Live Encore: iPhone Portrait Photography

1. Introduction: Portrait photography is one of the best ways to get into creative photography. It's the form of photography that we understand most as human beings. We see a face and we can instantly recognize any emotion, any feelings that person might have. I think it's just an incredibly powerful form of photography and it's also a very accessible form of photography. You can always go out and shoot with your family and friends and it's fun and you have a good time and you get some beautiful photos out of it. Hey guys my name is Sean Dalton. I'm a travel and lifestyle photographer from San Francisco, California. For the past few years I've been living throughout Asia, mostly Thailand, and Indonesia, just pursuing projects that interest me, projects that inspire me, and also dedicated the time to create a meaningful courses here on [inaudible]. Today we're going to be covering all the basics of iPhone portrait photography. Everything from planning your shoot to shooting, and actually a live editing session as well. You can follow along in this course by coming up with your own portrait shoot idea. The first part of this course is planning your shoots. This course is focused around the iPhone [inaudible] , but you can follow along in this course no matter what camera you have, whether that's an Android camera or a DSLR. All the principles in this course can be applied to any camera at all, so you don't need to have an iPhone. I hope that this course gives you the technical knowledge you need to capture beautiful portraits and more importantly, I hope that this course inspires you to actually go out and create, maybe half the battle of photography is having the motivation to go out and shoot. The more you shoot, the better you're going to become. This class was recorded live on Skillshare and I was interacting with the audience throughout the course. All right guys, well now it's time to dive into the course material. Let's get after it. 2. Planning Your Portrait Shoot: Hi guys. Welcome. My name is Katie. I'm a producer with Skillshare and I'll be hosting the live session with Sean today. What are we going to be doing in this live session today? Today we're going to be talking about iPhone portrait photography specifically shot on the iPhone. If you guys have an Android, that's okay too, a lot of the principles are going to be the same. The first session of this course, we're going to dive into basically the planning before you go out and shoot your portraits. Then the actual shooting phase as well, so digging into some tips and just giving you guys a workflow you can follow to capturing beautiful portraits with your iPhone. Then we have an actual 15-minute live editing session where I'm going to show you guys how to actually edit photos on your iPhone so you can see my screen, and that's going to be a co-interactive section of this course. Throughout this course, I'm going to be referring to some photos that I captured my friend last week. Her name is Kelsey, we went out to the beach and we did this beach style portrait photoshoot. We had a great time and I was honestly amazed with the photos that we captured, their beautiful and I can't wait to show you guys some of those images throughout this course. These were all shot on the iPhone 11 pro. But if you guys have an older phone, that's totally fine. Anything later than an iPhone 6, iPhone six, iPhone 8, any of those are totally fine, they're amazing cameras. Okay, so first step is planning our shoot. I broke this down into four different sections. The model and the story, the location, the outfit, and then also talking about inspiration. Let's dive into this one by one. The first thing with a portrait obviously is the model. The model is the person that's appearing in your portrait and they really are the centerpiece of your image. I think it's really important to sit down with this person before you shoot and think about a few different things and really reflect on a few different things because that's really going to help shape the photoshoot that you guys have. The first question I like to ask is, how do you want to depict this person? How do you want to portray them? What kind of emotions do you want to express in these portraits? There's a lot of ways you can go about this and sometimes this person, your model, is going to have ideas and they're going to bring ideas to the table and sometimes they're going to leave it up to you, so you can formulate this idea of the shoot and the story that you want to tell. Just work back and forth with them and that's a really helpful way to get this process started because that's the most important thing, is the story of the model. For the shoot that I did with Kelsey, we wanted to do something upbeat, happy, warm, beachy summer, upbeat, warm, I added that twice. But yes, so we just wanted to express those emotions. These images here on the right, these were shot in Thailand with my friend Vincent, and instead of just going out and capturing him on just walking around a lake we were like, "Let's bring a motorcycle and a cool helmet." Those are things that he's passionate about and those are part of his life and we wanted to show that and I think we did a really good job. Once