Mobile Photo Editing for Beginners: Bring Your Pictures To Life With Snapseed

1. Intro: Traveling is the number one choice of those who finally managed some time off work. But going through all the pictures and editing them on the way back can be really daunting task, but it doesn't need to be. In this class, I'll help to dig through pictures from a past trip or vacation that can be edited back to life in a very quickly and efficient way directly on your smartphone. I'm Andrey photographer and filmmaker, and I've been traveling the world for five years now shooting for brands, and tourism agencies. I already offered some courses and workshops in the North of Italy. When I'm going online. For this class, you don't need to know anything about photography or editing. As I'll guide, you step-by-step through all the tools and concepts that makes the biggest difference overall. By the end, I'll give you some bonus ideas in case you're feeling fancy. Our goal here is to help you identify photos with a lot of potential and dominant [inaudible] that you can use anywhere you are, whenever you have five minutes to spare in your smartphone in your hands. Hopefully it will also help you take better pictures next time, making your life easier when you're editing or giving you more options. So are you ready? Let's begin. 2. The Project: Welcome, I'm really glad to see you decided to take this course. Right now I'm going to explain about the project. The idea is you're going to pick three different pictures from the same trip you've made. It should be one portrait, one landscape, and one detail shot. Portraits and landscape are more or less intuitive. But detail shot, you could choose maybe a picture of a plate and a place you really like to eat or if you've been to any local market, fruit market, in which you could see something that is really specific to that place, you can choose that picture. The idea is with these three, you're going make a little story about the trip you've made. In the next lesson, I'm going to tell you how to choose those pictures, but don't worry about it right now. Regarding the classes, the structure is like this. You're going to be able to watch class by class, and the further you go, the more things you're going to learn and the more refined your edit is going to be. You don't need to watch all of them to edit your picture. You can go as far as you'd like, but I'd really recommend that you go through the end. It can seem a little bit overwhelming in the beginning and too many things to think of when you're editing, but I can assure you after you've done it a couple of times, it becomes natural. If you take maybe 10,15 minutes to edit your first picture right now, the next ones you're going to take maybe five, three then it's going to be super quickly to do and you're already going to think about it when you're taking the pictures, which is like the ultimate goal of this class. This is how I want you to go about this class. I want you to edit your pictures along with me. You can pick one of them and while you watch the classes, in between you're going to apply it right away. It's going to be much easier for you if you do it this way. This way when you reach the end of this class, you're going to have one of your pictures edited already. Then it's going to be much easier for you to get the other two and edit them right away and then your project is ready. In the next lesson, I'm going to teach you how to choose the picture. Sounds exciting. So let's do it. Let's dive into the next lesson. Choose your pictures. 3. Choosing Your Pics: Now it's time for you to choose your pictures. As I said before, you're going to pick one landscape, one portrait, and one detail shot. Throughout the course, you're going to learn how to edit: perspective, light, shadows, highlights, contrast, colors, and much more. Some of these may sound a little bit weird or you may not understand it this time, but don't worry if you don't even know what some of these mean right now. In each class we're going to learn in one of these, and you're going to apply it right away so you're going to be able to understand it. Now I need to tell you which kind of pictures you should avoid, either because they require an advanced level of editing that we're not going to cover in this course or because they have some problem that should have been fixed in camera while taking the picture and right now, it's going to be so difficult to fix it or even impossible. These are totally blown out or totally dark pictures but these don't trust your guts right yet, because you see how an editing might be impossible still to recovering: pictures in which the person is cut in a way that is not recognizable, pictures in which the subject of the photo is totally out-of-focus or blurry because of movement or pictures in which the subject is blinking or in a weird poles or something like that but if you want to make it as a joke, become [inaudible]. What things to choose then? You just have to choose the ones you're more sentimental about it. These are going to work the best, even if they look right now that it's impossible to recover, you can try some of them. Bonus tip for you: maybe you're going to find that the picture you wanted the most recovered is actually within the category of a no-go picture that I just listed, don't worry quite yet, choose one of these to make it like a fourth bonus picture in your project and then try to apply the techniques that I'm going to teach you and see how it comes out, include it in your project if the other tree and make it clear in the project that that's the one that you wanted to recover, but found it too difficult or maybe even impossible to edit with the techniques that I taught you here, then I'll give you like a special look into it and I'm going to recommend you. What else can you do with the techniques you already learn? What I'm going to recommend is some glasses or articles that you can read to solve specific problems about them [inaudible] , you might say. Next class we are going to begin editing , good luck finding your pictures. 