Mobile Editing For Instagram Photos

1. Trailer: Instagram has 500 million daily active users. Mobile photography has become a regular part of our reality. Instagram for photo self in a way to express yourself, to realize your creativity, to share your work, and often also a way to make money, and since Instagram was first of all about visual content, the quality of our folders plays a significant role. I'm Olga, illustrator, graphic designer, content creator, and busy mom. My new Skillshare class is all about mobile editing and the CDL for beginners because we will talk about basic concepts. But I want not just to show you some editing apps. I will form an understanding of how to create a harmonious image with the help of exposure, contrast, temperature, light, shade, and how to translate the desired mood. This understanding will help you to find your own editing style. I will also share with you some secrets of how to make photos more Instagrammable. At the beautiful view outside the window, remove all the objects and people how to look slimmer by a few kilograms, removes skin defects and even change the color of your clawses. See you in the class. 2. Class project: As a class project, I suggest you to edit some of your photos using knowledge from this class. Or you can practice one of my photos that I've prepared for you. You will find them in the attachments section. It would be great if you will try editing in several different styles. Don't forget to share it in a class project section. Can't wait what you will come up with. 3. Where does the editing begin?: Often looking at beautiful photos of bloggers on Instagram. It seems that to do the same you need to have their latest model of iPhone, or to use the same VSCO filter or just buy the same Lightroom preset. But in fact, everything is not so simple. Even the best editor will not save a better original image. So photo editing starts from making photo itself. For example, here I put the same Lightroom preset on different original images. As you can see, the result is different despite the same preset. Yes, photo editing is essential, but it's not a silver bullet. As [inaudible] you need for beautiful Instagram photos is to make a high-quality original photo. First, be sure to wipe the camera on your smartphone. Seriously, this is an elementary rule that many people forget, but almost always on the camera, there are dust and our fingerprints, which can screw up the whole image. The phone model is not so important. Any relatively new smartphone shoots well, iPhone or Samsung, it doesn't matter at all. You can also pay attention to more budget Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Huawei, et cetera, which also make great shots. It's better to shoot with defused daylight, soft light. This light doesn't give hard shadows and doesn't emphasize the texture of the skin. Also, you can use a reflector or shoot on an overcast day. If you need to make a photo at noon, go in the shadow. Hard light can be an exciting part of the composition and express the atmosphere very well. But it will require specific skills from you. If you're just starting out, then I advice you to train with the soft light before starting to play with the hard light. Think in advance what and how you will shoot. Think about the composition, clothes and posing if you are shooting yourself or other people. The variety of images make your Instagram feed more harmonious. Change angles, shoot details, flat lace, nature, et cetera. Don't always use the same angle and pose. The hit on Instagram feed is a separate big topic and within this class we will not go into it. Learn to see trends and analyze them. For sure, many of us have a board on Pinterest or saved photos on Instagram of those images you like. Don't just store them, but analyze what exactly do you like about each or these images. Maybe color scheme, or an angle of shooting and pose of a model, editing, perhaps the composition. Lots of details or lack thereof, what do all these images have in common? Thinking this way you can understand your own preferences and what you need to use in your photos. The most important rule, practice as much as possible. Shoot something every day. Take a lot of photos in one location. Shoot the same composition from different angles. With time, you will start to see a good shot before you get your smart phone. 