value it highly. The same goes for photography. Next, high angle. High angle can make your subject appear smaller and increase depth in your image. Try getting above your subject and shooting down at it. It can also make your subject appear inferior. Keep this in mind. Next, lateral movement. This is basically moving from left to right on a lateral plane or right to left. Take this, for example. Three different images of a road taken at three different positions on a lateral plane. You can position the camera on the right, left, or the center, and anywhere in between to change the viewer's perspective. Try out different lateral positions while photographing a subject and see which angle you like most. First person POV. POV stands for point of view. First person point of view shots are great because it places the viewer in the eyes of the photographer. It creates realism by placing arms or legs in the shot. You can get a wide-angle POV shot like this by using the piano trick that I talked about earlier, or a wide angle on a newer iPhone.
8. Shot Composition: Vantage Point: Number two is vantage point. This is one of the most helpful concepts for photographers to find great photos everywhere they look. A vantage point is a point of focus created by leading lines. Your eyes like to be guided, so we use lines in everyday life to steer or lead the viewer to a single-point. These lines can be found in almost anything; buildings, streets, trees, mountains, water, and plenty more. These lines begin at the outside of the frame and travel inward to a single point. There are two different types of leading lines; there's geometric and organic. Geometric lines are found in streets and buildings. They're straight and much more obvious to follow. Organic lines are often found in nature such as mountains, rivers, pathways, trees, or even reflections on the water. They tend to bend and curb much more than geometric lines, but always lead to a specific area. These lines can simply be the contrast between light and shadow, or between colors like a green mountain against a blue sky. Here's a good example of geometric leading lines to one vantage point. Here's an example of organic. Lastly, this one doesn't use exact lines, but rather the bottoms of the trees all line up to lead to a single spot.
9. Shot Composition: Rule of Thirds: Number 3, rule of thirds. Rule of thirds was created by John Thomas Smith back in 1797 when he wrote his book on remarks of rural scenery, and it's actually less of a rule and more of a guideline. This old guy staring at cows and tall grass had a point though. Rule of thirds is the act of separating your frame into nine parts, but most importantly, three different columns. Between those columns are two different lines. You can place a subject on the left line or the right line to draw attention to the composition as a whole rather than one single centered point of focus. This is often done by placing a person on either side of the foreground and placing another subject on the opposite side in the background, such as a mountain, or a lake, or a building, or a sunset. This is where the grid function comes in handy on your iPhone. Check out this image, for example. If the girl were in the center, your eyes would immediately go straight to her. But since she's positioned on the left third of the frame, your eyes now focus on the entire image, girl and background together. Neither angle is wrong, but the rule of thirds gives you the option to include the background as a second subject in the scene. If you're taking a picture with the human subject like this one, rule of thirds is also great because it gives you a wider picture of what the subject is looking at. It tells a story, which we're going to talk about later.
10. Shot Composition: Dead Space: Last but not least, dead space. This is a good way to capitalize on a great photo with minimal surging. Dead space is considered any space behind the subject that does not have other elements to distract the viewer from the subject. Use it to highlight a single subject with nothing more than a wide open area. This is achieved best with backgrounds that are very far away or empty or have one general tone of color. You can use rule of thirds with dead space to mix things up and bring a little more tension into your shot.
11. How to Create Depth In Your Photography: How to create depth in your photography. Understanding what depth is in photography is just as important as using it. Depth is the feeling of distance and separation from your subject. Many of the best photographers in the world use one simple trick to add depth to their photos. By simple, I mean very simple. They show us the ground. Take this photo of a city skyline, for example. You can add a lot more depth to this photo by simply taking the picture vertically and exposing the ground. The importance isn't in the camera rotation as much as it is in showing how far away you are from the subject, the subject being the city. The easiest way to do this is by showing the ground in your shot. Here's another example of a great shot. But here it is with far more depth because we've exposed the street below. When you think about a printed photo, you typically think of it as two-dimensional, meaning it has an x and a y-axis. But the trick is to introduce a third axis, which is the z-axis, by positioning your shots to include more depth.