you guys sit down and you talk about some of the things that you want to portray in your images, in the portraits, and the kind of the story you want to tell, now you need to choose a location. This is such an important piece of the portrait process because it really dictates the mood and the style of your photos. The location has such a big effect on lighting, on the overall mood, on the colors. It's such an important piece of the puzzle. In terms of choosing a good location, I always like to ask two questions. Does it align with the story you want to tell? Also is it beautiful? A good example of this is, say you're going to shoot a business portrait. You wouldn't shoot a business portrait at the beach. That wouldn't make a lot of sense. It doesn't really align with the story. Whereas you would shoot a business portrait, possibly somewhere like this room or in a cafe, or somewhere a little bit more refined, that might be a better spot. Then also, is it beautiful? Do you have a beautiful spot nearby that you guys can go out to and capture some photos? There's a lot of beautiful places around the world. This is a shot, another shoot I did with Kelsey on an island here in Bali and it's probably one of my favorite images that I captured this year. The location is beautiful. You might be thinking to yourself, "I don't have any crazy locations like that, Sean, like that's impossible." All I say to that is you just have to think outside the box a little bit. These are some images that I captured a few years ago in Thailand. It looks like my friend Nam is in this beautiful, lush, jungle somewhere and it gives off that vibe. But actually, I took those photos right here on the side of a random street. We just needed a little place to create something beautiful and we did. So think outside the box, there's always beauty to be found nearby. The next piece is the outfit and this is a really important piece of the puzzle as well because it really brings everything together. If you have a business portrait, but they're wearing a bikini, doesn't really make sense. You have to have an outfit that matches the kind of story or the mood of your images. I really like this image here, on the left. I think the poses are a little bit not well done, but I love the outfits and the props that they're using in this image. They look like they're ready to camp. They have a guitar, they have a little pot, so I think they did a really good job in this image of outfits, and also adding props to enhance the story. One thing I like to say is, props are amazing for creating a story. Instead of just going out and photographing your friend on a grassy field somewhere, throw in a picnic basket and a picnic blanket, and all of a sudden there's a story. The story of you and your friend going out and having a picnic and it's something that people can relate to. Props can be a really important piece of the story process. You can also use a laptop if you're doing a professional style portrait or a surfboard if you're shooting on the beach, which is what Kelsey and I used. The last piece of the planning phase is the inspiration, is finding inspiration. For me, inspiration is a massive part of the creative process. It helps me get ideas and it also just inspires me to go out and shoot, which is very important, it's getting the motivation to go out and actually capture something beautiful. For me, inspiration is very important in that regard and also it gives me a shortlist and it helps me with poses if I'm not familiar with posing a certain style of photoshoots. I might always recommend having some inspiration sources and having them readily available during your shoot. If you're shooting, you can just flip to your inspiration file and then you have all these different poses that you can copy or you can base your poses off of, as well as different compositions as well. So inspiration is very important. As you can see here on the right. I use Instagram for a lot of my inspiration. There's so many good photographers on Instagram. On the image on the left here, these are some of the images I saved for this photoshoot for Kelsey and I, and on the right, these are some of the images that I saved for my Still Life course, which is live on Skillshare. So some of you guys might have seen that. I also like to use Pinterest. Pinterest is amazing and specific magazines as well, Sidetracked Magazine, Outsider mag, these travel and lifestyle mags. They have amazing photographers and those really inspire me. Now that we've talked about the planning phase and all the things you should be at least thinking about before we go out and shoot. Now let's dive into the good stuff. The actual shooting. 