Mobile Photography A to Z: Take Professional Photos With Your Phone

1. Introduction: I'm Simona, I'm 25, and have a big passion for creating things, especially photos and videos. I come from a very small village in the north of Italy. Probably, like you, I had a general interest in photography, but with no clue where to start. I thought I needed to spend a crazy amount of money to buy all the equipment, and I just couldn't afford it. I was just randomly shooting with an iPhone 7 while I kept seeing incredible shots on IG taken with phones. If they can do it well, then I can do it as well. I started studying photography and practicing for months and years just using this. Fast-forward today, it's almost impossible to recognize which photos are taken with a camera and which ones are taken with an iPhone. Inside this course, you'll find everything you need to know to take your pictures to the next level, just using the smartphone that you have in your pocket. I'll show you how to set it up in the best way possible using specific apps and suggest extra pieces of gear. We'll dive into some basic art photography, and I'll show you how to frame correctly a picture. Things that will be very useful even when using a camera. I'll show you how to manage the lighting properly while also creating depth in your shot. Obviously, you'll learn how to edit different styles of photos just using free apps, composition, colors, effects, everything. There is a part dedicated to the mistakes you should avoid and also some bonus material. 2. Apps you should use: Hi, guys. Thank you very much for joining me in my courses. [MUSIC] This lesson, I want to show you all the apps that you need to install in your phone in order to take these great pictures. As I mentioned earlier, there's no problem in Android and iPhone. All these apps are free and available in both systems. They offer premium features, but I've never used it. You just need the basic ones, no problem. If you don't want to download these apps, but you prefer to use the camera of your phone is not a problem, although there will be many differences. One thing that you need to do is to activate the grid. You will find it in any camera settings, it doesn't matter the smartphone that you have. Let me show you how to do in the iPhone right now. To activate the grid in your phone, you just need to go in Settings, and then search for Camera, and then Grid. It will be very similar in any Android as well. Just to make it clear, the grid are these lines that you see that divides basically in nine different parts the camera. The most important app that you need is Lightroom Mobile. It's like a Bible for photographer, absolutely a must. The key point of this app is that it allows you to shoot in DNG. What does that mean? DNG is different from JPG, and both are format of a picture. A DNG is a much bigger file. It can reach up to 20, 25, even 30 megabytes, while JPG is very small like 2, 3, 4, 5 megabytes. [MUSIC] This means that inside the JPG, there is much less information than the DNG files. Therefore when we are going to add in the picture, we're going have more information inside the DNG file. Let me give you this example. When we add in JPG files, we have colors that go from 1-10, and we can choose only the integer number, for example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. When we're going to add in a DNG file, we will be able to go, for example, 1.2 or 1.3 or 5.4. We're going to have much more information, much more variety of colors that we can choose, when we added the colors will just look much better to do it. How do you set this DNG extension inside the app? Let me show you right now. The first app that we can see is Lightroom. As I mentioned, Lightroom allows you to shoot directly from the app itself. To select the DNG, we need to go here on top, click, and then select DNG. For one side you have JPG, and then from the other side you have DNG. Select DNG. Another amazing feature that Lightroom has are the profiles. These are presets. Basically a set of colors and settings that you can apply to your image in a very quick way, just with one tap. Let's dig into the app, so I can show you better. Lightroom allows you to shoot not only in auto mode, but also in professional. This permits to control the shutter speed, the ISO, the focus, and much more. However, just use the automatic. It's really good inside Lightroom. Of course, it allows you to put a timer or to set a different ratio. If you don't have it already, activate the grid even inside Lightroom, is this button right here. Whenever you're going to shoot a picture with the camera inside Lightroom, you will have all these picture inside the app itself. You won't find it in the normal camera roll that you have in your phone, but there will be whole here. After you shoot a picture, you have all these menus on the bottom where you can choose a lot of different features. Some of them will be blocked if you have the basic version, but many will be available. The different menus allows you to modify the light right here, the colors, and even each single one the effects like texture clarity, dehaze, vignetting details, optics, geometry. But don't worry, we'll see all of them later on in the course. In the top-left corner, you see all the information that you use to shoot the picture. One of the thing that I want to show you right now are the profiles right here. These are real-time preset inside Lightroom that allows you to modify directly just with one tap the image. Many of them are really, really good. After you finish to edit your picture, you just need to go into Share button. Here, you can click Export as and choose the settings that you want to export. For example, if you want to have the image quality 80 percent, 100 percent, based on how big you want the image or the file type. If you want a JPG, TIF, DNG. If you've finished to edit your picture and you don't need to retouch anymore, I suggest you export in JPG, so the file is a little bit smaller. However, if you need to edit more, I suggest to use TIF or DNG. These are bigger files that allows you to modify even more if you need. After you clicked Export as, you just need to go on Export to Camera Roll to export the image in your normal camera off of your phone, or you can even share to somebody else or share to email or open in other apps from here directly. The next app that you may download is Snapseed. Snapseed has many function and features inside. The one that I like the most is called healing. This allows you to remove people or objects or any mistake that you have in the picture in a very quick way. But let me show you right now what I mean. Inside Snapseed, which is made by Google, you have the chance to open any pictures that you have or even shoot with the camera. But we're going to use Snapseed just to open a picture that we have already in our device. For example, let's take this picture. I use Snapseed all the time to remove people from an image that I don't want. We go in Tools, and then Healing. Once we're here, we can zoom inside the picture and we see that the brush become smaller. We just need to drag our finger on the top of the people and automatically will be removed. This is really a powerful tool. Let's do another one. Here, and then he's gone. Let's do this group of people. Here, drag your finger on top, the spread brush will appear, remove it in just a click. This is it. Inside the app, you can find many other tools that we'll see later on in the course. The last app is called Lens Distortions or LD. This allows you to create some great effect for post-production. For example, adding the sun or sun rays, or add rain, add clouds, and many more. Let me show you inside the app. The last app is called LD, Lens Distortions, which is this one right here. This one allows you to take any picture that you have from your camera roll and apply on top different layers. For example, let's have a look on this picture that you might have seen on my Instagram. What we can do is apply a sun, for example. Because it's coming from this side, I'm going to apply this sun on the right side. A little bit smaller, exactly right here. Then I can apply even another layer. Click plus on the new layer and then we find, for example, soft light, which are sun ray, then we place the sun ray where the sun is. We can do something like this, then we can modify, adjust the softness in direction. The direction might be here, this length, shorter, longer, or the threshold where we increase the number of sun rays. Then when we're done, we can export it directly in our camera roll. The free app doesn't allow you to export in 100 percent. But if you want to share it on Instagram and you don't have to print it in a bigger size is more than enough, even 85 percent, which the free app allows you to do. As I mentioned, all these apps offer really a lot of features inside. These are just the general ones. But later on in the course, I will show you exactly with examples how to apply these cool effects in pictures. I'm really conscious there are a lot of apps out there and you may have found some better ones. However, I think these three are extremely important and they contain everything you need to create great pictures. We don't go in too crazy and finding too many apps. I wait you for the next lesson. Chao. [MUSIC] 3. Suggested Gear: Now I want to show you what gear do you need in addition to your phone in order to take great pictures. First of all, let me say this, you don't need anything. All you need is just your phone, especially when you're shooting landscape. However, when you shooting inside, you can buy additional props to make it more interesting. The first accessory that I will buy is a ring light. It's extremely useful when you're shooting inside because it creates a beautiful light exactly as the one that you see on my face right now. Usually, USB powered, you can attach a power bank or even to your computer as I'm doing right now. For example, when you turn it on, it has different lights, either yellow, white, or even in the middle. This is a phone holder. So what do you do usually is you attach your phone right here and then on a tripod and then you talk to your phone, you take video, whatever you want. Probably my favorite accessory of all of them is this one, is the GorillaPod. This is basically a tripod that you can put anywhere and you can move the