12. Surrounding Light and How to Use It: Surrounding light and how to use it. Surrounding light, whether it be natural light from the sun or simply a street lamp, can be your best friend or your worst enemy depending on your direction. This seem obvious, but most people don't realize it. Shooting in the same direction that the light is traveling can brighten up your entire subject and the scene. If everything is too dark, you should try changing your shooting direction to match the direction of the light source. On the contrary, shooting into the light can create a really nice silhouette if positioned properly and exposed properly. Exposure is the amount of light per unit area. This is just a fancy way of saying how bright or how dark a picture is whenever you take it. The best time to shoot in almost any setting is at golden hour, which is the hour right before sunset or the hour right after sunrise. This is because the light is softer and coming from one single direction closer to the horizon. Here are some examples. This was shot facing into the light, which creates a really nice silhouette. A silhouette is when your subject is completely dark against a bright background. This shot was taken more facing into the same direction that the light was casting. The subject is well lit, and so is the background. Here's a diagram of the difference between the two different shooting directions relative to the light source. Neither option is wrong. It just depends on what style that you want to achieve.
13. Filling The Frame: Next, we're going to talk about filling the frame. This is a style choice that is done by positioning more objects in the foreground of the image to create a much fuller shot and draw your eye closer to the subject. The foreground is the front of the image, and the background is the back of the image. Foreground versus background, pretty standard. You can use almost anything to fill the frame. Some simple examples are branches, trees, light posts, people, and walls. It will all depend on where you're shooting and what is in your nearby surroundings. Remember, photography is resourcefulness. Here's an example of a relatively empty photo. If you've been taking nothing but dead space photos for a while and want to try something new, try filling the frame with different surrounding objects to make it more interesting. You might need a friend to help you with this one in particular. Whatever you choose to fill a shot with can also help to tell a story, more on this next.
14. Storytelling in Photography: Storytelling. If you were to watch a film, you would probably consider it to be a good one if it has a great story. Well, the same goes for photos, and this is especially important for photos using people. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then let's tell the best story that we can with those words. Whether it's film or photography, you want to bring the viewer on the adventure with you by composing your shots to convey a story. Here's a few common story types to get you thinking. Hero versus what lies ahead. You can use distance and vantage point to portray that you have somewhere to go or an unknown place lies ahead. The use of vantage point helps add a lot more depth to the scene and the distance helps separate you from where you're going. Hero versus the world. You can use distance and perspective to portray that you are amidst a giant world, or watching it from above. The objective is to make the world seem as big as possible and you're just a small part of it. When we're children, the world is such a big place and our eyes tend to look skyward. You can use low angle in your photography to show how big the world really is. It makes you seem like an ant in a jungle. Or you can try high angle to add more depth and give the viewer the perspective that the world is a big place. As I said, you're just a small part of it. The, I'm too cool for the camera. This is an easy one that you can get almost anywhere. If your eyes can bear the blinding sun for a minute, you'll end up with an epic shot that looks like credits are about to start rolling on a movie. This photo is best taken at golden hour, which again, is the hour before sunset or the hour after sunrise. Just simply shoot facing into the light and have your subject face into the light as well. Or yourself, if you're using a tripod or propping your phone up on something. It pretty much speaks for itself. This is the follow me shot. Here's another easy one. If you have a significant other or don't mind holding hands with a stranger. It was popularized by a couple on Instagram in 2015. First-person POV and a decent scenery is all you really need to pull off this traveler adventure-style photo.
15. Long Exposure Photography: How to Shoot It on the iPhone: Long exposure photography. First, what is it? Well, any camera, whether it's the one on your phone or any other digital or film camera has what's called a shutter inside it. When you take a photo, the shutter opens for a split second and then closes. This allows light to pass through the lens and expose your image. Long exposure photography is when the shutter stays open for a longer period of time. Why is this useful? Well, it allows you to take images like this, where moving objects in the scene draw lines across the image, or like this, where running water appears to flow like silk. This is because the water is moving while the shutter stays open, and it blurs across the image before the shutter closes. But anything that's not moving will stay perfectly in focus. Believe it or not, this can be done on an iPhone. Let me show you how. First, just click on the "Camera App", and then just turn on a Live Photo up at the top right, and then just take a shot. Then view that shot, and then just swipe up. If you scroll through this little effects list here, you're going to see Long Exposure over here all the way to the right. Just click on that. Then it's going to instantly blur all of that moving water and give you a beautiful shot. The reason it does this is because live photo takes multiple pictures and then combines them all into one photo, and anything that's moving is going to be blurred. Then anything that's sitting still is going to stay perfectly in focus.