3. iPhone Camera Overview: Next up, we're going to go over a basic overview of the iPhone settings and talk about some of the things that you might want to enable or disable to make sure that you're getting beautiful portraits. The iPhone camera is amazing, the native app is great. I don't think you need to be using a separate app on your iPhone to capture photos. I think the native app that's available on your iPhone it's accessible, you can access it from the lock screen, it's fast and it just works, so I always recommend using the native camera. There's two settings that I tested and I recommend turning these off, those are the live photo feature and the HDR feature. The live photo, instead of just capturing a single image, the live photo will allow you to capture a short video. I think it's about a second before and a second after, you actually take the image so you can scrub through and find a better frame, say if somebody blinked or something. But I think it slows down the shooting process and also it captures the photo in a weird file that some programs can't use, I just recommend turning that off. HDR is called high dynamic range, and that essentially makes it so. The highlights are a perfect exposure and the shadows are a perfect exposure, so you have a ton of detail in your image. In my opinion, I think it looks a little bit unnatural. If you're shooting something like a landscape, I would say leave HDR on. But for portraits, I would say turn it off just because it just doesn't look very natural. Depending on the iPhone that you guys have, there's three different lenses on some of the new iPhones. On my phone, I have the iPhone 11 pro, I have a 0.5 times lens, a one times lens, and a two times lens. All iPhones now have at least one times lens, which is amazing for capturing portraits. If you do have a more premium version, you have the two times lens, that's even better and on the next slide I'll show you guys why that is. But when I shot with Kelsey, I really did about 50-50 shooting in the one times and the two times. One times refers to a wide lens, so you have a lot of field of view and the two times is a little bit more cropped, it's a little bit more zoomed in, and that's a telephoto lens. Like I said, you'll see the difference on the next slide. You guys can navigate between them just here above the photo mode here. It might just say one times for you or it might have two or three depending on your iPhone, but this is really useful when you're shooting to switch between them. I never recommend shooting in 0.5 times, I think it's too wide and it just doesn't look great, but one times and two times are amazing. The two camera modes that I recommend using are the regular photo mode and the portrait mode and I think all iPhones or at least the newer ones now have portrait mode, even if it's just one times for the one times lens. Portrait mode is amazing because it actually uses software to blur the background and give you a very professional looking photo. You can see that here, this is just a basic lens comparison. On this image on the left is Kelsey with the one times lens, so it's pretty wide and you can see a lot of the environment, and I actually really like that. The two times lens is using portrait mode, so not only is it more zoomed in, but also the background is very blurry because we have that portrait mode enabled. Portrait mode is fantastic. A lot of the photos I captured for this course were in portrait mode, but I also shot just a lot in normal one times mode as well. The reason why the two times telephoto lens is so good for portraiture is because with lenses, the wider the lens is, the more lens distortion that you have. The more zoomed in you can be, the more realistic your subject is going to look. With the two times lens, it's pretty zoomed in, so it really holds the true character of your model. You can see the background separation here between Kelsey and the ocean, it looks really great, we have a lot of background separation. But if you guys don't have a two times lens, that's totally fine, the one times is amazing like I said and you can really do everything that you need to do with that lens. I just want to touch on this quickly, basically talking about setting focus and exposure, I think this is really important. It's very central to shooting with your iPhone. I added a little GIF here, it's pretty low quality, but I think you guys can see. All you have to do to set exposure and focus on your iPhone is just tap on the face of your model and I say, tap on the face because that's the most important piece of a portrait; the face, the eyes, that's what's going to show the most emotion. If you want to adjust exposure, you can tap and hold and you can drag up to increase your exposure or you can tap and hold and drag down to darken your exposure. But for the most part, the iPhone does a really amazing job at exposing your photos so there doesn't need to be too much manual control here. Somebody had a question about the quality of iPhone photo, is it high enough quality for professional photography? They give an example of stock photo website typically require a minimum resolution to be eligible. What's your stance on that? That's a great question and I would say, yes. I would say the iPhone, the newer ones in particular, absolutely, and you guys will see some of the photos that I captured. Honestly, it's pretty amazing how sharp they are and how much resolution they have. I would say that, yes, some of the newer iPhones could definitely be used for professional purposes. I still think iPhones are limited in terms of a lot of functionality that you would need as a legitimate professional photographer charging for your services, but it is possible, I would say. 4. Lighting Your Portrait: Now, we're going to dive into lighting. In this section, I'm going