4. Getting Ready: For this class, we're going to use synapsid. It's an app from Google. It's totally free and it's available for iPhones or Android phones. There are many other apps in the market that do similar things, but I really recommend to use a synapsid right now because it's the one that I'm going to be using and it's going to be much easier for you to learn the techniques without having to worry how to access some function in a different kind of app. Just follow with it right now, learn it, and then later you can research some other apps and try them out. Other two very famous apps are VSCO and Lightroom Mobile. Personally, I prefer Lightroom Mobile, but I prefer the paid version. For this one right now, let's just use a really powerful app. There are many apps also that you can use to add some effects to your picture or to delete something unwanted in the middle, like that retouched or less distortion. There are really good, but let's leave it for the end. In the sequence, and it may sound a little bit obvious, but there are some tricks to it. You're going to need the files in your phone to be able to edit them. If you took them already of your phone, okay, you're good to go but if the files are on your computer, you should definitely avoid sending them over to your phone by WhatsApp, Messenger or any other of these apps because they really compact the picture and you lose detail. I really recommend it to press the files over to your phone, either using a cable, AirDrop, Bluetooth, or using some storage services like Dropbox or Google Drive. These are going to guarantee that your files are in maximum quality. Now a bonus tip for a little bit more advanced users in case you took your pictures with a camera that is capable of taking raw pictures, please use it instead of using the JPEG version, because the raw version has a lot more detail and it's much easier to edit. If it's not your case, don't worry about it right now. Just get your pictures and phone and will begin. 5. Crop, Angle and Perspective: All right guys, so finally, this is going to be the first editing lesson. By now you've chosen already are three pictures to edit and you're going to pick one of them as I suggested before, I think, you should take the landscape one, if it has some person or someone in the picture, it's fine also it's even better. Let's open it up on snap scene and begin editing. In this first one, we're going to focus on composition. It means we're going to cut the picture. We're going to make it look level. We're going to do everything that could have been done before in camera. But sometimes it's really difficult to do. Even professionals have to best through this part of editing after they've taken some pictures as it's almost impossible to get everything perfectly right on camera when you're taking the pictures. Let's dive right into Snap scene. I'm going to open it up in here now. I've got snap scene here. I'm going to open it up. Then it opens up the screen where you can just tap it and it's that I open the folders in your phone so you have to find where you saved your pictures. In my case, there's a skill share folder and I have the three pictures that I've chosen. I'm going to open the first one and that's the one I'm going to edit along with you, which is this landscape picture. Well, the first thing you can notice about this picture is that it's a bit too dark. You can't really see me well, we can't really recognize if it's me or there's another person also in the picture. By looking at the horizon and specially beaches that have the sea on them where the horizon should be totally flat and totally level is where you can see really perfectly that it's not really bright. We're going to fix composition. We're going to think about how do we want this picture right now, and we're going to fix it. On snap scene, you have these three menus down here and you're going go for the tools. There are many, many options here, but don't worry, we're not going to use most of them. Many of them are just like filters and things that you can apply, that I don't really recommend you using it. They're going to give your pictures and outdated look. The first option we're going to use here is the rotate function. It's on the second row and it's the second item here called the rotate. Then it opens up this way. In general, snaps scene works like this. You can just move your fingers up and down, left or right. You're going to change the parameters or choose the parameters you want to change. In this situation here on the rotate menu, you can do just like left and right, and you're going to see the picture rotating already. All you going to do here is just like rotate it. This grid appears on the picture to make it easier for you. You can just try more or less to make the level of the sea match that first line over there, this in my case. But if you're doing any other picture or specially when it doesn't have the sea or something that you know, should the level, you just have to pay attention, maybe more to the character, to the person in the picture, or pay attention to the lines in general. Sometimes pictures can be a little bit of an illusion somehow. If it looks right to you, instead of look right to most people and sometimes looking right doesn't exactly mean that it's leveled, but it just feels right. It should be enough. No problem. In my case, I'm happy about this, it looks pretty nice. Secondly, you're going to pay attention to is the perspective. Perspective is here on the second row is the third item. This can be a little bit confusing at first, because they have so many options. The thing here is, if you took a picture and really wanted it to be symmetric or it can be a little bit difficult to have it perfectly in camera so you can fix it later, especially if you're doing architecture pictures. For example, when the tilt, you can make it go left and right like this. In my case, I don't think we need it so it's fine. Other option you can do is rotate and then just going to go like this. The other one is the scale in which you're going to be able to stretch this picture up and down. The other one is the free in which you can just grab the coordinates. It's really going to look like you're touching paper somehow. It just like moving it along until it looks somehow symmetrical or right for you. I don't really recommend it to do this if you have a person and the picture, because it can really distort the person. If it's mainly architecture pictures in which you want it to be symmetrical or flat onto a wall, you can use this tool. In my case, I'm not going to apply any of these. Next one is going to be the crop tool. One thing to pay attention here is there are many, many ways to crop an image and there is no exactly right way to do it really depends on the picture you have in your hands. There are many, many different rules of composition that you can use for this. The one that I'm using in this particular picture is the rule of thirds. This means dividing the image into thirds, either vertically and horizontally, and trying to position the most important subject of the picture exactly where the lines meet. In this case, I'm on the bottom right corner and there is also the mountains on the back. It looks really natural, but there are many others that you can use. You really have to go according to the picture you have in your hands. It could be like a minimalistic approach in which you have the subject really small and the corner or on the bottom part of the picture and a lot of negative space above it, but for example, you could just have it centered like I am right now. There are many other options, but I would totally recommend right now to begin with centered or rule of thirds, it's going to work fine for most of the pictures. For now, just stick to this tool. In the crop tool, you're going to be able to choose the dimensions of your picture. It can be free. You can go for square. It's just going to show you already the part that is brighter on the picture is the one that is going