16. Macro Photography: How to Shoot Macro on the iPhone: Now I'm going to talk about macro photography, and I'm going to go outside and show you an example of how I do this myself. What is macro? Macro is just a film term for shooting extreme close up, commonly done on insects and plants and other forms of nature. Back in those film days, you needed a special lens and fancy equipment in order to do this. But now the iPhone has such a small versatile lens that you can go from shooting far away landscape photography to portraits, to macro photography without changing anything. But there are a few things that you can do while shooting macro on your iPhone to get a better shot. I'm going to go outside and show you an example and talk about why I'm doing what I'm doing. I found these flowers just in the middle of downtown. You really don't have to go far for a macro shot. What I'm going to do is click on the number 2 option to switch to a longer lens, which is going to give us a little bit more of a zoom in. I'm going to find a good flower that has a bunch in the background, and I'm going to click on it to focus on it. You can also click on the background if you want to focus on the background. But we're going to click on the flower, and then I'm just going to get into a good position and take a shot. You might want to take a few. Then what I've done is found a couple of just pieces of flower or whatever this plant is, and I'm going to use it to put in the bottom of the frame a lot closer to the camera in the foreground. That's just going to close in the frame and really help drive the eye towards that middle flower. Then just take another shot, and again, just make sure that you take a few shots. Here is what that shot looks like. Then you can also zoom in on it, and it's going to give you a much closer shot. You can see there's little water droplets in everything. The iPhone does a really great job with taking macro photos. Here is what that shot looks like, completely edited. I'm also going to be showing you how to edit your photos like this on your phone a little later in this course.
17. How to Optimize Pano Mode: Let's go over how to optimize pano mode. Panoramic mode is where your phone takes a series of pictures from left to right or right to left, and it automatically stitches them together to create a 180 degree image of your surroundings. This often looks far too wide and very annoying to post on social media. But there's a trick to using it to create a really stylish wide angle shot that looks as though you bought a special lens for your phone. Now if you have one of the newer iPhones with three different lenses on it, you can simply open the camera, go to photo mode, and tap the 0.5 button to get a wide-angle. But in case you don't have this option, here's a cool trick. Simply open the camera, swipe to slide over to pano mode. Tap the shutter, which is the white button, and slide across your subject while keeping your phone as level as possible. Also be sure to go slowly because your camera has to set a new exposure for each picture it takes to make up the full panoramic image. Then tap the white button again to stop wherever you want. If done right, you'll end up with a very GoPro wide-angle style image that can look very professional. This feature can also be used vertically. Just simply turn your phone on its side and repeat the process to take an extra tall wide angle photo. Keep in mind that the closer you stand to your subject, the better this is going to look. If the base of your subject fills the frame when you start it, it's usually going to end up looking really nice. I use this all the time whenever I photograph architecture.
18. How to Edit Your Photos in Lightroom: Now on to photo editing. In order to edit our photos, we're going to be needing Lightroom. Lightroom is an awesome free app that I use to edit all of my photos. In order to get it, just go to the App Store. In the search bar, just type in Lightroom, and then just click on Lightroom up at the top, and then you'll see it right here, Adobe Lightroom Photo Editing. I've already downloaded before, so I've got a little cloud symbol there. But you might have something that says, get, so just go ahead and click on that. It's just going to download, so just give it a second. Then whenever it's done, just click on "Open". You can just go ahead and click on the "Skip" button down at the bottom right and then it's just going to ask you to sign in. Now, you can do this and just create a new account, whether that's with Adobe, Apple, Google, or Facebook. I've already got an account, so I'm just going to go ahead and sign in. Then you're just going to want to give Lightroom access to all of your photos. First things first, we're going to want to import a photo. To do that, just click on the little picture with the plus button down at the bottom right, and then just import from camera roll, and then just select the photo that you want, and then you can just click on the check mark up at the top, and that's going to add that to All Photos. We've got "All Photos" right here so we can just go ahead and click on this. You can see the photo right there, and then just click on it. Now, here's where all the fun begins. Now if you have the free version of Adobe Lightroom, then "Selective" and "Healing" down at the bottom left are going to have little stars on them, meaning that you have to pay for them in order to use them. They're unlocked for me because I have a paid account. But honestly, you don't need them in order to create a beautiful photo edit. We're just going to go ahead and skip