legs, rotate them so you can put in grips, you can put in the hand drills, you can put in anywhere, literally wherever you want you can put this. The brand of this is called JOBY, and it's probably the top one for smartphonegraphy and it's really amazing because the quantity is great, but the price is really reasonable. For example, you can put the tripod like this, and then with here, you can move and you place the phone right here. You can place it horizontal or vertical as you want. It's perfect for vlogging. When I'm like this, I can just go around and film some cool stuff. Not only about this brand is really, really cool because it's modular and you can attach two extra arms. What you can do with two extra arms you can attach a microphone, for example, the Wavo still from JOBY amazing quality, extremely portable. You can unmount it and then you place it here. Maybe if you want to keep your phone on landscape mode or depending how you want to make the video. You can keep it like this so you have the microphone right there, phone you can attach it easy. Not only, we can attach even one extra arm on the other side and the thing that I love is this small light still by JOBY, it's amazing, it's extremely bright, you can charge it very fast. There you go, and then you can increase or decrease the intensity of the light and I love it. There you go. It's called Beamo, and you can attach it and as you can see, it's really amazing. Watch, so good for goggling. You can just stay like this and I can make all the videos that I want with high-quality and great light or everything that you need really. One more thing that you can use is the tripod with a remote. This tripod comes with remote as well, with a phone holder that you can move around, and this has many function and you can even increase the length. You can literally put it as a tripod like this, very long, and then you attach the phone right here, and is preferred for taking videos for TikTok or for any behind the scene that you want, of course, you can place it vertical as you want, and it's amazing, it's unbelievable. You can attach the two arms on the side even in this one, and it stayed like this. What you have to do is you just need to press record and don't care about anything else, the sound is going to be good, the light it's going to look good, so that's it. Such an amazing tools. You can also use it as a selfie stick. It goes very long and then like this. One more object that I really like it's called the Lensball. It's basically a lens that allows you to take pictures in a very creative way, let's say. With your phone, you take pictures like this. I want to show you some example. What it does is basically reflecting the picture upside down so you can create very cool effects. You don't need this and it's very heavy. If you need to walk for a long period of time or if you need to travel and you can't leave your luggage in a hotel, this is pretty heavy. These are some example of images that I showed with the Lensball. The last accessory that I want to show you is useful when you're taking pictures inside, especially. These are simply fairy lights. It's exactly the ones that you see right here, or even right there. Usually, you just need to put some batteries inside and you can bring these literally anywhere. Very light, very useful, and allows you to create even depth of the image. But we'll have a look at this later on in the course. All of these accessories that I showed you are absolutely optional. But it makes a little more interesting the picture, this is all for now. Thank you for listening, I'll see you in the next one, where we're going to talk about composition. Ciao. 4. Composition: Today we talk about composition. The first rule that we need to follow when we take a picture, is the rule of thirds. You may have heard this before, but what does that mean? Do you remember the grid that we activated together before? This grid divides the image in third, both vertically and horizontally. In other words, you will have nine different boxes. But what are these lines for? When we have several subjects or even one subject, we need to aim to put this subject either in one vertical line on one of the intersections of the grid we do this. Instead of putting the subject in the center to drew a better composition of the picture. Even if I put the subject in the center, I can use the rule of third in the background. For example, if I'm shooting a picture at the beach, what I can do is to put a third of sky, a third of sea, and a third of sand. But let me show you some examples so you can understand better this concept. In the first example, I want to show you the suspended bridge in Venice. The subject is placed on the top horizontal line of the grid. As you can see in the second example, my friend is placed on the right vertical line. The rule is exactly the same even for horizontal pictures. In this case, Elena is placed on the left line, all along the left line and he's watching on the right. Even in this picture when I'm walking in Casa Duomo in Milan, I'm placed on the left line all along. Not only that, if we have a look at the grid more or less 1/3 is the pavement, 1/3 is the Duomo, and 1/3 is the sky. This is why it's called the rule of thirds. If you have a look at Sant'Ambrogio church in Milan, is the same exactly thing. It's 1/3 of the pavement, 1/3 of the church, and 1/3 of the top or sky. Let's have a look now at this last example, this is exactly a perfect composition. As I mentioned before, you can divide three different elements of the image in thirds. On the top in the first third there is a sky and some clouds and making it even more interesting. In the second third, in the center of the image, there is a sea. Then in the last third, there is a grass of the path. Plus there is the bird, despite is not in the crossing lines, is exactly on the right line, so it makes it good anyway. One more photo, and this one I'm placed in the intersection in the bottom left of the grid as you can see. It looks great the composition, not only that, also the horizon in this picture is placed on the top line of the grid. In addition, the other subject of the picture, which is the dardoodle, the little rock with the hole is placed on the right line. This is why it makes a great composition. Now we talk about leading lines. Is a technique that we use to make more interesting the composition and to draw the attention of the viewer towards a subject that we want. We're using natural, artificial lines like buildings, floats, rail lines, handrails, everything that has a line to draw the attention to the subject. For example, let's have a look at some pictures. In this first, we see that the subject is clearly sun, but I use the buildings on the right and on the left and also the ground. A little line that you see on the center to draw the attention directly to the sample cathedral in London. This next example, I'm in Leadenhall market still in London. If you see all the market and all the lines are pointing towards me, despite these in the background, your eyes goes directly towards the bottom center of the picture. Once again, you can notice then I'm placed in the center of the bottom line of the grid. The last thing I want to talk about in composition is lead room or lead space depends on how you want to call it. Is a technique that leaves space in front or in the direction of the subject whether it's moving or stationary. For example, if a car is moving in this way in the image, I'm going to leave space in front of the car, not in the back. But let's have a look at some examples again. In this picture, Elena is walking towards the left of the picture and as you can see, I left space in the left of the picture. Let me tell you also that Elena is placed on the right vertical line of the grid and he's walking towards the opposite side. Let's have a look again at this picture. I'm walking towards the right part of the picture. Again, I left space on that side because I'm walking towards it. Now let's have a look at this stationary example. I'm not doing any action, I'm not moving, I'm not walking. There's not a car. However, I'm faced towards the left of the picture. As you can see, I'm placed on the right vertical line and I'm watching the left part of the picture, which is the peak of that mountain that you see right there. Also, you should notice the horizon of this picture is exactly on the top horizontal line of the image. These are the three main rules that we need to try to follow when we take pictures or with our phone. Just to recap, one is the rule of third, try to place the horizon either in the top horizontal line or in the bottom, not placing in the middle. Or when you have a subject or you only have two subjects try to place in the intersection or along one of the two vertical lines. The second one is leading lines. Try to find natural elements such as railways, handrail, or whatever you want that draw the attention of the viewer towards the subject that you want. Lead room or lead space. When I'm walking towards a direction, leave space in the image in that direction. If you're shooting the car, if you're shooting someone moving, leave space towards their direction. If you have a stationary subject that is facing towards a direction, place the subject on a corner one of the two intersection and leave space on the direction of you. Later on in this course, I will show you some of the common mistakes that beginners do and that you should avoid. Even about composition and everything else that we're going to talk about later. Thank you very much for listening. I'll see you in the next one. Ciao. 5. Lighting: Hi guys, welcome back. Today I want to talk about lighting. Lighting is a key element for photography. Sometimes it's really difficult even for professional photographer to control the light. But today, I want to try to explain briefly how to control the lighting in your phone. If you shoot on external, outside, it's really key to shoot during sunset or blue hour. By blue hour, I mean, the very early morning when the sun hasn't risen yet. Why do we do this? We do this because at midday or 2:00 PM, the sun is very harsh, is very high, therefore, our eyebrows will make a shadow on our eyes, which are always the subject of the image when shooting a person. On the other hand, when we shoot eternal, in a protected environment, we can control the light in