to be the final cut after you apply this crop. Then you can choose many different dimensions here. One thing to notice here is if you're doing this for Instagram posts, you're probably looking for the five by four. Then you can rotate it and it's going to be the perfect dimension posted on Instagram. If you want to use it for Instagram stories, you going to look for the 16 by nine, which is a little bit longer, exactly the dimensions of most cell phones out there. If your idea is to print this picture the normal dimensions, the most simple ones are 10 by 15. You should definitely use three by two which is going to be the perfect dimension for that, which is also the dimension in which I shot this picture. If I were to apply for even part for Instagram, it could work also. If you just rest this curved line here, it's going to switch it to vertical. Actually it matches quite well the mountain and the back and me and all the path there. I might as well use it like this to make it easier to see also. Let's keep it as it is right now it looks level. The crop is pretty nice and we have the perspective. It's good to go. Let's go for the next class. 6. Light and Shadow: In this class we're going to focus about light. I think these two classes, composition and light, are the most important of all, and that's why they're right in the beginning. These are going to totally change your picture. Maybe even only with these two, you're going to be able to save your pictures. Some they just look lost, now they're going to pop up again. Light can be really difficult especially for not using a professional camera, or you don't know how to use it. You're always going to count on the camera trying to understand what's around you, and trying to understand why do you want to photograph. You can never be sure that it really got it right, or there are some situations that even professionals, they have to edit the pictures later because it's just impossible to get it right in camera, so let me teach you some tricks about it. Back to Snap sit here you're going to click on tools again, and this time we're going to go to the first option in the menu, which is tune image. As usual looks like there's nothing here to edit or no options or no menu, but it's the same idea. You just have to go up and down, and then your menu than a pop up. You have many options here. The most important ones for light are the first one called brightness, and two other ones that are a little bit lower, which are called highlights and shadows. It's very simple. Brightness changes the overall brightness of the picture. If it's too dark, you got to move it right and it's going to go brighter. Highlights and shadows, they are a separation of brightness. Whatever you do to highlight will only change the brightest parts of the picture, and whatever you do to shadows, it's going to change all the darkest parts of the picture. This is really useful, especially when you have pictures in places. They have some really dark spots and some really bright ones. For example, here in the city that I live, there are some alleyways. The streets are really narrow, so what it means is that the sun almost never gets to the bottom of the alleys. You usually have a really bright spot on the top where the sun is actually heating on the buildings, and then on the bottom part, it's much darker. If you want to take a picture that actually renders both really well, it's almost impossible. You have to take one that gets the details more or less, it's an average. Then you rise up the shadows a little bit to recover those details and you put the highlights a little bit down not to overexpose the sky. It can seem a little bit strange right now, but let's try to do it in this picture and let's see how it looks. Let's begin with the highlights. Let's go left and right, and look, what you can see is the brightest parts of this picture are the sky above here, you can see that it really changes when you're changing the highlights, and also, you can see the stone right below my feet here. You can see how it changes because there's a really strong reflection from the sun there. The trick here is if you have some clouds in the sky, you're going to go a little bit lower so that you recover the details on it. Usually they're going to be blown out, so you have to put it a little bit down. In this case, since I don't have them and the sky looks a little bit too dark, I'm going to pump the highlights a little bit up. Let's go to the shadows. If I go left, you can see mostly what's been affected is the sea and especially on the left side of the mountain because it's more in the shadow than on the light part, so you can rise it up to really recover those details over there. See how it was before and see how far can I go with the dark part here, and see how much I can bring it back, almost leveling out with the part on the light. We don't want to make it look fake, as like obviously the left part should be a little bit darker than the one on the right, so you don't want to overdo it, which is going to look strange, but it can try to recover a little bit and make it look more nice and more natural, this looks enough. Now let's go the overall brightness. If you pull it right here, look, everything's going to be pulled up, and if I go to the left, everything's going to be much darker, so it is. Let's go to a point in which just looks pretty natural. I think about here is nice. There's really no exact formula for this, you just have to go with your feeling, and see if it looks nice for you or not. Just be careful not to overdo it. Usually if you have to go past this lines here, on the top and as you can see, usually means that you are going too far. Try to stick within these two lines, either lower or above, and should be fine, so I stick mine around here, it's fine. In pure world that if you're editing a raw picture, you can go much farther than one can go with just a JPEG Beecher, but also don't go too far. In the next lesson we're going to talk about the color temperature. 