4. Basic editing: [MUSIC] So why do we need basic correction if we have filters? The main idea is that the filters will work correctly even if the source image has a very high quality and this is not always what we have. Basic editing helps us to correct overexposed dim and dark pictures without re-shooting them again. This basic correction will work with exposure, contrast, highlights, whites, blacks, temperature, and so on. It's better to know about each of them by example. So let's start. I don't use many applications to edit my photos. Firstly, the more applications you use in the picture, the worse the quality becomes. Secondly, three, five apps are absolutely enough to complete all the editing tasks. There is a list of my favorite apps. I do almost all the editing in Lightroom. My opinion, it is the most functionality app. There is an advanced pay version, but for the basic editing will be enough the free one. If you have Creative Cloud subscription on adobe.com, you will automatically have a full version. So open the photo in Lightroom and before we start, I have to say right away that there are no magic settings. Everything is very individual for each photo. Every time you have to try different options because our photos were taken in different conditions. That is why often the filters in pictures without basic correction look bad. They work the same way on every image, not taking into account many nuances. Go to the Light tab and select Exposure. Exposure is the illumination of the image. If the photo is too light, then we say it is overexposed and if it's too dark, then we say it is underexposed. If your Instagram feed is light, then the exposure should be increased and if it's dark and atmospheric, for example, then on the contrary, it is necessary to decrease. That's what will happen if you add too much exposure or reduce the exposure too much. Therefore, we use this function not in full force but only little. Move the slider to the right and see how the whole photo becomes lighter and the sky generally became white. To fix this, move the highlights to the left. This function changes only the lightest areas, the rest of the image doesn't change. Here, we see that the sky has become not so wide and we can even see some clouds. Also, we can add a little bit of contrast, something like that. Next, we see whites and shadow sliders. Shadows affect only the darkest areas in the image without affecting the light areas. If we start dragging shadow slider to the right, then the dark areas in the photo become lighter, and if we go to the left, the dark areas become dark and even more. Please pay attention to light areas such as the skies. They remain almost unchanged. Whites may collide areas lighter, and whites whiter. However, again, do not drag anything to the maximum because if we strongly pull shadows, then noises will come out and if whites, then you can get an over-lighted image. Just play with sliders for each photo. Here, I will only increase white slightly. Similarly, for blacks, use it neatly. Now we need to fix the white balance. To do this, go to the Color tab and select the Eyedropper, the circular piece, and we can move it around the image. For this feature to work correctly, you need to chose those areas that are supposed to be neutral. Because if you put it on a bright white area in the image, then the rest of the image may become too yellow or blue. I usually first try to fix white balance with the Eyedropper and if I don't like the result, I work with sliders manually. Below, there are temperature, tint, vibrance, and saturation sliders. Let's look at each of those options. Temperature. If we start to drag the slider, we see that warm shades add a yellow sub-tone to the colors and cool sub-tones and blue. Visually, the image becomes warmer or colder. I perhaps will make my photo a little warmer. Tint adds a green or pink undertone to the image. I like to add quite a bit of pink to my photos. Vibrance function automatically detects the brightest areas of the image and first pulls up all the other dull colors to that level and then the brighter ones while saturation increases or decreases the brightness to the whole image. The Effects tab is also handy. I mainly use Clarity and Dehaze functions. Both of these functions add clarity to the image. Their difference is that Dehaze itself determines which parts of the picture could be in a haze and correct them. But Clarity works on the whole image equally and increases its clarity. You can also add a bit of sharpness if you think that it's not enough. But then use a masking to avoid too much noise. Again, do not use anything at the maximum. Use all the functions very carefully. So here is our photo before and after the basic correction. As we can see, the picture already looks much better. Now you can apply filters and do some editing.[MUSIC] 5. What is the colorcorrection : The basis of any preset or editing style is a color correction. In general, this is changing of colors in their shades in the photo to achieve different effects. It's needed to understand, that there is no universal editing and so-called white or pink editing may look harmonious in one picture and absolutely horrible in another. This understanding will help you to work with pre-made, presets and filters, because you will see which options increase and which ones decrease and so that a preset, works correctly. Here for example, I edited the base photo in three different styles. Let's take a look at the main points. Our best friend in color correction is Color tab. Here in addition to adjusting temperature, tint, vibrancy and saturation, there is a super useful color mix function. It controls each color separately and we can adjust hue, saturation and luminance of each color. Let's see how it works. For example, in this photo, I want to make the shade of water more dark just to