a easier way. Usually, if you don't have professional light, you have to use a window. This is the best way to take great pictures, both for personal and for product. When you are inside, the best way, if you don't have professional lighting is to use a window. But when you use a window, make sure that the sun is not hitting directly your subject that you're shooting unless you want to create a particular effect. Basically what I mean by that is that when the sun is hitting your house inside a window, try to not place the subject directly towards the sun. Stay in the shadow, inside the house, inside the room that you are. First, let me tell you what is a highlight and what is a shadow. When we have an image, all the light part are highlights and all the dark are shadows. The one in-between are called midterms. When we shoot a picture, especially when we are inside or outside, it could happen that we have a very dark side and a very bright side. This happens, for example, where we are inside a dark room and we were trying to shoot outside where it's very bright. In this case, it is very difficult to capture both shadows and highlights, especially using our phone, which has a small sensor. The difference is that a camera has a bigger sensor and allows to capture more shadows and more highlights, a better dynamic range. Our goal when we take a picture with our phone is to try to capture as many highlights and as many shadows as possible. Sometimes if the image is too dark, the shadows will be completely black, so we're going to lose details. On the other hand, if the image is too bright, we are going to burn the highlights, so we're going to lose all the details in the highlights. Our phones allow to control the light in several different ways. One way is to use the app Lightroom that we talked before in the pro mode and control manually the light. This is the most difficult way. Let me show you the easier way which is using their normal camera or even Lightroom. We just need to tap on certain parts of the image to control automatically the light. When we open our camera app or even Lightroom, this allows you to tap in the place that we want, whether it's in the shadows or whether it's in the highlights to adjust automatically the exposure. Usually every smartphone is set on automatically. That means that the software will adjust itself to the exposure. However, when it is like this, if the shadows are too dark, we can tap on the shadows and the image will bring up the shadows. If we want to tap on the highlights, this will darken all the image. When we're like this but we want to control it by hand, you can tap on this spot and then darken the image, dragging down your finger or lightening up, dragging up your finger. However, even if you are in this position, when you're going to move your phone, it will adjust automatically, so it won't remember the settings that you put. However, if you keep pressing on one point, the iPhone will automatically block the focus and the lighting that you choose. Again, if you want to drag it down to darken the image or drug it up to lightening up, it would hold these settings. Even if you move, it won't adjust automatically. It will always keep the one that you put. This image is a bit difficult and this is why, this area is very dark and this area is very bright, so because the sensor of the iPhone is very small comparing to a camera, it won't capture both highlights and shadows. As I mentioned before, when we shoot with Lightroom mobile in DNG file, we have more data inside the picture. In this case, it's easier to bring up the shadows if they are too dark or bring down the highlights if there are too bright. When we shoot with a normal camera of the smartphone, it is very difficult to bring down the highlights or to break up the shadows because there is less information, therefore, when his burned or when you're too dark in the shadows, it's just lost, detail lost. On the other hand, with Lightroom, with editing, we can adjust a little bit, but it's always better to shoot the best we can on the firsthand. Okay, guys. Thank you very much for listening. I'll wait for you in the next one when we are going to talk about depth of the image. Ciao. 6. Depth: Today we talk about depth of the image and how to create it. Usually when you walk outside, you have different layer. Even if you don't notice. For example, there's a person in the foreground, a building and then a bus very very far. In a picture it's very difficult because it's a 2D image. We don't have that depth. But there are some techniques on how we can recreate this depth. Through the focus of the image and the aperture of the phone, we can blurry either the foreground or the background. When we place an object very close to the phone and we have our focus to the background, these objects in the foreground will be blurry. Or on the other hand, we can put the focus on the object that we have in the foreground and blurry the background. Let me show you some examples. As you can see in this photo of Florence, we have different elements and different layers. In the foreground you see for example the top right corner, the leaves are blurry because they're very close to the phone. Then you see all the other plants. Then there is the city, the cathedral and in the very background there are some mountains. This is what I mean by different layers. In this photo of Venice as well, you see that the two columns on the right and on the left are blurred because they're very close to the phone. While the suspended bridge in the center is unfocused. This great depth in the image. As I mentioned, the second option that we have is to blurry the background and keep in focus the foreground. For example, in this image, we have these little trees. They are in focus and then the background is completely blurry. This is why the plants were very close to my phone and the background was very far. Therefore, I just kept the focus there and blurry the background. How do I do this? That's the real question. What I need to do when I'm on the camera is to very, very simply tap on the object that you want on focus. For example right now, if I put the finger right here on my phone, if I want my finger on focus, I just need to tap on my finger. If I want the background on focus, I just need to tap on the background. Then the phone automatically will blurry the one that you don't want. Even in these other example as you can see, I had the focus very close to the brush, so my phone was very close to brushes and then in the background was simply blurred. Another option that I love to use to create depth or lights. For example, I can put a light very close to the camera or even further away than the subject. In this case for example, in this image, you see this lamp right here that is blurry because it's further away from me but creates depth. Let me show you some more examples. In this image, the subject is in focus but in the background as you can see, there are some Christmas lights right there. They're just not in focus. You don't notice them, but they create depth in the image. They create different layers, as I mentioned before. In this other example, I use a lens as a subject and then a small candle one or two meters away to create depth in the image. As you can see, my subject is in focus while the light behind is blurred. Another option is to use these slides very, very close to the camera in the foreground blurry. Then having your focus on the subject a little bit further away. For example in this picture, I use some Christmas lights in the very foreground. Blurry, so you can't really see much about the lights. But then you create depth because the subject is in the background in focus. It's always good if you can create depth already in camera. However, when we're going to have a look at less distortion, one of the app that I told you before. I will show you how to add layers on top of your image in a artificial way in post-production, so we can create even more depth. But for now, that's all. Thank you very much for listening and I'll wait you in the next one. 7. Mistakes you should avoid: [MUSIC] Hi, guys. Welcome back. Now, I want to show you all the biggest mistakes that you should avoid as a beginner. In all of these past lectures, we've seen composition, lighting, where to put the subjects, how to create depth. But sometimes it's really difficult, even for intermediate or professional to create the right image, the perfect one. Let's start with composition errors. In this first picture which looks cool, there is one big mistake. I'm facing towards the right of the image. However, the spaces on the left. This doesn't make any sense, it doesn't look good. Another mistake in this picture is that I'm not exactly in the intersection of the right and the bottom line. To correct this image would have been better if I will stand along the right vertical line, I would've had to face the outer side or have space on the front side of the image. In the second picture, still looks good, color looks good, the sun looks great. However, I'm too far, right. I'm still the subject of the picture, despite I wanted to show the background as well. But I should've stayed on the right line of the grid, as we mentioned earlier. Let's have a look at this picture. The sunset looks great, but there's reason huge mistake. First of all, nothing is on focus, everything is blurry. What's the point to post a photo that is completely blurry? The horizon is not horizontal. Such a huge error, and so many times I see this on photos posted, even on Instagram or wherever. I mean, he's fine if you're not a professional. But it's pretty easy to put the arising juice straight and it doesn't take much time. Let's have a look at this next example. If you're not focused and you don't know about this, you might think, okay, this looks good. There is a good competition. The sky, the color is okay. However, let me tell you that the horizon is in the center. What did we say earlier is better if the horizon is on the first line or the second line of the grid. Let me try to crop this image so you can understand the difference better. This way we're going to have one-third of this guy and two-thirds of the mountains and the snow. As you can see on the left is the before and on the right is after. It looks much better. [MUSIC] In this next example, everything looks pretty good. The subject is