those for now. Really, the first thing that we're going to be getting into is the Light tab. I'm just going to scroll over and you'll see "Light" right here. We can just go ahead and click on that. It's going to say, hey, help is there whenever you need it. But that's what I'm here for, so let's just go ahead and close out of that. Now the first thing you've got is exposure, which is basically just how bright or how dark you want your image to be. If your image came out a little bit too dark, you can give it a little bit more brightness and neutralize the photo. Then you've got contrast. Now, contrast, whenever you drag it all the way to the right, this is going to make your shadows a lot darker and it's going to make your highlights a bit brighter and it's going to create a real light and dark effect, and then if you go all the way to the left, it's going to neutralize the image and flatten it out, it's going to gray it out a little bit and there's not as much contrast between the lights and the shadows now. What I like to do is just give it maybe a little bit of extra contrast. Then you've got highlights. Highlights is basically the brightest parts of your image, so anything that's really white, like the snow on these mountains or the clouds up in the sky. If you drag that all the way to the right, it's going to brighten those up a bit, and then if you drag it all the way back, it's going to darken them out and it's going to expose a lot of detail in the snow. You can see there's a lot of dirt in that snow, and it's going to show a lot of that. I honestly like to give it just a little bit of highlight pop, just like that. Then you've got shadows. Shadows is basically the darkest parts of your image, like the trees in the foreground. Now if I drag them all the way to the left, it's going to darken those trees up a lot, it's going to look really contrasty. But if I drag them all the way to the right, it's going to expose a lot of detail behind the shadows and those trees, which is really cool. You can bring out a lot of detail in your photos if they're ever too dark. The shadows function is fantastic. I actually am going to give it just a bit, maybe like that, maybe a little less. Then you've got whites and blacks. Whites and blacks is basically just an extra boost for these light and dark areas of your image. They work very similar. If you drag the whites up, everything is going to get a bit brighter, that's white, and then vice versa if you go the other way. Then same with blacks. It's going to pop out your shadows a little bit more just like the shadows function, it's just not quite as much as using shadows. To be perfectly honest, I don't really touch whites and blacks very much, I only really focus on highlights and shadows. The next most important tab that we have is the color tab. I'm going to go ahead and click on that. You can see we've got several different options here. Now, in here, we've got temperature. You can see that this is obviously a sunset and it's very orange. Now what I could do is correct for that just a little bit by adding a little bit more blue, just a bit, and that's going to neutralize the image a bit more. You can see if I hold my finger down, that's what it was before, and then after, it looks a lot more neutral. Now it does depend on whatever style you want to go for. If you like the sunset, you can even add a little more orange if you want to. But the temperature slider is mainly for correcting, as well as the tint. If there's a lot of green hues in this photo, I would want to give it a little bit more pink and then that's really going to add to the sunset as well. But what really is happening is you're correcting for white balance. White balance is basically just the lighting conditions that you're shooting in. It might cause your photo to be really orange and look a little warm. That's when you're shooting maybe indoors with tungsten lights that are really orange in hue, or maybe you're shooting around sunset and everything gets really orange. If you wanted to add a little bit more blue to your photos and make them a little bit colder to neutralize, you can add a little bit more blue with the temperature slider. Then you've got vibrance and saturation. Now, I'm going to explain saturation first. Saturation basically just means you're boosting all of the colors in the photo. So when you drag it all the way to the right, it's going to make all the colors pop a lot more. The blues pop, the greens pop, the purples, everything. When you drag the other way, you're basically creating a black and white photo, you're taking all the color out of the image. If you want to give your photos a really nice boost, you can use saturation. Now what I like more is actually vibrance. Vibrance is a smart form of saturation. Vibrance is going to take all the colors that need to be popped and it's going to pop them, and then any colors that it already recognizes are pretty bright, it's not going to pop those as much. So it's a much more even way to add some more color to your image. I am going to pop this a bit, maybe just a little bit like that. Whenever you are using anything in Lightroom, less is always more. You don't want to go too crazy because if you throw a lot of it in there like that, the whole image looks broken and over-processed and really doesn't look good. Now if you want to undo anything at all, you can click on this button up here at the top, and that's going to undo whatever your last change was. Now a cool function within the color tab is the mix tab. We're going to go ahead and click on "Mix". This basically means