7. White Balance: Now let's talk about color temperature. This is an option that really changes the mood of the picture. Color temperature means that you're going to choose if your picture is going to go towards the blue side or the yellow side. But it doesn't mean only color. This also affects the mood of the picture. If I go towards the blue side of it, people will looking at the picture to feel somehow colder, to feel somehow that it's like before or after sunset. It's a totally different mood. If you go towards the yellow part, you are expressing a more warm mood. It means more like before sunset or right after sunrise, or warmer feelings. You'd have to make your picture somehow match it. You can't really go with, for example, in my picture here, it's like a beach or like somehow summer mood or something like that. If I really go towards blue and I'll show you here, you can go to Tools, then I just have go to an image again, then you're going to have the option of warmth. It's the last option on the menu. Let's go towards the left, and you're going to begin seeing that the whole picture begins to turn blue. This is the limit. It's obviously too much. Then if you go to the right, it begins looking much, much warmer. But then you have to be really careful about something here, either blue or yellow. It's like overlaying the picture, so it's going to affect the other colors as well. For example, if I go too far with the yellow and the sea is blue, you can see that it's actually now turning to green. It's mixing the colors. You can't go too far with this. I'll just warm it up a little bit and then it's going to look fine. Here's my recommendation for you. If you're dealing with a picture that's totally on summer during the day, you'd probably want to go a little bit to the right side, a little bit to warmer tones. But if you're dealing with a picture that is right after sunset or before sunrise, or if it's more wintry or something like that, you probably want to go a little bit to the left, but don't overdo it. Now I have a second recommendation for you. Usually cameras and cell phones, they have something called auto white balance. That means that the color temperature, what we just changed, is going to be changed accordingly by the camera itself. In the case that you didn't have it set and you took a picture inside some place in which there were artificial lights, usually they are going toward the blue or they're really yellow incandescent lights. You need to compensate for that. Probably you might have some features in which you took in a café or a bar or something like that, in which, for example, the lights were really yellow, and then everyone you can see by the skin tones they look really, really yellow. Here's the moment in which you're going to fix that. You are going to go in the opposite way until it looks natural. There's no specific number you should look for. You go really slowly until you find that color tones, especially of the skin to look right. Then it's going to be enough. The second way of changing the color temperature of a picture is coming to white balance. Then you're going to be in this menu where you can choose either temperature, which is more or less similar to the warmth that we changed to before. There's also tint. Tint goes from green to magenta. You're going to see how these two affect each other. What we're going to do here is, either you can change them manually, just scroll left and right and it's going to go from blue to yellow. Or you can go on tint, and you're going to go from left, which is totally green, until right, which is really, really magenta. The other option you have in here that is really interesting is that there's these drop picker, and then what you're going to do is scroll it around. You can see what matters here is what's in the middle, the red cross. What you're going to find is some gray area in which, for example, my shirt is gray here. If I put it over there, it actually makes the overall of picture look pretty nice. It's going to be fine like this. You can just accept it as it as it is and that's it. Then you can check going up and down what it did. For example, if you put the temperature lower or a little bit and the tint also little bit lower. Sometimes it's almost unnoticeable, but sometimes it's really, really going to fix your picture. Give it a try. Let's talk about the colors. 8. Contrast: Now, we're going to talk about contrast. What it means is, how black your blacks are going to be and how white your whites are going to be. This may sound a little bit strange right now, after all, black is black and white is white. That's the general conception of it, but actually it's not like that for photography. Your blacks can go lighter a little bit and then they're going to turn into dark grays, middle grays, light grays, until they turn white and the opposite with the whites. You can just turn them up a little bit and then they may begin turning into light grays, medium grays, dark until they turn into black. You can see it here in the screen. Okay, so what is the change in the picture? It changes totally the look of the picture and the vibe of it. Especially if you are just traveling around and relaxing, what happens the most is, you just wake up in a new place and you just want to explore. But you don't really think about going to the places to take pictures in the best time of the day, which is usually after sunrise or a little bit before sunset, when the sun is a little bit lower and the light is nicer. Usually what happens is people take a lot of pictures during the mid-day time more or less in which the sun is really harsh and it's really, really contrasted. You're going to see really dark shadows and really bright highlights. The contrast is where you're going to fix a little bit of that and then you're going to give also a little bit of a feeling to the picture. Let's try to do it right now in this picture here. There are two ways in which you can change the contrast and I'm going to show you both of them. One is very simple, the other one is a little bit more advanced. You're going to try both. Okay. We're here still in this first option of the menu. You're just going to have to scroll up and down and the second one is called contrast, all right? Now if you go left, you're going to see that everything begins to look a little bit of gray. Then if you go right, you're going to see that everything begins to look much, much harder. Okay, so obviously, it's the same concept as the other ones. You shouldn't go too far with this and this is where the sun was quite high. You can see this by the shadows, the real shadows in the picture. You can see that they're not exactly like below me, for example, they're a little bit to the side. That means there's somehow an angle to the light. But what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to put it down a little bit of the contrast. Make it look a little bit more mild. Okay, it looks nice like this, it's fine. My recommendation for you here is if you did a shot that was around mid-day time, so really harsh light, just pull down the contrast a little bit. The opposite, if you did it more on a softer light moment of the day so just bump it up a little bit. This is not a room. You're going to play with it and you going to feel how it affects the picture. Okay, so for the second style of changing the contrast in this, you're going to go to Tools and then to Curves. Okay, so now we've opened this up. What it means is the left part of this square are the shadows and the right part are the highlights. If I pulled this dot up here, means that I'm taking the contrast down from the shadow parts and if I move this one on the right here, it means that I'm affecting the highlights. What you can do is you can actually create some other dots on this line and affect specific parts of it. For example, if I'm changing this one in the middle here, I'm changing only the mid tones. Only the ones that are not really bright or not really dark, just like the middle of it. This way you have much more control over what you want to do. For example, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to deep contrast a little bit. The darker part. Contrast a little bit more. The highlights. Just put it down here a little bit and I'm just going to make this S curve really mild here. You can just go up and down with this dots and see where there are affecting the picture and where you should move it to until you're satisfied with it. So for me, it looks fine like this. Look what happens if the shadows on this left part on this left rock, for example, when I bump it up a lot, look, it's becoming totally gray, gray, gray until it loses completely. It just goes away. There is a limit here. This looks like a real vintage, somehow filtered image. But this actually looks quite nice. I think I'm going to leave it as it is right now and you're going to see that there is an option down here in which you can actually change specific colors, also. It's good for you to know that they exist here already. If you want to change the picture, if you think it's too green or too blue or too red, you can have the control here also of each one. The one that we are changing here right now is the RGB one, which means you are changing all the colors at the same time, not a specific one. If you are going to doubt where to go with the line, you can just click on this small booklet on the right and then it's going to offer you some pre-made filters. What you can do here is you can just select one of these, see how it changes the picture and then adapt more or less what you like. Okay, so this is how far we've been with this picture already. It looks pretty nice. All right, on to the next lesson. 9. Colors: Let's talk a little bit about colors now. This is a very sensitive topic. Usually people don't want to edit the colors in their picture because they don't want it to look fake or they want it to look just like reality. But the thing is, whenever you take a picture, the camera is interpreting the light in the way that it can in that moment, so colors can actually be a little bit off. Another thing that really matters here is that depending on the kind of phone or the kind of camera you have, the camera itself already applies its colors to it. You might like it more in a way or more in another. Actually in post production, you can bring them back to what you want it to be or actually bring them back to what they were in reality. If you want to develop your style, it's like a painting. You can actually change the colors the way you want. Snapseed doesn't offer a really well controlled change of colors like for example, in [inaudible] Mobile, in which you can change the hue of each different color going towards one side or the other or maybe change the saturation of each color separately and also change the brightness of it. Going brighter or darker on each specific color. On Snapseed you're going to have three different ways of changing it. First one, you've already done, which is the white balance. You're going to make the picture look more blue or more yellow, colder or warmer. The second option you saw already but we didn't do anything about it, it's the curves. Let's go back there and I'll sure you're a little bit how it changes the picture. Clicking the small lens icon here, you can just choose red, green or blue. Let's begin by blue. I'll just grab the lower left part which are the shadows and then I'll just pump it up here and then you see that the picture is actually turning more blue. Then if I turn it right, it's actually turning green. Every dot in the curve that I create is actually going to make the same. It's going to make it go towards blue or the green area. I'll just pump it up a little bit to make it a little bit more blue like this not as green as it was. It's fine. The other options I have are green and red. Let's try green. Let's see what it affects. If you pump it up, it's the same. It just goes more with the color that I've selected. In this case, if you go right, it's actually going to go towards more blue and it goes more to magenta. I don't want to change this, I don't want it to be more green or more magenta in anyway. I'm just going to leave the green one as it is. Let's try the red one. Here's the same idea. If I pump it up, it's actually going to go more red. If it put it right, it's going to go more towards the green area. You just have to select here how far you want to go. If I pump it up a little bit here, I might create something, let's see, like if you create something in the middle, let's see how it goes. Maybe we can put a little bit more red or magenta here on highlights. It looks pretty good. This is original picture and this is our picture so far. Perfect. The main way of changing the colors here in snapseed is actually go into the tune image again and then you have the option of saturation. Saturation is going to change the overall colors in the picture. If you slide it left, it's going to go to black and white which means not saturated colors at all. If you go to the right, you have this really punchy colors even too much. What I'd like to do is especially when I have these shots that were made like bringing harsh light, is to put down a little bit the saturation without making anything colorless or without life but not making it look too saturated. I really like it like this, for example. It's fine. We're good to go. One more way to do it and I'm going to explain more in the next lesson is a selective way. In the selective tool what's happening is you click in a point and then snapseed selects all the area around it that it comprehends for the same group more or less. To understand it better, let's just go to the first option in this menu. Scroll up and down and then go to brightness. Then pump it up all the way to the right. Now you can see all the area that was changing is the area that snapseed is considering being part of that group. Whatever you're changing this manual with this four options is going to affect only this area. Let's say for example, I'm going to leave it a little bit brighter in that area there. I'm going to go up the saturation just a tiny bit down. That's done. Then I can do the same for any other spot in this picture. Let's say for example, let's click the plus here. This area here. Let's do the same. Brightness up. Then look, it's considering all the water right around that rock. You can just like bump it up a little bit over there and then maybe I'll just do the same. I just desaturate it a little bit. If you go all the way, it's actually going to be black and white. Like this, that's fine. Then one thing that I really like to do is that I don't really like my greens on the pictures to be really saturated. For example, here is selecting all the leaves and plants all around that area. What I'm going to do here is I'm just going to get the saturation and put it down a little bit. Let's see with the contrast will happens. That looks totally bad. Both down a little bit and then I'm going to do the same for this area here on the mountain. Then look how it selects perfectly all around that mountain. I just