to give you guys some practical tips for ensuring that you have beautiful light in your images and light in your models in an effective way. This is the most overlooked thing with, I think beginner photographers. It's hard to understand, but if you can understand two things about lighting, you're going to be in a much better position and you're going to be way ahead of most portrait photographers. First thing is, natural light is amazing. Light from the Sun is beautiful, it's soft, and it just looks great. You don't need to be using artificial light. In fact, I would say do not use artificial light because the Sun is that beautiful. The only issue with the Sun is, it's very dependent upon location, time of day, and weather. All of those factors are going to contribute to whether the light is soft or hard. I'll show you guys in the next slide the differences between those two. But the hours surrounding sunrise and sunset, you have nice, soft light and also overcast days are perfect for shooting portraits because the light is nice and soft. That's because this light from the Sun hits the clouds, and then it diffuses and it becomes nice and soft. It's actually perfect for shooting portraits. If you live in the UK or somewhere where it's always raining, don't worry about that. You are in a perfect place for portraits. Here's a good example of soft light versus hard light. They're both beautiful images by a great Russian photographer. On the left, I actually really like this photo, but you can see on her face here we have some really bright hot spots here. This is really dark shadows and really bright highlights. It's a great image, but it doesn't compliment her face well. Whereas on the right we have soft light. Maybe this was a shot in the afternoon, or maybe on an overcast day, or perhaps in the morning. You can see how much better her skin looks. It's just glowing, it looks a lot nicer. You can see the differences between the soft light versus hard light here. I think that's a good representation. Now, the other principle is lighting direction. Not only the strength of light is important, but also the direction of the light is important as well. I think this can be a complex topic, but it's so important to understand. If you can understand this, your photos are going to become amazing. Trust me on this, this is a really important piece of the puzzle. I like to break down lighting direction in three ways; front light, side light, and back light. This refers to basically where the Sun is oriented in accordance to you and your model. You can see here in this first shot, it's front light. The light is coming from the bottom. It's coming from straight on. It looks great. It doesn't look bad, but there's no shadows. That's because if the Sun is behind you, everything is going to be very well exposed. However, it looks flattened. It doesn't look dynamic. A photo is two-dimensional, but it needs to look three-dimensional. Using shadows, we can shape our photo and add depth into our scene. You can see that here with the second image of the side light. The light is coming from the right side. You can see these shadows on the side of Kelsey's face here. It just adds a lot of depth to the image and I think it just looks a lot better. Then on the last image here we have back light. The light is actually behind Kelsey and I'm shooting into the light. If the light is strong enough, this will create what's called a silhouette, where basically your model is completely dark and the sky is bright. You can get some crazy colors shooting like this. But I really like how this shot of Kelsey came out. We still have a little bit of detail on her body so we can still see her, she's not completely dark. The sky is nice and bright; beautiful image. Lighting direction, it can be complex, but if you understand it in these three terms, and you test out and shoot with all three, I think you'll come up with some really cool images. 5. Posing Your Subject: Next up, let's talk about posing and some of the things that you can do to ensure that your subjects look natural and relaxed in your portraits. Posing is a super important piece of the puzzle. I think I've said that about everything we've talked about today, but it really is. It's difficult to make your subjects look natural in your photos, and ultimately, that's our main goal with posing. I always like to say, let things flow as naturally as possible during your photo shoot and capture the moments in between. You should be shooting when the model least expects it. Don't count down, and then take your photo. You should instruct them to do something maybe like, why don't you walk over there? Why don't you stand up or open your MacBook or pour some coffee? Then you can capture all that, the whole scenario of them picking up the coffee and pouring it into their glass or something like that, and you can capture some pretty amazing photos in those in-between moments. I'm going to also say, keep your posing list handy. That's why we talked about inspiration earlier on in this course is, having that inspiration in your pocket. You can use it as a posing guide. If you get stumped and you're out in your shoot and you're like, "I can't think of any more poses." Just pull up the inspiration source, check