that you can edit individual colors and their saturation and their hue within the photo. Let me show you an example. I'm going to take the blues in this photo by clicking on the blue, and you can see if I drag the hue slider all the way over to the left, it's going to create more of a cyan-colored sky, which is pretty cool. Looks really unnatural if you go too far. But if you give it just a little bit, it can just add a little bit of a different blue. Then the other way, you can make it really purple if you drag over here. But it's only affecting the blues within the image. Then you can also affect the saturation of just that color. So if I wanted to just boost all the blues, I could do that without boosting any other color. But I like them the way they are, so I'm just going to go ahead and leave it. Then same with the luminance, this is basically how bright that one color is. So if you wanted it to be really bright, you could make all the blues really bright, almost to a white. Then again, you can make them really dark and expose a lot more detail in those blues. Now I'm going to do just a little bit of a negative 10 maybe luminance on the blues. Then if I wanted to do the greens, I could click on green and I could change all of the hues of the green. If I drag all the way this way, you can see it, they're getting a little bit darker green, and if I drag this way, it's a bit more orange, you can see it in the trees there, which is pretty cool. Now I'm going to make them a little bit more green because I took this photo in Seattle and it's really green over there, it's beautiful. So I'm also going to pop them with the saturation a little bit. Maybe just like that. Then you can also play with the Luminance as well, but to be honest it doesn't do a whole lot for those greens, so I'm going to go ahead and just leave it. You can do this for any color in the scale, which is really cool. I love the Mix tab, I use it literally for every single photo that I edit. Then just go ahead and click on "Done". Then you've got the Grading tab right here, which is within the Color tab, just go ahead and click on that. It's going to try to give us a little bit of a tutorial, we're just going to exit out of that. This is basically assigning a color to the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights separately. Right now we're on the Shadows, you can see that I've got the button clicked on the Shadows. If I want, I could add a color to those shadows. Let's just do it a little bit more drastically, like let's say a red or like a green, something like that. You can see that the shadows are mainly what's affected. Now, this is a cool way to get an old film look, you could add a little bit of red to the shadows. Then you've got the midtones, which I'm not really going to touch very much, but basically the same thing, you can assign a color to them. Then you've got the highlights. If I wanted, I could add maybe a little more blue to the highlights like that, or I could add some yellow, whatever I really want to do, I think blue probably looks the best. Now, this photo has a cool film look to it. If I click on "Done", and then I just hold my finger down on the image, it's going to show us what it looked like before and then when I let go it shows the new one. It's a really cool way to get this old film look. Now, I'm not going to keep that, it does look cool, but I'm going to go ahead and undo, and we're going to go back to where we were. Now the next tab is called Effects, so let's just go ahead and click on that. In here, you've got a few different options, now the first thing is Texture. Basically, when you drag the Texture slider up, it's going to sharpen your image a lot and give it some rough edges. But to be honest I don't really use it a whole lot, if you drag it the other way it softens it up. There's a reason I don't use it very much, and it's because I like clarity a lot more. Now, if you drag Clarity up, again it's going to sharpen your image, but it's also going to add some more contrast to it and it's going to make it look more chiseled. If you want a really chiseled look to it, kind of grungy, you can drag it up. If you want more of a soft dreamlike photo like that, it's really hazy and soft, you can do that as well. But again, I like it the way it is, so I'm just going to go ahead and leave it. This image is already pretty textured and contrasty, so I'm not going to add much more clarity to it, but I love the Clarity slider, I use that one a lot. Then you've got Dehaze, which is basically just going to get rid of fog or any haze that's in your photos. If you drag it up, it's going to get rid of all that, but it's also going to break your image a little bit, so you want to do just barely a little bit with this one, you don't want to go too far. Then the other way, it's going to add haze. If you drag left, it's going to add a lot more haze, make it look more foggy and cloudy, but I'm going to go ahead and leave it. Then you've got the Vignette, and the vignette basically means that you are darkening or lightening the corners of your image and this really helps draw the attention towards the middle. If you're taking portrait photos of people and you want people to lock onto their face instantly, then I highly suggest using a little bit of Vignette. Let me show you. If I drag to the left, it's going to darken the corners of the image. You can see, like that. Now, again, less is more, so if you're going to do this just add a little bit and it's going to draw your eye towards the center, or you can make them white like this. But to be honest, I