not really on the intersection., however, what is the biggest mistake here? The highlights are blurred, the image is too bright where the rocks are. In this case, we would have had to adjust it when we're shooting the picture because now it's too late. We lost the detail of the rock in the center of the image. Therefore, even in post-production will be basically impossible to bring back all the details. If we have had a camera, maybe you could have just a bit of these highlights. But here we can do anything. You just blur. You can't use this picture. Even here when we have a look at this picture, the composition looks great. There is the subject, which is this donor. On the lower level, there is a hand, there is a tree which is noting focus, there is the London Eye on the back. However, the sky is blurred. Even if with too high window exposure, we should have shot with lower exposure or bring back the highlights in post-production if there not blurred too much. Let's have a look at another example. This picture looks quite good. It's not bad. The composition could've been okay. However, it's too dark. We adjusted the exposure on the sky. The sky is not blurred, however, the shadows are too dark. We don't have any detail, is completely bad, Pitch black. This is a problem, it's not okay. In these cases I mentioned to you before, is very difficult without a camera or just with a phone. When we shoot from a room inside where it's very dark and there is another side which is very bright, is difficult because the phone doesn't have a very wide range. Either you blur that highlights or either you lose details in the shadows. Another really, really big mistake that I see, is way too many people inside a photo or way too many subjects, way too much going on in a picture. Just try to keep it simple. Let's have a look at this picture. Right now you see myself smiling they're on a picture at a composition could be okay. There is one-third of the sky, there is the buildings, the church, the people, the grass, the shadow. There something probably is a building, I don't know what it is. It's just too much, way way too much. I went I have looked at this picture, I don't know where to look. There are people, there is me, there's a church or the buildings. Just too much. Keep it simple. Maybe wait five minutes that these guys are gone, or maybe try to get only the church instead of the building as well. Tried to go away from the shadow. Just too much, keep it simple. This next one, we're talking about leading lines. As we notice, there are lots of things going on and it couldn't be fine if there was a subject. But in this photo, there is not a subject. All the lines that are a lot of lines and your eyes is lost. You don't know where to look at which one is the subject, maybe is the lab, maybe you or other people. Maybe is the top floor, maybe or the shops downstairs. There's just too much everything is pointing towards a point where there is nothing. This is a wrong use of leading lines. I showed this picture and we're just a mistake. I just won't use it. It's really fine to make mistake. You just need to recognize them and try to avoid next time when you shoot. But during the shooting is totally normal to make lots of mistakes. You've just seen post-production and you won't use certain picture days. You notice they have mistakes. Let's have a look at this picture. I really like this picture is taken from the bottom, so I ask different perspectives. There was a taxi, there're a lot of reflections around their colors are good. I already edited this picture, but there is something that bring distraction inside a picture which is probably the testing that you see on the left. How about we cut this taxing? We just keep the one in the center. So we try to eliminate all the distractions that you've seen in the picture and just keep the subject. You should consider that every image that you shoot, every picture should have a meaning. Try to think when you shoot, what does that mean? What just communicate to me at this picture? Do you want to say something when a picture, doesn't have emotion, does it have a subject? Try to ask yourself these questions when you're shooting. The last big, big, big mistake that beginners do is to edit too much the pictures. You're going to be very careful when you edit it pictures because it really makes or breaks the picture itself. There are a few elements, they are very dangerous when editing. I'm going to show you later on in the course, right after how to edit colors, details, exposure, and everything in the following lessons. There are four elements very dangerous that you need to avoid to push too much further on texture, vignette, clarity, and dehaze very dangerous. Don't push them too much. Keep it very simple. For example, this picture looks very good, but it's edited way, way, way, way, way too much. Instead, what about this? Much less edited looking great, good composition, good subject, nice depth of the image. There you go. All right, guys, these are the biggest mistake that beginners do. I hope you learned something today. I hope you will try to avoid these. Try to think. I know that a lot of elements things, to think about. But sometimes try to watch back this video maybe or keep it note and tried to avoid all of this. Then you're going to be shooting great photos. I'm sure about this. 8. Editing pt1 - Composition: We are now entering in the last part of the course, probably my favorite. We're going to talk about editing. Editing is a very complicated and wide area. I could literally talk for hours and hours. However, there are some elements that I want to teach you to make sure that your pictures will look good. Remember to shoot the pictures with the DNG format with Lightroom Mobile, the built-in camera app, not the camera that you have in your phone, but open Lightroom on the bottom-right corner, there is the camera inside Lightroom, shoot with it and set DNG file. If you don't remember how to do it, go back into lecture Number 2 and you'll find it. Editing is absolutely key and it can make or break your picture. With editing, we can turn a very ugly composition, very ugly picture, into something acceptable, something more interesting. But on the other hand, we can make a beautiful picture looking so bad. But don't worry, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know. It happens very often that when you're taking a picture, you don't have everything perfect. The composition is not perfect; Details are not perfect. However, what you can do is trim the picture. The first thing to do after you've shot the picture is to adjust the composition and the cut. In other words, just trim your photo, let's dig into it. Once we have shot the picture, first thing that we need to do is to adjust the composition. We go in the crop menu, with the help of the grid, we try to adjust following the rules that we set earlier. For example, here we have the subject that is in the intersection of the two lines, and we have their horizon on the top line. This is good already. In this menu, you can also choose which format you want, which is the thing that you need to understand at the beginning if you want to use it for Instagram and the vertical version is, for example, five ratio seven. Or if you want a story, it's 9,16. Or if you want a scare it's one by one. Here you will adjust based on what you're choosing. Let's leave it original at the moment. I'm going to adjust it a little bit. I'm perfectly on that line and the horizon is perfect. This is good. Here we can also straighten. In case the horizon was not straight already, we can adjust it and rotating right or left, make sure to avoid these bad mistake. Here you go. Here in this menu you can also rotate left or right, depending what you want to do with the photo and how you shot it. Here you can also flip it horizontal and vertical. Usually, I use the flip when I need to match my Instagram feeds. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. Once you're done with the trim, the crop and rotation, you just click okay. Then we go in the next one. Very important, the light. You go in the light menu. Then the first thing that you need to do is to readjust the exposure. Be careful when you do this. Try to not burn the highlights, but show the shadows as well. You need to find the right balance. This is okay for me. Then we go in contrast, be very careful even when you're using the contrast, try to stay between 20 and minus 20. Don't go too much with the contrast and don't go too less, of course. I'm going to put now around 12,10. Then we need to adjust the highlights. In case when you adjusted the exposure, the highlights were burned, you can try to bring them down here a little bit or a lot, depending how you want the picture and how you shot it. In this case, I'm going to bring them down. Then with the shadows, we go a little bit higher, so we're showing more details. This is maximum, but maybe we show a little bit less to create a bit more contrast. Then we have the whites or the black. This acts a little bit as the highlights and the shadows, but they have some differences. In this case, we want to bring down the whites or up. This is the effect that it does. Play a little bit with those as well. I'm going to bring them down a bit. Then up or down even the blacks. In this case, when you're bringing up the blacks, you add details on the shadows and the blacks doesn't become black anymore, but it will be a bit gray. After you've chosen the format, cropped the picture, and adjusted the lighting, we are ready to go in and tweak the colors. But this will be in the new video. Thank you very much for watching, I'll see you in the next one. 9. Editing pt2 - Color: [MUSIC] In this video, we're going to talk about colors, still part of the editing, still very wide area. Some people study and do only colors. That means it is very wide, it's very complicated, and there are a lot of combination of colors that can be nice together. Let me give you this example right now. As you can see this composition, you see a teal right there and an orange right there. Teal and orange they stay together very nicely. This picture looks pretty good and can be one of the thousand of combination of colors that we can choose for our pictures. The first thing that we need to do when we are editing the colors of a picture is to adjust the white balance, or some other