out those poses and then you can use those as well. In terms of considerations for posing and making sure that they look good, I think there's three questions you can ask yourself. Does it match the scene? Does it make sense that they would be posing in that way? Does it look natural? Also, is it flattering? Does your subject look good in this position? Now, I'm just going to rapid fire six different posing tips. I think these are really going to help you guys when you're out shooting, so we'll just rapid fire and go through these pretty quickly. The first one is eyes. Eyes are full of emotion and I always recommend showing the eyes of your subject, and you can see that in this first photo and in this second photo of Kelsey as well, the eyes are very powerful, so I always recommend showing them in some way. Also hands. Hands tell a lot about a person and we understand them as human beings, they're very emotional, so I think having hands in the scene can be a really powerful way to pose your subject, and it can also help frame the face. Also movement. I had Kelsey just run along the beach and I ran with her and captured some photos, and I edited it in this old school film, nostalgic summer vibe and I really love how that photo came out. You can just instruct your model to walk or run or something like that and capture the whole sequence. I always like to say shift the shoulders. The shoulders are the focal point of the body and when you have your model shift their shoulders, their entire body position is going to change. Try different positions, have them shift it left to right, up and down. Also have them look on and off camera as well. You can mess around with that. Props can be used as a really good focal point for posing. This is from a different shoot with Kelsey. We found a piece of coral and I had her pick it up and just hold it in front of her, and it just adds something to the scene, and it helped her pose because it was right there in front of her and it was something to hold. The last tip I have for you is pay attention to light. We already talked about lighting and how important it is. But posing is going to affect your lighting. If you have your model look, say, away from the light source, then their face is going to be dark. Always be thinking about lighting and how the pose is affected by the lighting. I really like this image here because you can see all these different shadows on her arms, and legs, and face, and she is looking into the light source, that's a beautiful photo. 6. Composing Your Photo: In this lesson, we're going to talk about composition and its importance to portrait photography. Composition is one of those topics that I think is very misunderstood. I think that's because there's too much information online regarding composition and it can be a little bit confusing and a little bit overwhelming. I think it's over taught with a lot of photography teachers. I take a different approach and I like to teach it in a slightly different way. What is composition? Composition is basically how you arrange all the elements in your scene within your frame. It's pretty self-explanatory. If you have a model, it's how you organize them within your frame and then how you capture that photo. Instead of teaching the rule of thirds and all these crazy compositional topics, I'd like to focus on three principles: Perspective, leading lines, and depth. Perspective is basically your orientation to your subject. Your orientation to your subject greatly changes the way your subject is portrayed. For example, if you shoot down upon your subject, it might make them look vulnerable or weak. If shoot up at your subject, it might make them look powerful or strong. If you shoot straight on, that might be just a more realistic approach. I always recommend constantly shifting your perspective while you're shooting. Moving up, down on, backwards, forwards, just going all around your subject and capturing all of these different compositions. In my photography essentials course. The exercise of that course is to capture 50 different photos of a single item. That really forces you to shift your perspective and that's a really good exercise. Always be shifting your perspective, that's one of the best things you can do for coming up with unique compositions. Next up is this principle of leading lines. Leading lines are basically just lines in your image that guide your eyes to the viewer or to the main part of the image. In this image on the right here we can see our subject right in the middle of the frame and all these lines just converge perfectly on her. This is a fantastic example of leading lines. It's not always going to be perfect. Nature doesn't always look this geometric and perfect, but this is a good example. Your physical environment can be leading lines, like as we can see here. But also the body can be leading lines as well. The arms, if you're resting your head on an arm, that arm could be a leading line leading up to the face, hands, hair, and other objects that you're surrounded by can all be leading lines. Leading lines are important because they just make the photo very easy to view for your viewer. It lets your eyes very easily navigate throughout the photo. They can also work to frame your