never use the white, I don't really think it looks that great, but you can if you want to. But again, it's really great for photographing people to add a vignette. Then whenever you do add a vignette, so let's just add a really strong one just so I can show you. If you go down to midpoint and you drag that over to the right, it's going to push the shadows all the way out to the corner, so it's going to be a lot less. Or if you drag it to the left, it's going to bring it way into the middle so you can control how much of that vignette you want. Then you've got Feather. If I drag the Feather all the way up, it's going to really smooth out that transition from dark into your photo. If you drag it all the way to the left, it's going to sharpen it up to a complete circle. Now, obviously this looks ridiculous so you don't really need to do that, I think more Feather is better, so I'm going to give it a little bit more Feather. Then you've got Roundness, now I am going to drag the Feather back down just so I can show you. If you go over to Roundness and you drag it to the left, it's going to turn into more of a square. Then if you drag to the right, it's going to turn into more of an oval. Now I think more of an oval is a bit better, so I'm going to keep it around there. Then, again, drag that Feather way up, and then I'm also going to go over to Vignette and just make that a little bit less, maybe just like that, I just want a tiny bit of Vignette. Then you've got the Detail tab, so let's go ahead and click on that. Here you've got Sharpening, so if your image came out just a little bit too blurry or out of focus, you can save it a little bit by dragging up on the Sharpening. That is just going to sharpen up every tiny little edge in your photo and just make it a little bit more crisp. Now I'm not going to do that with this photo because it already came out in focus. Then you've got Radius, Detail, and Masking, which are just extra adjustments for sharpening, but to be perfectly honest I never use them. You can drag them around and it really doesn't seem like they're doing anything, so I just don't touch them. But if you scroll down you've also got Noise Reduction. With digital photos, there's always the risk that you have a little bit of noise in your shots, especially in the shadows where areas are a lot darker. Sometimes, whenever you zoom in on an image, noise can look like this. This is a very zoomed in picture of noise, and it's basically just a bunch of pixels crowding around your image, so that's what this noise reduction filter does. It can really take out a lot of those little pixels and smoothen out the image. The next tabs that we have are Optics, and this is just for lens corrections. To be honest, I never really use it. But if you had a photo in here that was maybe taken on a GoPro, really wide-angle and you want to flatten it out a little bit, you can use this tab. Then Geometry, if you click on that, is really just to distort the image a little bit so you can drag on these sliders. You can correct it that way as well if you have a GoPro style photo, or you can correct top to bottom, left to right, whatever you want to do. But again to be honest, I really don't use this tab very much. But one that I do use a lot is the Presets tab right here. Let's just go ahead and click on that. In here, if you click on the Color right here, you can see you've got a few different categories of presets that you can apply to all your photos; Color, Creative, Black and White, and so on. If we're in Color, you can choose any one of these and it's going to apply a preset onto your photo, so it does a lot of the editing for you. You can go over to Creative and you can do some of these little more desaturated, I really like the look of that one a lot. If you hold down you can see what it was before and then what it would be now. Turquoise & Red, there's a lot of cool options in here. You just click on the "Creative" right here, and you can switch between all of the different categories. You can also make your own presets with all the settings that you apply to one photo, and then you can save them as a user preset, but I'm going to talk about that in the next lesson. I'm going to go ahead and hit the "X" because I don't want to apply any of these presets. If you go over to Versions right here, you can create different versions of this photo. You can try out a bunch of different edits, and each time you get an edit done you can just click on "Create Version". Then you can just give it a name, which I'm not going to do right now, but it will create a version of this photo. Then down here you can go through all the different versions and see which one that you like the most. If you want to reset your photo, you can just click on "Reset", and then you can reset just the adjustments, you can reset all or all the way back to when you first imported the photo. If you wanted to start from scratch, you can use the Reset button. If you want to export a photo to your camera roll so that you can post it on social media or whatever you want to do, you just click the little box with the arrow coming out of it, and then you just click on "Export to Camera Roll". This photo was successfully exported, so if you go over to your camera roll you can find it there. Now, Lightroom does have a lot more features to it, but everything that I've shown you in this lesson is what I personally use every day to edit my photos. But if you do want to learn this app inside and out, I do have an entirely different course that's all about Lightroom Mobile that you can find on my Instructor page.