people call the warmth, as you may find on Instagram. What does that mean? Basically, when we're looking at a picture, we need to figure it out which one is the right white. What I mean by that is that the white in a picture can be a little bit too blue or a little bit too yellow. This is why professional photographers use these cardboards. What they do is before taking pictures, they adjust the white balance with the white cardboard based on the subject. In the pro mode in Lightroom, you can adjust the white balance or you can keep it automatically. Don't worry, keep it automatic. It's pretty good in Lightroom. The best practice is to adjust the white balance directly when shooting. But if you don't do that, we can adjust it also in post-production, in editing inside Lightroom. Let me show you how to do it. To adjust the white balance we need to go in the color menu, and then drag on the right, the temperature to make the warm feeling like the summer light, or to the left if you want to have a more winter effect, blue or night effects, as you want to call it. Then we need to adjust also the tint, make it more green or more magenta. It's totally up to you as you like the picture. Then we have the vibrance and the saturation. The difference between the two is that the saturation affects the whole image, the whole colors, more and less, while the vibrance affects only the colors that are more present in the picture. When I drag it down, for example, now here there's a lot of green and yellow is going to go down while the gray in my hood is not really affected much. Also, the color of my skin is not really affected because you're not really present in the picture. While if I drag it up then you see that these colors, they go up a lot. [MUSIC] One more option that we have to adjust the temperature is to tap on this dropper on the right side of the screen, and then we need to move the circle and the pointer toward the white of the image. In this image, it doesn't really work because we don't have a pure white. We have just my hood but this is gray it's not really white. So we don't use the dropper this time, but we just drag it automatically where we want it. I like a little bit warm for this picture. This could be okay, and then I want to increase a little bit the vibrance, and this is it. Let's have a look at this other example. First thing first, we need to crop the image. Try to have a nice composition. Yeah, this one looks fine already. Then what we need to do is we go in the light menu, adjust exposure, maybe decrease the highlights, increase the shadows a bit. [MUSIC] Then we go in colors. What we do first, as we said, we adjust the white balance, so we need to figure out which one is the right white inside the image and adjust as we like it. For example, if we go on the winter side, here's your winter, but I like a little bit of warmth feeling because there was a lot of sun that day. Then we need to adjust the tint and the vibrance. This tint is already fine. I'm not going to touch anything here. We go in the vibrance, increase a tiny bit the vibrance. After we have adjusted the settings, it's time to dig into the real colors. Let me show the possibilities that you have inside Lightroom. Now, we go in the real color tweaking. We need to tap and mix [MUSIC], and then here we have the HSL, [MUSIC] where basically we can control the hue, saturation, or luminance of every color that we have in an image. For example, these mountains are green and yellow. Let's go into yellow and drag the hue towards the oranges. As you can see, all the yellows becomes orange, and if we drag the yellows towards the green all the yellow become green. At the same time, we can use the saturations to desaturate the yellows or saturate them. [MUSIC] Then the last one is luminance. It's also referred to the yellows. So if we drag it down, all the yellows will become darker. If you drag it up, all the yellows will become brighter. [MUSIC] In this case for this picture, I want to drag the yellows a little bit towards the orange, desaturate them, and lightening up a little bit. Let's go for example, in the teals, we can drag it down or drag it up and it's going to affect a little bit this part of the image, not too much though. [MUSIC] Let's take the orange as well. We can drag it down and we are going to affect this part of the image or drag it up to change the colors, desaturate them, and apply maybe illuminance. There you go. [MUSIC] We can also look at the reds. Usually, what I do, I just tap all the colors and see what it modifies. For example, this part also affects the sky just a tiny bit. One more option that we have is to tap on this center here, tap on the color that we want, and drag it to change the colors or the hue, and also we can go in saturation down here and the luminance doing the same thing. For example, if we want to remove the saturation from this part, we go in saturation down here, click, and then drag it down if you want to remove or drag it up if you want to increase the saturation of the yellows. As you can see in this part, it selected the color that you selected, so you can check. For example, we go here in the mountain, and we can drag it down to decrease the luminance because we have selected it or increase it. Then we go in saturation and we can tap, decrease or increase. Let's go back to the HSL. [MUSIC] Let's modify again as we want it. Maybe just like this, looks fine. There you go. Let's have a look at another picture, another example, and then let's change the colors. First thing first, I want to touch the blues because I like the sky to be a bit more teal. We go and drag on the left and then we drag down to saturation and the luminance as well, just a tiny bit, and then we go in the oranges the lower part of the image and maybe we modify it towards the orange. Yes. Then they saturate a bit and then maybe increase the luminance or decrease depending on how you like the picture. This is already pretty good with the colors. This is before and this is the after, before and after. I'm happy with this. Let's have a look at this sunset picture, which is a bit different than from others. For the light, we need to increase the exposure a little bit. Be careful to decrease the highlights so the white the sky will be burned, as we said already. Maybe increase the shadows a bit, and then we go in colors. Adjust the temperature. Do we want it more winter or more summer vibes? Let's keep it winter this time. Then we need to modify the tint. Because it's a sunset, maybe we drag the tint towards the magenta. [MUSIC] Yeah, like this, I like it. Then the vibrance increase it a little bit and the saturation as well, just a tiny bit. Then we're going in mix and we try different colors. Let's go for example, in these purples ones and see what is the effect. For example, here we literally have a lot of options depending on how we like the sunset. This is a bit unrealistic, but if we go on right, this looks great. Then we can increase the saturation and increase also the luminance or decrease it. Not too much because we're going to lose details if we decrease too much like here in the center of the image, so let's leave it normal. [MUSIC] Let's have a look at the other colors as well and see what they do. This is literally what happens during the normal process. You just try. Try and error, and then you'll find the right composition that you like and you're going to stick with it. This looks pretty good already, so I'm fine. Have you heard the word preset. What is a preset? A preset is a set of settings that you choose directly from another picture or from a different creator, or that you've saved by yourself that you apply directly to an image. However, they don't work for every picture. Different conditions, different sun, different lightening doesn't allow to apply a preset for all the pictures that you have. For example, I have different preset created by my own because I know which one I need to use for a different set of lighting, different set of colors, different sets of situation. There are some general preset that can make little tweaks on an image and can be used in different situation. Buying the preset online can have different prices. You can also find them for free. For example, as we're going to see in Lightroom, there are already some profiles that they're amazing and they are free. However, if you want to modify your pictures more, you may consider to buy external ones. Talking about preset and the profiles that Lightroom offers, here's what we try to do. We have this image it looks pretty good. We just need to crop it. Maybe we do like this, so the subject is in the bottom and then the village is on the top line of the grid. We're good. So we click "Okay", and then we just go to the profiles and we can play with all the presets that Lightroom offers. I really liked the modern number 8. So let's go with this, and already the image looks so professional. The only thing that we need to do after applying the profile is to play with the light. In this case, we just need to increase a little bit the exposure, and this is the result, before and after. It looks amazing. It took me probably five or six seconds to make it. As you've seen, modifying the colors means trial and error. Sometimes you just need to try them all drag and see what's the effect, and then you'll find the right combination afterwards. One thing that I do very often is that when I shoot pictures in the same location with the same angles with the same light, I just need to modify one picture and then copy and paste the settings with slight adjustments. If there is a day that is cloudy, even though the light might change a little bit, the colors will most likely remain the same throughout a day or throughout a few hours. So just modify one picture, copy and paste. For example, you're going to take 15 minutes to modify one single picture, but then if you have 20, you just need to copy and paste, and it's going to take five minutes maximum to copy and paste in all the others 20. In general, keep in mind that finding the right colors is very difficult, takes a lot of practice and a lot of time. I know that it's not easy, but just keep doing it. Just try to train your eyes to see which colors look better together, and maybe do some research on lights which are the best, which are the teal and orange or which are the combination that work. Okay, guys, this