subject. Here we see in this image she's very nicely framed between these both sides of the street. Lastly is this idea of depth. This is a really important principle and I think it's actually pretty easy to accomplish good depth in your images. The depth is basically the difference between your foreground or the objects in the foreground of your frame, the front of your frame, the mid ground, which is all of the objects in the middle of your frame, and the background, which is basically what's behind you. I really love this image because we have a foreground. This plant here. We have our subject here, which is in the mid ground, also in the foreground. Then we have this background here, which is further away. We can increase the depth in our image by adding foreground elements like this plant, or by placing our background further away, or by shifting our perspective. Sometimes if we just drop a little bit lower, it'll bring more foreground elements into the frame and that will create much more depth and interest in our scene. 7. Shooting Tips in Action: Next, we're going to cover a few more shooting tips that you guys can follow where you're out shooting. Then we're going to take a look at some more example images that I captured out on my shoot with Kelsey. Clean your lens. This is something that is so overlooked. The iPhone lens gets dirty all the time. So all you have to do is take it and rub it on your shirt and it's going to be good to go. Definitely recommend cleaning your lens. Also, talk to your model if you're always talking with them and reassuring them, that will help them feel at ease. Also, being confident. Be confident and take charge and always be communicating because that's really going to help your model relax. That's a really important tip for a portrait photography. I also say capture the details. There's so many amazing details that happen in every scene. So focus on those. You don't always have to be shooting the face. You can focus on the hands, the shoulders, different parts of the body. Those can be really powerful images, and I'll show you those in a second. Then lastly, don't ever forget about lights. Like I said, lighting is the most important thing. Don't forget about it. It's always going to be playing a role in your images. Here's just a few more images. I showed some images throughout this little presentation here, but here's a few more images of Kelsey, all shot on the iPhone. Honestly, I just love how these came out. These are some detailed shots here on the left and the right. Then this one in the middle is Kelsey posing with the surfboard. I just think it's beautiful and it's incredibly sharp and the colors just look great. I'm really happy with how these images came out. Here's a few more. So you can see here shooting with the two times lens and the one times lens and adjusting my perspective and just getting a good range of photos. 8. iPhone Editing Overview: Before we actually get into the editing section itself, I want to talk about some of the options that you have for editing on your smartphone. In terms of editing, I always say there's two trains of thought. Those that want to edit quickly and are interested in and really spending a lot of time to customize their photos and then people that want to have more control, they want to edit more in-depth and that you'd use Adobe Lightroom for that. But for those that don't want to spend all day editing, you can use any photo filter app. You can search photo editing on the app store and there are so many apps. I mean, they're all great. It's easy. All you have to do is apply a filter and for the most part, your image is done. Some of my favorites are the iPhone, just the photo app built into the iPhone. It has some pretty good filters. VSCO, Snapseed, and Instagram as well. VSCO is what I used to use all the time when I first started out with photography. I'd use the A6 filter and I think it's free. All you have to do is download that and you use the A6 filter and you can see the before and after edit of Kelsey here edited with the A6 filter. But for those of you that do want more functionality, then you're going to want to use what's called Adobe Lightroom Mobile. This is the app that I was talking about and this really is the gold standard for mobile editing. Most photographers now use Adobe Lightroom on their computer to edit their photos and Adobe Lightroom Mobile is almost exactly the same as the desktop version. It's honestly amazing how much technology is in our pockets nowadays and you can do so much with this app. It can also be a really strong organization tool and it can also be just as quick as editing with photo filters by using something called Lightroom presets and I'll show you guys those as well. But now, I'm going to jump on my iPhone here and I'm actually going to show you guys how I would edit a few images here. 9. Quickly Editing in Lightroom: Now let's dive into the actual editing of a few photos. I'm going to show you guys how you can edit these photos in a very beautiful way without spending all day editing. This is Adobe Lightroom and I have all these photos that I captured of Kelsey. Honesty, I took way too many. I get excited when I shoot and I get creative and I just start capturing so many photos. But