19. How to Create Presets in Lightroom: How to create presets. Presets are an awesome way to speed up your editing and create a really cohesive look across all of your photos, which can look really good for, let's say, an Instagram account, like what I've done here with mine. All I really did to get this look is just copy and paste the same preset that I already made once, and then you can just do a little bit of tweaking here and there to make sure all the photos flow. Let me show you how. First I'm going to choose a photo. I'm going to edit it however I want to fit my style. Cool. Now I've got my photo edited, and you can see that was it before, this is after, it's got a lot of blues and oranges in it, which I really like for my style. Now to create a preset, all you have to do is just click on the three dots up at the top right, and then you just go down to "Create Preset." Then you can just give it a name. Then you can choose which of the options that you want to include in the preset that will be pasted onto other photos. Now, I didn't really use tools, optics or geometry, I'm going to go ahead and just leave those unchecked. Then I'm going to leave everything else checked. Now all we have to do is just click on the little check up here at the top right. Then that was just added to our user presets. Now you can apply this to any other photo. Let me show you. We're just going to hit the back arrow. We'll just choose another photo, let's say this next one. Then we're just going to go over to Presets down at the bottom. Then you can just click on "Color", to switch to a different category. We're going to go down to User Presets, that you can now see at the bottom. Then I would just choose my preset. Then that's going to apply. Now the blues look a little bit too bright. What you can do is just hit the check mark and then you can tweak it however you want it to. I'm going to go back over to, let's say the Color, and then I'll go over to Mix, and then choose blue. Then I'm just going to drag those blues down just a bit. They were a little too harsh. Then again, I can just switch the colors however I want, maybe I want a little bit more cyan color in there like that, and then just hit "Done". Now you can see that was before and that's after. This is a really easy way to apply the same edit to any photo. I'll go show you on another photo and I'll do it to this photo too. Again, just go over to Presets, Dale's Insta Preset, and then boom, it already looks fantastic. I Might want to bring those blues down just a little bit again, so I'll go over to Color, and then go over to Mix, then go over to blue and just drag them down a bit. That photo looks instantly so much better. It was so quick and easy. You can create as many user presets as you want. You can do one that's a little less aggressive on the saturation, one that's more in the middle, and then one that's really saturated, depending on whichever photo that you're editing. All the photos you take, you're going to have different lighting conditions and they're all going to come out just slightly different. There's always going to be a little bit of tweaking involved, but presets gets all the work done for you.
20. How to Make Your Portraits Pop in Lightroom: How to edit your portraits to make them pop. This lesson was requested by one of my students, and I think it's very important. I'm going to be doing a practical example about how to take any portrait photo, and make it really pop in Lightroom. I'm going to show you how to take a photo from this to this. There's a huge difference between these photos. The edited photo really pops, the color pops, the lighting, everything about it. I'm going to jump right in, and show you how to do this. Here we are in Lightroom, and we've got our photo ready to go. It's a pretty good photo, but it looks a little bit too desaturated and flat. What we're first going to start with is the Light tab. I like to just start with Light, and then go to Color, and then Effects. Let's go ahead and start with Light. I'm going to open that up, and then we're just going to play around with the exposure a little bit, maybe make it a tiny bit brighter, we're going to bump that contrast up. I think contrast on portraits looks fantastic. We'll do maybe a plus 23. Then in the highlights, we actually want a little bit of highlights in there instead of going the other way, because that's going to flatten it out. We actually want to boost those highlights, because it looks really good on her face. Then the shadows, we're actually going to bring those down. Again, a lot of contrast on these photos of portraits is better. If you go this way, it's really going to bring out those shadows, and it's really happy-looking. But we want this to look a little bit moodier. We're going to bring those down just a tiny bit. That's all we really have to do in the Light tab. Now we'll move over to Color. Then first things first is just to bring up the Vibrance. The color is going to pop a lot more with the Vibrance tab. Remember, I use vibrance because it's a smart form of saturation. It's only going to bring up the colors that need to be brought up, and it's going to leave the other ones alone. If you just do saturation, then it's going to blow out your whole image with