get the trendy Instagram effect. To do this in the color tab, select Color mix and choose Blue. I move the slider a little here to the left. Slightly remove the saturation, and then the little bit of luminance. Viola, we've got that trendy shade of water. You can also use this feature to make white more whiter reds and yellows, as is often the case. Go to color mix, choose yellow, decrease its saturation, almost to the maximum and add luminance. Let's look before and after. White became whiter. Another Lightroom feature I advice you to pay attention to is Split Tone. This feature allows adding a particular color to the light and dark areas of the image. In this way, we can create different effects on the photo and that's something in common to all our pictures without using filters. For example, you can add a cold tone to highlights. Like this was not very large saturation and a warm tone in shadows. Adjust the balance slider to decide the warmer or cooler look you like. Our photo has already changed noticeably. You can add pinkish stones to highlights and shadows, then adjust the balance slider. The image has become with a slightly pink tint. Now it can feed in pink shade Instagram feed. Before and after. If you had warm tones in highlights and shadows, then we will get editing with a little retro effect. Before and after. This feature will allow you to keep the overall style of your feet even with relatively different images. 6. White style editing : Let's add this photo in a trendy white style. Here is the image opened in the mobile version of light-room. This photo made on the imperfect light conditions, but we will fix it. Remake editing, thinking about we want to get a fairly light image as a result. Go to the light tab, here we slightly increase exposure. Add a little bit of contrast. Though the match doesn't look so flat and decrease highlights. Do you see how this curve appears? Then we increase shadows to make the photo brighter and slightly increase blacks and whites.[MUSIC] Well, the image already look much better. Next, go to the effects tab and add some clarity to the image. I slightly increase clarity. Use dehaze function just a little bit. We can, for example, add a bit of grain to the picture. Then we add sharpening and be sure to use masking in order not to get an externals. Then go to the color step. Here we slightly increase the temperature and adds the image a bit of pink tint. Of course decrease the saturation of the picture. We can see that the photo has already changed significantly. Next, we need to do our quiz, each color separately. As we want to have white editing, we need to reduce the saturation of almost all colors on the photo. First, we reduce the saturation of red and orange shades that are responsible for the skin tone[MUSIC] or something like that. Let's get rid of unnecessary yellow tint. To doing this, I slightly change it's tone, reduce the saturation and add a little bit of luminance. We also decrease the hue and saturation of green and increase the luminance to remove the shades of green from the trees and mountains. In my end, my exam look more natural. On the contrary, for the quartz blue. We increase the saturation and luminance. Now, to blue. I move the humor in the quartz, reduce saturation and reduce luminance. Now the sky and the water have a similar shade. There are no wider traits in the image. We can change nothing here. In the pink shade. I reduce saturation and slightly increase luminance. I already like how it looks. But let me show you another one useful feature. In the optic step. There is enabled lens correction function. Which can correct imperfections of the smartphones camera. Now we can compare the before and after [MUSIC] and one more time before and after. If you like your editing, you can easily create your own preset. To do this Go to the settings. Three dots in the right top corner. Select the create the style and print the name of the preset. I will name my preset. Click save. Now, you can use your preset on all your photos. You can select it in the preset stop user presets. But again, remember that any preset will not work equally well on different photos and therefore needs to be corrected. That's why we need to have an understanding of the basic principles of color correction. 7. Pink style editing : Here I have a typical Instagram photo, a hand with a glass of pink champagne on a beautiful background. Well, let's get to it in Instagram editing aligned with shades of pink. The original photo is quite dark because the light conditions at the time of the shooting [inaudible] and there was little time to take a picture. I take such photos for an example on purpose so you can understand the principle of editing itself. If you learn how to edit images with no ideal light, then you will have no problems with good source images. We start to make the photo brighter. Go to the "Light" tab, add exposure like this. Slightly reduce overall contrast. Then decrease highlights completely. Move shadow slider to the right and white slider to the left a little bit. Not to make the image over lighted. Also reduce blacks