is all for now about the colors. Thank you very much for watching. I'll alert you for the next lesson where we're going to talk about details and we're going to finish the pictures that we started. Thank you. Ciao 10. Editing pt3 - Details: Hi guys. Today we're going to talk about details inside Lightroom as we're going to see there are two different menus, Effects and Details. We need to be very careful with these settings because they can break the picture. Some photographers they even say to never use clarity and texture, but honestly, I really like it. Let me show you how to do it in a proper manner using the photos that we edited before. To edit the effects and the details inside Lightroom, there are two menus called exactly like this, Effects and Details. Let's have a look at the Effects first. We have different sliders, either Texture, Clarity, Dehaze, Vignette, and then the following ones will be activated after you decrease or increase the Vignette like this and this will be activated. Texture. As I mentioned already at the beginning, one of the biggest mistake that beginners do is to increase the Texture and increase the Clarity. These picture looks awful. This is the before and this is in after, be very careful with this. Just to increase maybe a little bit sometimes and the Clarity. Both Texture and Clarity increase them a little bit. However, if you want an effect more like dreamy effect, you can decrease the Clarity. You have this blurry but not blurry. In this case it doesn't really match. Let's increase a bit the Clarity. Then the Dehaze works very well when you have some cloudy pictures. When you have some foggy images, you can increase a little bit to have more details. In this case, we don't really need it. Let's leave it zero. Vignette, sometimes it's very helpful, but if used too much, it can become really heavy. What we do here, we decrease the Vignette because in this picture will look good and decrease also the Midpoint, which means the center of the Feather of the Vignette. We just decreased the Vignette a little bit and the Midpoint as well. This is vignetting effect when we increase the Feather, you won't see anymore. It blends it within the picture. The picture is almost done. We just need to go in Detail. We have different option, but we're going to use just the Sharpening. What does that mean? It's very simple. It makes the image a little bit more sharper. But be careful because if you increase too much, it will bring up the rumor, which is basically the noise that you see in the picture. You see. We're going to increase just a bit the Sharpening and this is the final result. Before and after. Let's have a look at another picture. We're going to the Effects menu. We can increase the Texture, the Clarity may be a little bit. Be careful, as I mentioned before, you don't need to go too crazy with the clarity and even with the texture don't go too crazy. Keep it simple, keep it low. Then you can decrease maybe the Vignette. Midpoint as well, also the Feather maybe. If you decrease the Feather, you will want to see the vignetting as a circle. If you increase the Feather, you will see less the difference between the vignetting and the center. When we go in detail, we can increase a little bit of Sharpening, not too much and this is the final result before and after and I'm pretty happy with this. Let's have a look at the sunset that we already modified before. We increase the Texture a little bit, increase the Clarity as well, and maybe decrease the Vignette. by decreasing the vignetting, we're going to have more focus on the center of the image and decreasing the focus of our eyes of the external parts, even the Midpoint. In this case, because the vignetting makes a bit darker the image, we can go back into Light and increase a tiny bit the Exposure. I think this is enough for the Effects. We go in Details and increase the Sharpening a little bit. This is the before and after for this picture. Looks pretty good, isn't it? This is how you finish the pictures with Effects and Details. For this lesson, it's all. Thank you very much for watching. I'll see you in the next one where we're going to talk about the two apps, Snapseed and Lens Distortion that I love to use for post-production. 11. Magic Apps: Snapseed: In this video, we are going to have a deeper look at Snapseed, which is a Google app, and it's free both for Android and iOS. I'm going to show you all the main features that I use pretty often I would say. Sometimes happen that I shoot pictures with my camera, I edit maybe with Photoshop desktop and Lightroom. Then I like to import these photos in my phone and then add some details with Snapseed or lens distortion. Let's dig into the app. So after we open Snapseed, you can choose the picture that you want from your device or either you shoot a picture right there. For example, let's have a look at this picture. Here we have the possibility to open the Tools menu where you can find all these information, all these different features that Snapseed offers. The first one is Tune Image, where it allows you to modify all the basic settings of the image; brightness, contrast, saturation, ambience, highlights, shadows, and warmth. Basically are very similar to what we've seen with Lightroom, so I'm not going to go through these. I already edited this picture. The next menu that I want to show you is details. I really like the structure of Snapseed. Usually, I like to put it around plus ten or plus 15 depending on the image. One effect you can do with the structure is to remove it all to create these dreamy effect in a picture. It depends on how you want it. I like to have some structure in it. Now, I want to show you two of my favorite menus, selective and brush. In the selective menu that I use very often, allows you to click on a part of the image and select by zooming in with two fingers, pinching in and pinching out a bigger or smaller parts of the image based on color and luminance. What does that mean? Basically, now that I clicked here on the sky, is going to select all the parts of the image. They're very similar with luminance and colors. Then once I'm here and I selected with the red dot right there, all the red part is selected, I can drag it up or down to increase brightness, contrast, saturation, or structure. For example, let's go in brightness and then I drag my finger on the right, slide on the right to increase the brightness. Then you can see in the circle is green because I'm increasing the brightness. If I slide on the left, is going to become red. So I am decreasing the brightness on the selected area. Let's see with zero now. What I can do is to click on the plus button on the bottom to add another selective filter. For example, right now let us go on the green part on the grass. Here I can pinch in or pinch out to select more or less area. But as you can see, selecting only the greens and not the beach, not the yellows. So any of here, and even here I can do the exactly same thing. I can increase the brightness, decrease the brightness, or even decrease the saturation, or increase the saturation. It's totally up to you if you want to select some parts and modifying only a little part of the images. Next menu that I want to show you is brush. This is a bit complicated. Let me try to be as clear as possible. We have different brushes. Each brush has a different function. When we go in temperature, for example, as we've seen before, we can change to warm as yellow, or to cold tones as blue. How much we're changing depending on the number that we have down here. For example, we have plus 10, so it's going to change a lot. If we can go plus five, we can go plus five or even decrease the temperature. That means going to the cold tones. For example, let's select minus 10 temperature. Then I can zoom in or zoom out to have a bigger or smaller brush. Let's zoom in to have a smaller brush and let's paint on this rock to make it more blue, to have a cold tone. Just need you to drag your finger like this and color the image that you're modifying with these settings that you just put. The same time, you can do the exactly same thing with the other brushes. For example, if you want exposure, if you want to increase the exposure of the bottom of the picture, you can put, for example, exposure 1.0, maybe zoom in a little bit and then increase the exposure of these part of the image. Of course, now it doesn't make any sense because I already edited this picture, is already perfect, doesn't need anything else. But if we want, for example, to darken only a little part of the image with the brush, we can go in Exposure, go in minus, for example, minus 0.3. We zoom in on the left part of the image where all these people that I don't want to see and then we just paint on top of it. This is the before and after of this part. As you can see, I darken a little bit with the brush that part of the image that I didn't want to be too bright. At the same time, you can do the exact same thing with saturation. If you want to remove some saturation from a single part of the image, you can go, for example, minus 0.5 and then remove the saturation from this part of the sea, which I don't want to be too blue, I just want to be more white, more without color. This is the difference that you see. From blue, look at these part of the sea, from blue to gray to white, without colors. Let's have a look now at the healing menu, which I showed you before already a little bit. The menu that I showed you before is healing. As I mentioned before, you just need to zoom in. If you want to make the brush smaller, and then drag your finger on top of the people that you want to remove. Maybe twice to remove everything that you don't want. With people, could be pimples, could be imperfection of the photo. Snapseed is pretty good, but sometimes you need to do it more than once. For example, here these people are gone. There you go. This is the effect. You can keep going keep doing it with older people, with patient, and then you can create the perfect picture. You can use the exact technique for, for example, removing pimples from the skin. Like look at this picture, I did it just with Snapseed, and here's before and after. It's pretty easy. Another fact that you can use is vignette, is exactly same as lighting as we've seen before. You go in TOOLS and then Vignette, you drag to the left if you want a black vignetting