too much color. We're going to do a little bit of vibrance like that, somewhere in the middle. You can already see the difference in the color whenever I do the before, and after. We can even bring it up just a bit more. A lot of vibrance is good here. Now, I'm also going to go over to the Mix tab. I want her red lips and her hair to really pop a lot. I'm going to go over to the orange, might even have to do yellow. We're going to go over the orange. We're going to pop that a little bit. That's going to affect her skin tone a little too much. Let's actually try yellow, and pop that. Her hair's popping a little bit more with that. Let's do that. Bring the yellows all the way up, and then I'm going to go over to the reds. I'm going to bring her lips up just a little bit more like that. Then I'm just going to click on "Done". Then let's go over to the Effects. Then you can play around with the clarity. If you want more of a chiseled look, you can do that. It looks pretty good. But I think I want to go with a little bit of a softer look. I'm going to be really subtle, because if you go all the way here, it looks really broken, and doesn't really look very good. This is about normal, I'm going to do just a little bit of softness, maybe just like that, like a negative 15, 16. Then I'm going to add the vignette. This is probably one of the most important parts of making a portrait pop. I'm going to bring the vignette in just like that to close in the sides, and it really draws your eye towards her, and makes her pop, because there's no black actually being put on top of her, so it draws your eye in, which looks really nice. I'm going to do something like that. Then I'm going to go over to Detail. I'm going to bring up the sharpening just a bit. Maybe a quarter of the way, like that. Then just like that, this photo looks so much better. Here's what it was before. You can tell how flat it really was before, and here's what it's at now, which looks so much better. Then what I could just do is go over to the three dots up at the top right, and then create a preset. Then I'll just call this the Portrait Preset. Then just click the Check mark. Then I can apply that to any of my portraits. This helps if you're editing lots of different photos of the same person. If I were photographing this girl, I would take probably 50 different photos, and then I'll just pick my favorite ones, and apply that preset. Now that you know how to make your portraits pop, let's head on to the next lesson.
21. Final Words: Be Adventurous: Now some final words, be adventurous. Keep in mind that photography is more than just walking around, clicking a button, it's an adventure. The more adventurous you are, the better your photos are going to be. To be adventurous, you have to be courageous. Some of the best photos are taken from places that people don't normally go. If you're envisioning a photo, search for the best location to match that style that you have in mind. The best photographers shoot with purpose, they plan to go to specific locations with props, wardrobes, and angles in mind. Stand up on that light post above a crowded street to get the perfect high angle. Take the long hike before sunrise to get the best lighting at the top. Stand in the middle of the cross-walk and shoots straight down the middle of the street for the best vantage point. Lay down on the floor for the perfect low angle. Try some weird crap, have fun with it, and figure out what inspires you.
22. Final Words: Memorize The Rules and Break Them: The most important step of all, memorize the rules and break them. Everything I've discussed in this course will help you to start taking and editing amazing photos all on your phone and should be committed to memory. Once you memorize how each step affects the way a photo is perceived, your brain will start to do everything on autopilot while you're out shooting. Practice makes perfect is not just a cliche that your middle school basketball coach says, but the only thing that will take you from beginner to a professional. The best thing that you can do is shoot, shoot, shoot. While you're between shooting, study your favorite photographers photos and look for all the elements that we've discussed in this course. Once you start recognizing their patterns, you can begin to add your own style? How do you add your own style? Break the rules. Just as important as memorizing the rules is getting comfortable breaking them. Photography is a constantly evolving art form because people are becoming bolder and more imaginative with their shots every day. Breaking the rules of photography once in a while is necessary for discovering new and attractive shots as well as discovering your niche. That's a wrap for the iPhone photography course. If you'd like to leave a rating and a review soon, I would be more than grateful. Every rating and written review helps my credibility grow and matters so much. Feel free to check out my Instructor page for more courses. I have courses specifically for photo editing, cinematography, and video, how to get a cohesive Instagram feed and more. Thank you for watching. I wish you the best of luck on your photography adventures and I will see you on the next course.
Dale McManus, Photography, Cinematography, Music