grabbed saturation, pull it down. Contrast, pull it down also. Look how much it changes already. One more detail about colors here is that some colors really call attention in a picture depending on the other colors around it. In my case for example, most of the colors in the picture are blue or green and then there's one person with a red backpack and they really cause attention unnecessarily. What I'm going to do is, you can just scroll around the picture here. Don't let your fingers go of this frame and put the red mark right over whatever you want to change. In my case, the red backpack. You can see that there's now this red circle right around it. It's perfectly selected. Just leave it there and then let's go for the saturation. We can just bring it down. Now if you look at it, boom! The red backpack is now totally without color. That's a really good trick to use also if you have someone really standing out and it's not you in the picture. By now your picture should be looking pretty nice already but I really recommend it to go a little bit further now. In the next class we are going to talk about more selective tools and one really interesting tool snapseed has called masking. You're going to be able to change whatever you want in every individual part of the picture. If there's one thing standing out too much, you're going to be able to change them. Let's go. 10. Selective Editing: By now your picture should look pretty nice already. We're going to go a little bit deeper into more selective tools, changing little parts of the picture that can look much nicer if they're treated individually. There are some ways to go about it. One of them is the way that we did in the previous lesson in which we just changed the color and the saturation of some specific areas. There are some other ways to do it. A really interesting one is the one that I'm going to show you here right now. You can come to Tools and then you can go to Brush. With the brush tool, you're going to have four different options. Dodge and burn, and exposure. At first sight, they can look really, really similar. For now, I really recommend that you use just the exposure one. Temperature, which is what we changed to red like blue or warmer tones, you're going to be able to apply it individually to wherever you pass your finger over, not in the overall picture. The last one which is saturation. You're going to be able to do more or less likely to do that with the selective tool, but just putting a point over. But in this method, you are going to be able to choose yourself exactly where you want it to be applied. All right. For this example, let's use the exposure. You're going to see that in the bottom here, you have an arrow down and an arrow up. What it means is, if you just go down, you can see that it goes to minus 1, minus 0.7, 3, eraser, and then up. The higher goal, the strongest is going to be the exposure where you press your finger over. If you put it down like to minus 1, for example, it's going to be much darker. If you put it into zero, it's going to just erase whatever you did. For example, let's just put it over one and I'm going to try to make it a little bit brighter the way that you can walk here. See. It's maybe too much, but you can see that it just applied it over where I pressed my finger over. It's a really interesting tool. If it's too much, let's erase this. You can press your finger over and erase it. I'm going to choose a more mild way of doing it. Let's say 0.3 and then slowly paint your finger over it. All right. You can see the small icon on the upper right corner of the screen actually shows the before and after. It is not a big change. But in editing, it is exactly like this. The small changes you do, they stack over each other. When you look in the final picture and you do exactly this to see the previous, like the first one where you started, it's totally another picture. Really try to do it in some place and it's going to look really cool. One other thing that I'm going to try to do is brighten myself up a little bit. Let's zoom in. You can do it by using both of your fingers together. It's like swipe over really slowly and just brighten it up a little bit. It's not much, but it's very significant. It looks pretty nice. One other suggestion that I can give you is if you get the brightest parts of the feature and try to make them a little bit brighter, like for example, this part here. You can even put it a little bit more. It looks really nice. Now I'm going to teach you a little bit more advanced tool in Snapseed. The thing is, you can actually change any of the parameters within the app locally. But the thing is, you have to apply it over the whole image and then go back to another menu and mask it out. I'll show you so it looks a little bit simpler. What we're going to do is, we're going to come here to the curves and just apply a blue curve. Just bump it up until the sea looks more or less bright. But we're not going to apply it to everything. Let's apply it right now as it is. Let's apply to the whole picture, also over the mountains, and everything, which is not what we want. Now, you're going to click on the stop icon here in the first page, which actually has some layers and a left arrow, which means you can undo anything that you did before or you can view edits. Here, there's a list of everything you've done and the curves, which is the last thing we did. If you click left, you have three options. You can delete. You can edit selectively, or you can readjust the sliders. In this case, let's go to the middle one, which is this brush. Now, you can see that the effect is not applied here anymore. It's only going to be applied to whatever you press your finger over. If you have this little eye here on the corner selected, you're going to see red being painted over, but this is not the color being applied. This is just showing you where you're applying the filter over. If you click it again, you're going to see that blue thing now, right in the middle. Let's put it to zero. Select it again, just erase this. Okay, let's choose maybe 50 and let's start painting right over the ocean here. Okay, here. You can tap the eye icon whenever you want to be sure wherever you're painting. Let's see. For example, here I've painted a little bit of the sky, which is not what I wanted, but you get the idea. Let's paint over the whole scene being careful here not to get too much of the mountains. But understand that you can go back and erase it wherever you want. This is called a non-destructive editing because you can still go back to it whenever you want. Let's see here. Okay, it's good for me. I selected most of the sea, but I want to unselect the mountains. I don't want it to be painted over. I put to zero on the curves and I'm going to raise really slowly here. You can use your two fingers to navigate the picture and then do it like this. You can be more careful than I am being here, but it's to show you how to do it. Here we go. Select it here. Now I'm going to try to clean a little bit of the sky. Okay, here