a little bit. In the effects tab with photo clarity, through clarity and the haze functions. But again, we do not use any parameters to the maximum. Then add a bit of sharpness and don't forget about masking. Go to the color tab and make the image warmer. Add some pink tint. Also reduce saturation of the image. In split tone to add the same subtle pink hue, add a slightly violet shade to highlights and reduce its saturation. In shadows, I will add a warm undertone with not high saturation. The balance will be something like this. Now, let's go through the colors in color mix option. We need to make a red tone more pink than red. Decrease its saturation to make the champagne pinker. We also can add a little luminance. Orange should be made less saturated so that the skin doesn't stand out so much. In yellow, I will also slightly change the hue, decrease saturation and decrease luminance. Greens will be made less yellow and less saturated and I want to make turquoise blue, bluer. I think more saturated. Then I tone the shade of blue into green, so that sky becomes similar shade with the water. Reduce saturation a little bit and reduce luminance. Okay, something like that. I won't touch violet shades, they have almost no effect here. But we will adjust the pink sakura to make it color to look like champagne. To do this, we will make hue to more reddish one, reduce saturation and luminance. Maybe now I want to make the image a little lighter, so I increase the exposure a bit. As I have already said, this is a process for each particular image, there are no universal rules here and often it's possible to decrease or increase something to infinity. The main thing is to stop in time. Yet I want to add vibrance and return saturation to zero and add a little more clarity. Look before and after, and one more time, before and after. 8. How to change the view outside the window : Now, we figure out the basics, and it's time for a little magic. Let's find out how to transfer to New York in a few minutes, for example. I took a rather dark photo taken against the light and even with an old model of a smartphone, but this is not a problem. The main thing is to choose a suitable image for the background. It should be similar in light conditions and scale. I found this photo of New York on unsplash.com, and I really liked. I will change the background in the free PicsArt app. It has a paid version without ads and with advanced functionality, but for our purposes, the free version will be more than enough. Open the photo in PicsArt app. Here, I've already made some basic correction in Lightroom. Now, select Add Photo function, select photo of New York. Remain with the picture transparent so that you can see where we put it and begin to enlarge it and try it on. Something like this. Now, select Erase function and gently just start to race unnecessary parts. Zoom in the photo for the most accurate correction. You can also adjust the size, transparency, and sharpness of the eraser. If you have erased too much somewhere, you can always bring this area back with the brush. Also, you shouldn't be super accurate around the edges because we will crop the picture anyway. Now, turn back the opacity of the photo and see how it looks. If everything's good, then click Apply button. Then crop the photo, then select Next, Save. Now, you can find the photo in your photo gallery. After, you can do any color correction you want in Lightroom. There, for example, I made white correction with shades of pink. 9. How to add additional details to the photo: Let me show you one more example how to make an image more instagramable, and get from a base photo like this. When I was shooting, I didn't have coffee and a suitable card at hand, it was only New Year's one, but this is not a problem. Now I will show you how to fix it. The original folder is initially quite good quality, and to begin with, I will slightly correct it in Lightroom. Increase Exposure a bit, add a little bit of Contrast, move Highlights to the left, make the Shadows lighter, increase Whites slightly, and decrease Blacks. In color clip, I will make the image a little colder and more pinkish. In the column mix, I remove the yellow tint, choose yellow and reduce its saturation almost to the maximum, and that luminance. In voila white can become white, and now I want to slightly reduce the saturation of the model skin color from the magazine's color so that the magazine doesn't stand out too much. The color of the skin almost always orange, so we change its tone a bit and reduce that saturation. In the Effects tab, add some clarity and the haze. Also, let's add some sharpness a bit. Save the photo and now we can add coffee and a cup. I want to use minimalist letters on a white background as a postcard. In such cases, it is good to use when shooting just a white solar sheet of paper postcard format in advance so that later you can put anything on it. But at the time of the shooting, I forgot about it. Now I will correct it in the Photoshop Fix app. Select the hidden tool, and start removing unnecessary details. By the way, the same function is in the Snapseed app, so we can choose any of these apps. Here it is. Now save the photo and open it in PicsArt app. Click Add Photo, choose My Lettering. I have it in PNG format, that is quite useful. I then pose it on the card. That's all. Now we start to work with the coffee. Everything is the same here, choose Add Photo, Edit Picture with coffee that is found on annspledge.com. Make it more transparent, place it so that it approximately matches with the cup and begin to erase unnecessary parts. Again, you can easily adjust the size and transparency of the brush. Don't worry if something doesn't manage to be edgily delighted. This will not be noticeable on Instagram. Here is the result. 