I filtered through and I found the ones that I liked and I labeled them five-stars so I can filter, and these are all my favorite images from the shoot here. I think these bottom ones are my ultimate favorite. I'm going to edit some of these images here just from scratch and I'm going to show you guys my basic workflow for editing. This is probably one of my favorite images from the shoot. There's a lot of different settings here and it can be daunting. It's like, "Oh my gosh, what am I supposed to do? There's so many." Don't worry, it's actually pretty simple and I have a basic workflow to work through. The first thing I'd like to do is crop. You can crop your photo if you want. I think this crop looks good, but I'm just going to straighten it based on that horizon line in the back there. Once you crop, then you're going to come over here and you're just going to start with lights. You're going to go from left to right. Light, color, effects, detail, and honestly, the other things, you don't even need to worry about. Lighting refers to basically the exposure of your scene, how bright or how dark, the contrast, the highlights, which are the brightest areas, and the shadows, which are the darkest areas. The whites are the white areas of the image and the blacks are the blacks. But before we touch those, I'll like to go into the Tone Curve. The Tone Curve seems scary, but it really does amazing things for your photo. The only thing I like to do with all my images is create what's called a basic S curve. You can do that by opening the Tone Curve, which is in the light panel here in the corner, and then tap this Google Chrome-looking icon and then just create three basic little dots there. Then all you're going to do is drag these ones in the third down and up, and then drag the corners up and down as well. What this is doing is basically just adding mid-tone contrast into our photo and then also is softening things out. You can see what this does when I raise this up, their shadows get nice and soft and it just gives it this beautiful classic look. Once I do that, then I can come into light and make sure my exposure looks good and everything and the contrast is where I want it. Sometimes I'll increase the shadows and decrease the highlights just to create more dynamic range in our image and then I can go and increase the whites and darken the blacks, and that's just going to add contrast into our image. I think that looks pretty good. I'm just doing this by eye. This very much is a creative process. I don't think there's a lot of room for technical stuff. You can't go down that route. But in my opinion, you're trying to create an image that looks beautiful, and following your creative instincts is the best way to go. After you edit light, then you're going to move onto color. In the color section, we can edit our temperature, so I make it cool or I make it warm. The vibrance, so affecting some of the lesser colors, and then the saturation as well. I think for the most part, the colors in this image look good. One of the greatest things about Lightroom is it gives you the ability to adjust colors independently. If you click on "Mix" here or tap "Mix", you can see all these different colors and you can affect the hue, the saturation, and the luminance. The hue is the actual shade of the color. You can see when I drag the orange, what it does to the image. You can see what saturation does. Saturation is the pureness of the color and luminance is the brightness of the color. There's so much control here, it's really cool. This image, it looks great. The iPhone colors look great already. The only thing I might do is desaturate her skin a little bit. But I think it looks pretty good as it is. So there's not a lot I would change here, but you can, you can dive into all these colors and get really creative here. After that, you can go move on to effects, and you have a bunch of different things here. The only thing I like to change from our portraits is to just take this clarity slider and bring it down by about five, and what that does is it just helps soften out the skin and it's more complementing for portraits. Lastly, moving down the line, we move on to detail. What I'll like to do is just sharpen the photo maybe about 20 and I don't even touch the radius or the detail for the most part. The sharpening feature works really well if you just slide that up. That's our edit. There's the before and there's the after, before and after. You can see, it just brings the colors out, enhances the contrast, but it looks really nice. You can spend all day editing photos, but the iPhone does such a good job already that all you have to do is really touch it up and it will be where it needs to be. I want to edit one more. This is probably one of my favorite photos and you guys saw this one earlier. I really, really love it. Now we're going to follow the same progression, go into the light tab, go to the curve, make our three points and enhance the contrast there, drag that down, and then just gives it such a cool vintage look. I might brighten it up a little bit and then I might drag the highlights or the shadows up to increase the dynamic range, highlights down and shadows up. Then I think the whites look really good and I think