we go. All right. It's looking pretty good. It's all reddish right now because this is the mask. This is where we're applying it. Let's click the eye icon and boom. That's it. Now you can see how the seat turn from a little bit greenish to more bluish. The idea is, you can apply any other filter to this picture and do the exact same thing that we just did. Just go back to the first string, go onto that layers icon, choose "view edits", choose whatever effect you've just applied, and just brush wherever you want it to be applied. Very few people actually go to the trouble of doing this. This is really going to differentiate your picture from the others, because for most people, it's totally unconscious. You can't really realize why a picture looks nice or not because there's so much work that goes below it. Right now, you're probably thinking like, "it's too much work" or something like that. But as you try it, it's going to be really natural for you. I really recommend you to try this right now in your picture. Try with different colors, different effects, mask them out, see what works for you, what works for your picture, and then proceed to the next step. See you there. 11. Managing Focus: Let's talk a little bit now about positioning your subject in the picture. This is really important. You really want to give focus to what's important in the picture and leave everything else a little bit behind it, a little bit in the background. The idea here is, I'm going to teach you two techniques that you can use. I give you the same advice as all the other ones, don't overdo it. Otherwise, it just looks too fake. But this can be really nice to make your subject pop in the picture. The first one of them is the Lens Blur. Actually if you have a good camera or a good smart phone, you can just tap on the screen wherever you want the focus to be when you're taking the picture and everything else must be a little bit out of focus. That's really nice to make your subjects pop a little bit more in the picture and make the viewer understand that whatever else is not that important, the focus should be there. Let's just go here to the tools on snaps it, and on the bottom right corner, you're going to find here lens blur. Let's go into it, you're going to see that it already applied something to the picture here. There are many different kinds of lens blur that you can do and you can change them by just going up and down in the menu, and you're going to find strength, transition and vignette strength. I'll explain in a second what they are. The other option you have is clicking on the small circle down here, and it's going to change actually into some lines. What it means is, whatever is in the middle of them, really close to this blue dot in the middle is going to be focused, and this other area around it, is the one that is going to be out of focus, but gradually you can adjust how far it goes and how strong it is. Let's say for this example that I want myself to be focused and the rest a little bit out of focus. I'll switch it back to the circle and we'll just position it overly. Now you can see that all the rest looks too much out of focus, looks strange. This is not the way that a normal camera would capture this image. You can see that this is made in post-production. One of the biggest recommendations that I can do to you about editing is that don't do stuff that makes it look fake, just make it look natural so that the person that is viewing the picture can't really understand why it looks so nice, It's just like underlying there. Let's see, here is too much out of focus, so I'll just scroll up and down. Let's go to blur strength, right now it's on 30. I'll just pull it back a little bit, let's say, if I go to zero, nothing is out of focus. I'll just put it up to six more or less. Then the next thing we can change is the transition. You can see that when you scroll left, it goes closer to the first circle. That means that right after the circle, everything is going to begin going out of focus. Then if you just go to the right, it makes it bigger, bigger and then this out-of-focus part is each time farther and farther from me. Let's say about here looks good. Let's accept as it is right now. Then let's go to vignette is the less option on the left here on the menu. Here again, you're going to go up and down, and there's going to be outer brightness and inner brightness. Lets change both of them and see what they do. Outer brightness is going to change all around the picture in the borders going from black. If you go with both fingers, you can make it bigger or smaller, meaning that this outer brightness perimeter is going to affect only what's outside of this circle. Let's make it almost until the border here, and then change it to the back a little bit. Then here you can see that its maximum. You can go to the left, let's just do it a little bit like this. It's looking pretty good. Now, inner brightness is actually what's going to be inside the circle. We're just going to leave it as it was before. We've come a really long way already. If we check here the difference between the initial picture and right now, you can see how long we've come. I think most people, when they see the initial picture, they think like come on, what is that change in this picture, why it looks really nice. But then after you edit, you see how many things you can change and how much you can improve any kind of picture. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how to remove unwanted objects or people from the pictures. 12. Erasing Elements: [MUSIC] I can imagine that a lot of you may even skip some lessons to go straight to this one. As this can be really useful when you're traveling around, especially when you go to really famous places and it's almost impossible to do a picture of some spaces without having a lot of other tourists around. This is not going to make miracles, sometimes you're not going to be able to remove people, or some objects without leaving some traces behind. But I'll show you what it's possible to do on Snapseed and it can actually be pretty good. It might pick tools that going to remove the person that is on the path down to the beach. Let's just go to Tools, then you have to find on the third row, third column here. Now in here, whatever you touch on the screen, the app is going to try to replace that point with something else, whatever it considers that should be there instead of what you're touching. This, you have to be really careful. It's really good if you zoom in to that specific spot and then just touch exactly where you want it to apply the filter. Let's say, for example, I'm going to remove here this person. I'm going to zoom in really close to it, and I'm going to tap on the screen exactly where he is. I'm going to just paint over it. You're going to see this red overlay showing me wherever I am painting, and whatever I want Snapseed to try to replace. Looks pretty good. As soon as I release it, boom, it's done. Actually, if you look from far away, you really can't tell that there was