10. How to change the color of clothes on the photo: Sometimes our closest didn't fit the style of our profiler though or for example, we want to edge at the photo in the same style and we need some specific color in the picture. As an example, let's change the color of the sweet shot in the photo. Open the photo in Photoshop fix, select pane tool, assigned menu appears in which we can adjust the size, hardness, opacity, and color of brush. Click on the color and there is a color wheel in which reach we can chose any color. I will take, for example, such [inaudible]. Although we can change the size of the brush, increase and decrease it and we begin to paint. [MUSIC] If some way you got out of the border and that's okay. This can be fixed with the help of the restore function. Here you can also change the size, hardness, and the positive. [MUSIC] Here is the result. [MUSIC] Also, a similar function isn't the Pixar app, but it doesn't always work correctly, but sometimes it can be useful. I will show an example. Open the photo in pixel, select effects, colors, color replace, chose the colors that you need to replace with the slider and chose new color, and the color automatically become renewed. As we can see, not all area of the color is replaced correctly. This feature is useful when you need to replace a large area with even vibrant color. I often use this function as the first stage and therefore in Photoshop fix menu, I'm using the pen tool I paint all the remaining areas.[MUSIC] 11. How to look slimmer : Sometimes we want to look a bit slimmer in the photos than in live, and that's normal. The proportions of the figure can always be corrected in the apps. The main thing is not to overdo in order not to look unnatural. In this photo in the pool before it's noticeable that someone ate too much pizza that summer. So now I will fix it. To do this, open the photo in Photoshop Fix. Zoom in a little bit, choose liquefy. Well, the menu on the right again appears with which we can adjust the size of the brush. We begin carefully change places in which we want to reduce the unnecessary volume. Again, the main thing is not to overdo it because the result will not be natural and the background can't change too. So let's look before and after. Also, we can add volume, for example, increase the chest part or the volume of the hair. So which which will swell, adjust the size of the brush, direct it to those places that we want to increase and add volume the seat. For me such volume is unnatural and I don't like how it looks. So I will put everything back. But sometime this function can be useful. Similar functions are in the Facetune2 app. If you like it more, you can use it. 12. How to remove skin deffects : None of us is perfect and sometimes there is a need to remove any defects from the skin on the photo. Let see how to do it, open the photo in Photoshop fix, select Healing, Spot heal, again with the help of the right menu, you can adjust the size and hardness of a brush and edit some red ninc, unevenness soft skin tone, pimples wanes, and so on. If we see that the defect has been replaced by the wrong area of the skin, refers to paint over it. Select the page function and click on that area of skin from which we want to copy. Well, and their results suites me and now we need to flatten layers. Dysfunction merges the layers into one and all our next changes will not affect this. Now, we can make the skin tone more even and for base go to smooth and begin to paint all the areas of skin we want to correct. This function if we use the full capacity, gives a very unnatural affect. The face becomes like a porcelain doll, there were days where we'll reduce the capacity of the effect and a little more work with it. Well, now everything is fine. Maybe I'll be back in a spot heal and remove a small defect from the forehead. We have slightly corrected the photo, removed not significant defects while the face remained alive. Back in Photoshop fix, if you go to the liquefy section, right here you can find face recognition function, which allows you to change the proportions of the face, cheek, jaw line and chin. There you see it. If you wish, you can play with this function and make your face look thinner for example. Another application that can help with editing is free you cam make up app which allows you to make a virtual makeup on the photo. Opens select for two makeup, selects a desired photo and