the blacks maybe I'll bring them down just a little bit. I'm always working between all these settings because they all affect each other in some way. I'm just going back and forth and just filing it out. Then we'll move on to color and I can make this a little bit warmer if I want to really get that summer vibe. I think the colors look really good, there's not a lot I would change. We can try maybe bringing the saturation of the blues up if we want to see what that does but for the most part, it looks pretty good. Same thing, bring the clarity down by five for that soft portrait look, and then bring the sharpening up to about 20. There we go, nice and easy. There's the before and there's the after, before and after. How are you switching back and forth between the before and after? Yeah. All you have to do is tap and hold on the screen, and that will shift to the before and after. A pretty cool feature. Before we finish, I just want to show you so all the images that you guys saw in this course, I actually edited with Lightroom presets. Lightroom presets are essentially like a photo filter for Lightroom and it basically just saves different editing profiles that you can use on your images. Some of them are built into Lightroom, so Lightroom actually includes them. You guys can play with those. Then also a lot of photographers sell them as well. I do sell these on my website. They're totally not necessary, but you can get my portrait pack on my website, and that basically just helps you edit a little bit quicker. These are all my presets here. I actually use the Surfs Up preset for all the images that you saw on this course. It's pretty similar to the editing style I just showed you guys. I just made a few changes and it's a little bit more complex of an edit. But you can see just with one application, it looks really good. I really love the colors in particular. Then you can see it with this image as well if we just scroll to Presets and go down to Surfs Up and tap "Surfs Up", and then it gives it this nice bright portrait look. Presets are really cool and there's so many available online. There's free presets available, there's paid presets available. I recommend testing them out, if you are going to use Lightroom, it can really help speed up the process, and it's a pretty cool tool that I recommend using. 10. Organizing in Lightroom: Lastly, I'll show you guys how you can organize your photos using Adobe Lightroom so you never lose a photo. You can actually create folders, which is really helpful for organizing everything. I have 2020 here. I'm getting pop-ups. Let me close this. I can go to October and then Kelsey Beach Photoshoot. I have all these photos right here and I can actually rank them as well. If you click on a photo and you tap on the upper left, it says edit. But if you tap Rate and Review, then you can actually go through and rate your photos. This one's maybe three stars. This one's maybe one star, and then you can filter it. It's a really good organization tool. That stuff is something I recommend checking out. Do you tend to download them on hard drive for long-term storage? Yeah. I actually use iCloud, which basically I pay monthly and I have all the photos backed up, but you can use something like Google Photos. Google Photos is great because you can send or basically upload all your photos to Google and then you don't have to pay for it. That's really nice. But I just leave them on my phone and then when I want to export, all you have to do is tap this little icon here and then select Export to Camera Roll. Then, I'll typically AirDrop it to my Mac or send it via email or Dropbox. Those are the best ways to get the photos from your iPhone to your computer. 11. Final Thoughts: Guys well, that is the end of this course and I really hope it was helpful for you both in terms of technical knowledge, so hopefully, you learned some important principles about the technical side of photography like lighting, and posing, and also planning your shoots. But also, I really hope that this course inspired you in some way, whether it inspired you to go out and shoot with your family and friends, or just gives you some ideas for shooting in the future. Follow your inspiration if. Something inspires you and you have the urge to shoot, sit down and plan something out. I mean half the battle is taking the steps to put together a good shoot. So if you feel a hint of inspiration from this course, call up a family member or friend and be like, "Hey, let's go shoot." Maybe the more you create, the better you're going to become. So if you guys do go out and capture a portrait of a family member or a friend, or maybe it's even your pet, feel free to post that in the class project. I love checking those out and that's a great way to connect as a community here on Skillshare. You guys would like to explore some of these concepts in more detail. I recommend checking out my Photography Essentials Course, where I cover all the basics of photography in a really in-depth lesson. Also, I recommend checking out my Adobe Lightroom Mobile editing course. That the course is jam-packed full of information and you will definitely learn how to use the software through and through if you watch that course. All right, see you guys.