something there. If you zoom back in, you can see that there is no fence in this part where it should be continued, but it can't really notice. It looks just fine like this. You can actually see that there's some more people down here, so we can try to erase them too. Let's see. Perfect. It even almost makes a fence here for us. Let's try to remove these other people here and also their shadow. Always remember to delete the shadows also. Otherwise, it can look really fake. Perfect. It also replaced with a little bit of a fence there and it looks amazing. There's one more person here. Let's try painting over him, and boom that's it. It looks really clean right now. You can't imagine that there were people there before, so perfect. I'll just apply it as it is, and that's it. You can go a little bit deeper with this option if you want, which is trying to recover those details that disappeared when you heal that part. Let's say for example, that we really want to recover the fence where that guy with the red backpack was. Right now, we don't have the detail there anymore, the fence is gone. What we have to do here is you can just come to Tools, go to Double Exposure. Here you're going to add the feature again over. Here we are. We are actually with the original picture right over it. We're just going to position here. That left part of the fence exactly over where it was deleted. Here, you can control the opacity of the picture. If you go to the right, you can only see the new picture that was put above the other one. Then if you go to the left, you just see the original picture, so stick with me. We're going to just go totally to the right and put the old picture over this one. You're going to hit Apply, and now you can only see the new picture that was just overlaid above it. Let's do the same masking we did in the other lesson, let's come up here, view edits, and then double exposure and edit with the brush tool. Now what you're seeing is the original picture and we're just going to apply this in future with the same action that we did to a specific spot, which is exactly where the fence is missing. You're going to zoom in here, the double exposure is set right now to 25. What we can do is just paint it over here a little bit and see what happens. You can't see really much, so let's go to 50. We're beginning to see just that part of the fence from the other picture. I'll go up a little bit more, 75, all right, we can see it much better now. We can try going on 100 and see what happens. You can see it much better, but you have to pay attention to something. The old picture doesn't have the filters apply. If you want to be really careful about this, you're going to have to export the picture that you're editing, lay it over, and then do exactly this. In this case, I'm not going do it. I'm just going to erase it here, and I'm just going to put 75 and just do both lines. I'm just going to put 50 and I'm going to paint the fencing. Perfect, so let's go to the last lesson of editing [MUSIC]. 13. Bonus Features: Congratulations. You've come a long way already. Now I recommend you to save your picture, I'm going to show you how to do it. You just come to export and then save. It's going to apply. You can see that it's applying all the filters that you did and it's saved. Now I'm going to pass over quickly a couple of function that might be useful to you it depend of a picture. Come to tools, there's one option called expand. What it does is, you can see right now that it actually shows this square background all around the picture and some borders that you can pull up, down, left or right. The thing here is maybe you cannot crop a picture the way that you want or it's missing information so that you can twist it around or rotate it or do something that you wanted to do with it. What I can do here is, wherever you pull one of these borders as much as it's going to try to complete that area with information from the original picture. Let's say for example, you want to do a little bit more of sky here. I'm just going to put all the way up and you can see that it does a pretty good job on completing it because it's really, really uniform across that area. It does have some flows, but it's pretty much okay. Let's try out the other sides also. I'm just going to pull it to the left here and let's see what it does. It's completing here the sky. It went pretty well and actually on the left, it looks pretty good. It did put a little bit of a stone here on a part that is shouldn't but remember everything that it does here you can go back to that healing option and just delete it. So let's try it here. I'm just going to pull it to the right also, let's see how it completes. It's pretty good also. It did replicate me a little bit here on the right, but let's try to fix that. I'm just going to apply it, then let's go to tools, healing and then let's try to delete these parts that didn't really work. It does look quite okay. What you can do in this case is that if you really feel that you need it to do it, you can just use the vignette and just cover that part with dark a little bit or try to paint it darker. You can just go and use one of the techniques that I taught you here to try to cover that part a little bit, make it not shine that much, maybe blur it a little bit more, some things like that. I'm just going to save it as it is here. The last option that I'm going to show you is this grainy film filter. This is a feature to make your picture look more like from analog camera or older a little bit or something like that. You can just come up and down and there's grain and style strength. You can just come to grain and the more you put it up, you're going to see beginning to pop this weird black dots all over. This is called noise or grain and then you shouldn't add too much but if you add just a little bit, it actually looks pretty cool, it looked a little bit vintage. You can apply a little bit or it's just like really sharp images and look like [inaudible] coming really new. You don't need to add this. It's just another option that you have. That's it. We just completed all the editing classes. In the next one, we're just going to wrap it up and talk about how to finalize your project. 14. Conclusion: Congratulations. Now, you can call yourself a proper mobile photography editor. If you followed along the way I suggested, and you edited one of your pictures along with me during the course; you have one-third of your project ready. Now it's missing to edit only two other pictures, which should be much, much faster than the one that you did along with the course. I really suggest you to edit both of these pictures right now and post them in the project area, so that I can take a look and comment on it. Thanks so much for watching this class. I really hope you enjoyed watching it as much as it did preparing it. Please leave me some feedback in the comments and follow me, so that when I post some intermediate or advanced lessons, you can watch it also and just grow your technique. Hope to see you in the next lesson. Bye.