immediately see some nightmare. But don't worry, the application automatically applied some of pre-made makeup options. Just cancel this section and go to the face step. Here we see that the results are as smoother functions similar to photoshop fix. It supplied automatically to the entire face and you can also adjust the intensity of this effect. In the foundation tab you can play and try on different versions of foundations. Again, the force of all effects can be adjusted. In the blush tab, you can add a blush of various shapes. In the control tab you can perform face sculpture, there are also many different options. You can also add a highlighter and the face shape and function allows you to make a face narrower or wider. Nose enhance visually, makes the nose tighter. Blemish removes pimples with one touch and shine removal makes a face more math. In the eye tab you can play with different options of eyeliner and mascara. The main seemed to use all the effects a little bit otherwise the result will be very unnatural and not attractive. There is also an option to add eye shadow but in my opinion, this function gives an unnatural result. Eye bag allows you to adjust the area under the eyes and the eye color feature even allows you to change the color of your eyes if desired. Brightness function makes the eyes brighter. In the mouse tab, you can feel different shades and textures of lipstick and whiten your teeth. Here I perhaps we'll leave everything as it is, and here is my before and after. The main thing when you working in with such apps is to be careful and use all the functions of the minimum, then the result will be natural and attractive. 13. How to remove objects : Usually we don't have an opportunity to find the perfect place to take pictures. Often there are strangers, some other objects and much more. This is not a reason you don't take photos in a beautiful place. I will show you how to remove the other objects in the picture. Unnecessary objects can be deleted in many apps. I don't like to use many apps. I usually use Photoshop Fix from our complex objects because it contains the Clone Stamp Function which allows to draw some objects. Here, for example, I deleted people in the background and painted the fence. Or I use Snapseed if I need to remove some small objects on a background. For example, the head of the floating person in the water in the sea or some skin defects for example. Let's remove the tattoo from my hand in Snapseed. Here is my image opened in Snapseed. Now select the hidden function, zoom in and just paint over it. That's all. We have clean skin. Here is before and after. Now the more complicated example where the problem cannot be solved so quickly. Here we'll need Photoshop Fix. When I took this photo, I chose a place without people. This place was the only one and some part of the ship were in the photo. I don't know how it goes to be honest. Go to hidden, selects Spot Heal and zoom in and begin to paint over. [MUSIC]. Something like that. Next, let's remove these defects on the floor, they are too noticeable. [MUSIC]. Now, this thing, I also don't need it in the photo. Let's try to get rid of it with the help of the same Spot Heal. This is usually not a very fast process. You have to adjust some places several times. I show you a live process so that you don't have the illusion this happens literally from the one attempt in five seconds. I also use the Patch Function to select the place from which to copy the pixels. [MUSIC]. The select Clone Stamp Function and correct the edge of the ship deck. Reduce size of the brush where it's necessary and carefully correct it. [MUSIC] Zoom out photo to understand how it looks in vent. Here it is. Now using the Restore Function I will put my foot back. Now I want to remove these shadows from their railings so that it doesn't take too much attention to themselves. I'll try to do it again with Spot Heal. Here I use the Patch Function. It's very handy. Don't forget that now we have a very close photo and you can see all the nuances but when we look at the whole picture after editing in Instagram, all these little things, no one we'll notice. [MUSIC]. Now I want to [inaudible] floor itself more [inaudible]. Again, with my favorite Spot Heal. [MUSIC]. Something like that. Frankly, it's not very convenient to do this on the phone. On phone a finger can jump off. [MUSIC]. Here is my final result. We can continue to improve every millimeter of the photo to infinity but for our purposes it will be just a waste of time. Here is the before and after. [MUSIC]. 14. Final thoughts : So as you see, there is no magic in creating eye-catching Instagram photos, and now you know some tips, and tricks to polish your Instagram account. Practice everyday. Analyze someone else's editing style, and eye-catchy photos to understand exactly how this is done. Don't forget about a good source image. Don't compare your beginning with someone else's middle. All the blog is started with something too, and everything will turn out. Thank you for your attention, and of course for your positive reviews. See you in the next class.