or you drag to the right, if you want a white vignetting. Then we have the export menu that allows you to either save their original photo with the changes that you made. So you won't have the original photo, you just have the one with the adjustments or either you save a copy, so you can have both the original and the modified one. Save a copy and it's going to apply all the effects that you applied, and this is it. The last thing that I want to show you is double exposure. It is pretty difficult to understand how it works and to put into practice, but I just want to give you some examples of what you can do with this. Let's start with this picture. What the double exposure does, is that you can put a picture on top of another picture, reducing the opacity, therefore you're going to see both of them. Let me show you. So we start with this one and then we go in tools and double exposure. Here we add a new picture, we choose the picture that we want. For example, this one and then it's going to add on top with a lower opacity than normal, so you see both picture. For example, right now I'm just going to zoom the top image. This looks pretty good. What I'm going to do is you can change the opacity of the picture on top so you're going to see more or less of the picture on the bottom. Let's leave it like this for example. This one looks pretty good. What I can do is I go in Crop, select the format that I want, 7.5 rotating vertical, which is the Instagram format, and then click "Okay". This is the final picture, before and after. It's pretty cool. We export it and we're done. Let me show another example. Let's start from this picture, which is a silhouette of myself that I did during sunset. We go and then we put a double exposure and then for example, let's add the sunset that we edited before. There you go. Looks pretty good. Isn't it? Export, Save a Copy, and there you go. This is all for Snapseed. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson, where we're going to talk about lens distortion, an amazing gap for post-production [FOREIGN]. 12. Magic Apps: Lens Distortion : Hi guys. In this video, we're going to have a deeper look on Lens Distortion, one of the three app that I told you in the beginning. This is a free app that allows you to add different layers on top of the image that you've shot already. For example, if we want to add a reflection on the lens, or maybe you want to add some sun or some sun rays, or fog, or rain, or clouds, this app is really really useful to add artificial effects on top of what is your original picture. Now I want to show you a few example on how to add a sun and sun rays in a proper manner. Let's have a look at it. This is the app, Lens Distortion. When we open, we need to choose a picture we want to edit. Let's pick this one. I posted this one on Instagram so you can go and check it out if you want. I'm going to show you how I edited it. The colors in the composition is already made. I'm just going to show you that with Lens Distortion, you can add a lot of layers on top of the picture. Many of them you have to pay to have them. But you've already enough in the free version to have fun with your pictures. For example, right now, in this one, we noticed that there is the sun that is coming this way, although you don't see it, we can add a fake sun to emphasize the lightning coming from that side. For example, right now, I'm choosing this sun, placing on the right side. This is already looking pretty nice. Much better than before. But if you want to do even more, we can add another layer and then, for example, go in soft light and then tap the first one, which are sun rays. Drive the sun rays where the sun is and diminish, zooming in the circle so it becomes a bit smaller. Positioning the right side and then you tap on the soft light right here to access all the settings for these sun rays. For example, we tap "Direction" and then we can move the sun rays where we want. For example, right now, I want it to go very close to me. For example, like here, I already like this picture a lot so we could export it already. But just to show you, you can literally modify the sun rays as much as you want. If you want to make them more bright, if you want to change the color. For example, we're going temperature and you can make them more yellow or you can make them more blue. Of course, this is not real. You need to try to simulate the real conditions. Otherwise, no one will believe at this picture. For example, if you go in threshold, you can increase the number of lights that is coming out from the sun or even diminish. If you want to shorten the rays, then you go in length and you decrease the length of the rays or increase if you want. There are literally a lot of options. Let's have a look at another picture. I shot this, in the Jurassic Coast in UK with my phone. It was pretty nice. It was a golden hour. This is why the picture looks already so good. What do we need to do here is very simple. Because the sun is coming from this way, we are going to add a little sun coming their way, just to fake it. There you go. I'm already done. This is edited. Here, before and after it's pretty done good. Let's have a look at the third example. This is the Glasgow Cathedral. I was inside and the idea that I got is to add a soft light coming from this window like the sun is hitting from here. Let's see if it works. There you go. You just need to put the circle right there and maybe a bit smaller and then you go and control may be the direction. Let's go and illuminate the subject that is here in the center of the picture. We can change direction, see where it goes. This app detects automatically the highlight in the picture and creates the sun rays coming out from these highlights. These are already good enough. Not only sun and sun rays, but you can also add snow, frames, and clouds. This is another old picture, I just edited the colors a little bit. But I want to show you that if I want to emphasize the storm, I can even add some snow. For example, let's get this ethereal snow here on top. It's already looking pretty good and I did nothing. But let's add another layer just for fun. [MUSIC] We take this one for example, and we can increase the dimension and if you want, you can also edit different settings as we saw before. For example, the softness. If you want to make it less naked, less sharpened. This is the effect as the snow was very close to the camera. That is added in post, it's not real. This is the before and after. You're looking pretty good. As you can see there are a lot of options that you can put together. In this example now, I will show you different combination of different elements that can look good in the picture. For example, in this picture that I posted on Instagram, we have many, many options of combination of sun, sun rays reflection that we can add. Let's have a look at few examples. Here, let's add, for example, the sun on this side of the window. No one can really tell that this is a fake sun unless you know, for real. But eventually, we can modify the colors, the opacity, the brightness, the contrast, the softness, everything we want to make it as real as possible. In this case, for example, it's too yellow. Let's make it a little bit more white. Or let's diminish a bit, the brightness. This looks pretty good. Let's add another layer. We go in luminary, we take anything that is here, and then we put it on this side. Looks pretty good already. We can increase the blur intensity, the brightness, the opacity, everything that we want. Even here we need to change a little bit the temperature because the sun is a little bit more yellow than the reflections. Let's increase the warmth of this legacy. This looks pretty good. Let's make it again. We cancel these two layers and we make it a new one. This time we're going to add only some soft light. The sun rays. Let's place the sun rays here on the left part of the image. Like this is fine. Then we go in direction and we modify the direction, maybe a little bit more on the left. That looks pretty good. Like the sun is entering on this side, illuminating myself. Even here, if we want to make it less long, we can decrease the length or even increase the length based on how we like it. In this case, we can put another legacy, for example, on the left side to simulate an object that is in the foreground. We can increase the blur if needed, or change the color. Even this one looks pretty good. Before and after. Let's have a look at the third and last example from this picture. Let's add the soft light, the sun rays on the right side of the picture this time. We decrease this circle to make it less impactful on the picture on this side and then we modify the direction, for example, going to the left. This looks pretty good. Then we make another layer and we add an eclipse. It's like we simulate a reflection on the lens, for example here. This looks pretty good. This is fine. Then we click if we want to modify the colors, the brightness, the opacity. I'm going to bring down the brightness a little bit, and then even the opacity a little bit down, and then maybe the saturation a bit down so we make it more gray. This is more than enough before and after, looks good. After we finish with the editing of the pictures we can export it. The basic version of Lens Distortion allows only 80 percent of quality, which is still enough for Instagram or for social media. If you want to print this photo, maybe you should buy the premium version or you should edit the picture on the desktop version. Once again, remember that it's the best practice is to add all the elements that you want when you're shooting directly without having to add the post-production. However, these apps are really useful if you want to make an image more interesting, I'll see you in the next video. Ciao [MUSIC] 13. Optional Apps: In this video, I want to show you some optional apps that could be useful to enhance the quality of your photo. Whether is about creating different effects, apply filters or both. Some really cool compositions. I am using an iPhone and some of the following are only for iOS, but the majority are for both. Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure that if they're not available right now, they'll be downloadable pretty soon. Same concept as with Lightroom and lens distortions, the majority of these apps have a limited free version and a premium one which requires either a membership or a onetime purchase. Now keep in mind that I barely use these apps because I tend to create my complicated edit and compositions using Photoshop on desktop. Obviously, they can be much more useful for you if you don't have Photoshop or simply don't know how to use it. But yes, it requires some time to master these apps as it is with Photoshop and any other editing software. I see a lot of people on the Internet on Tiktok, on IG doing some crazy things with these apps. I'm just going to give you an overview and I won't go in depth about them. The first app that I suggest you have a look, it's called Picsart, and it's probably the most used app for creating incredible composition just using an iPhone. Yes, it's main Photoshop for smartphones. Some people have literally exploded on social media because of their creation with Picsart. Lots of different possibility and features they just take time to master as I said. When you open the app, you have already a lot of options among different templates and actions that allow you to make your photo same as the ones in these templates. We can scroll down and see what's going on right here. If we want to do, for example, this photo, you can see the before and after already. But then when we click on it, you see that there is original, crop, fits, stickers, mask, and noise. These are all actions that the app will take on your original photo to make it like the one that you see on the template. Let's have a look at another template. Let say for example, this one, I don't know. Let's try. This one does crop, motion, and film FX3. Let's pick, for example, this photo. Let's put it right here. There you go, apply. Then the app will do the magic itself, and then you can move around even for shadows. Of course, everything is customizable and you can move them based on your liking. There you go. This is the end of the template. Obviously, you can start with your own image from zero and play around with all the features like filters, stickers and lots more. You can find also some retouching tools that uses AI to fix your skin and apply auto magic tricks through your face. Let's have a look at them. For example, we're going plus we create a blank canvas using any photo that you like, and then we go in retouch and then you can do a lot of different things. For example, you can smooth the face, let it charge. As you can see I lost probably three or four years of age. Can both use auto or manual. You can see I have now a baby face. There you go. It's pretty magic. Used a lot by girls, not much by men, but it's totally up to you. I highly suggest checking it out and if you want some inspiration, you can check out @arianteo on TikTok, IG, and YouTube. He literally became famous, thanks to his creation on Picsart and he's really amazing to do some magic with a smartphone. The second app that I want to mention is Crystaliq. It applies kaleidoscope lens effects or mirror or broken glass effects within its built-in editor. You can customize those of different parameters, pick how many repetitions, displace, aberration, control of the blur into edges, and lots of other cool stuff. You can also do the same thing with videos, even this one. Check it out. The third app is Photoroom. The main feature of this app is that it has built-in background remover, that is pretty solid I would say. It's super useful if you need to do some product photography, if you own a business, or just want to have some fun posting some objects. Even here you can start from templates and to be honest, they're very well-crafted and they could be used to create some serious beautiful compositions for product imagery, profile pictures, collections, e-commerce, magazine covers, podcast covers, YouTube thumbnails, discount badges, and lots of other things. Next app is called SCRL, and it's fundamentally an editor for IG multi posts. Do you know when you have these beautiful posts on IG that have photos within the posts that matches when you slide. Well, this app allows to create carousels with Instagram multiples feature. You can freely layer your camera roll pictures across multiple frames in your Canvas to create better stories and increase your engagement. For example, if you have a landscape photo and if you don't want to sacrifice it and post it vertically, you can use this app to create a perfect carousel and showcase the same image across multiple single photos in the same post. The next one is called Unfold and creates beautiful and engaging stories from minimal and elegant templates, stickers, or text. I use this app many times because it allows me to frame the picture as I want and therefore enhance its qualities before posting it on stories. I can also put many pictures in a single post and modify text, stickers, and dimension. This is very useful when you're going out for a shoot. You have, let's say 10 pictures and you'd like to post in your stories, but you don't want to post them all individually to avoid ******* off your followers. What do you do? Use Unfold to put multiple stories in a single canvas. There are lots of apps that do the same thing, but this one has a very unique and elegant style. If you have, let's say, eight photos you want to post, you can use a frame of three twice, and then a frame of two once. You have eight photos but in three stories only. The next app is called Mojo, and it's basically the same thing as Unfold, but in this case, you can add some animation to your stories. You can use videos in a more compelling and storytelling way. Now it's totally up to you. Some people prefer Mojo, some people like me prefer Unfold, because it's more basic and minimalist let's say. Next on the list, which is not really a photo editing app, but it's more for planning social media post and it's called Unum. Even here I use it just to plan my grid. You can connect it to your IG or simply at photos on the go. This is my go-to app to plan the grid, not fully satisfied as I'd like to change a few things and the free version I have so I have only a limited amount of posts there, but it does the job. Until I find something better, I'll stick with this one. Then last app that I want to mention is called Capcut and until now it's the best free video editor for mobile that I've tried so far. I tend to edit my reels and Tiktok on mobile whenever there's only some basic editing required. Everything that requires a little bit more complicated edits with overlay, with keyframes, with masking, with music, or some other stuff, then I use Final Cut Pro on my desktop. But this one, honestly, it's pretty, pretty good. If you don't have a professional editor on your computer, if you didn't have a computer, then this app has also keyframes as masking options and allows to create beautiful composition that almost looks like films. This was the last app of the list. Thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next video. 14. Portrait Photography: In this video, I wanted to show you how you can maximize the potential of your smartphone when talking about portraits. In particular, I'll show you how to take dramatic black background photos just on your own. First of all, let me tell you something that you should avoid. If you have a modern smartphone that has the 0.5 function, the ultra-wide camera, you absolutely need to avoid it when talking about portraits. This is because very wide-angled cameras, they'll destroy your face, they'll squeeze your face in this way, and then you'll just look bad. This is the same thing with cameras. When you want to take a beautiful portrait, you want to avoid some wide lens like 16 millimeter, or 14 millimeter, or whatever you have, the best way is to wherever 35 onwards millimeter, which equals to 1x of our smartphone. Even better is to use a longer lens, let's say, a 70 millimeter, which correspond into the phone of a two pair zoom. So never use 0.5, never used wide cameras, but try to use the two pair function on your phone. However, don't go over the normal, the native zoom of your phone. Let's say, when you open the camera, you have 0.51 or 2x on the camera of your phone, don't go over that, don't zoom in in a picture because that's a digital zoom, and what it does is basically just trying to picture. It's much better to use the native zoom like the one that you see there, for example, two pair, and then crop in in the picture afterwards. Never zoom in more than the native zoom, but crop the picture in post-production if you have to do so. This will retain the maximum quality of a photo. Imagine this, two pair is maximum quality, the more you zoom in or the more you crop in, you lose quality. But it is better to crop in instead of zooming in with your fingers, this is a general rule. The next thing I wanted to talk about is how you position the light, and this is key in photography, and what I'm goings to say works both with camera and with phone. The goal is try to enhance our face shape, and therefore you don't want to have flat light in front of your face. Instead of having a light in front of your face, you should have it placed at 45 degrees towards your face, and even when we have a ring light, that's the biggest mistake that almost everyone does. What happens is that the majority of people use the ring light like this because the phone holder is exactly in the center of the ring light, and this is okay, but if you want to make it better, we should have the ring light coming from this side, 45 degrees in front of our face instead of having flat in the center, because this will enhance our face shape and we'll create some beautiful shadows, for example, here, or maybe with our eyes, with our nose, with our cheeks. Instead, this should be the right setup for perfect photos. We have the phone right in the center at my eye level and then the ring light coming 45 degrees topside on my face, and this will help a lot creating beautiful images. Now, I have a big light right there that is flattening out, but that's also the concept. Because the light is coming from this way, then you can see that there are some shadows here. Instead, if I would have had the light coming directly in the front, would've been a flat face with not much movement and would've been very interesting. This is why you always have the light 45 degrees towards my face. This is the same thing if you have a window, never shoot a portrait in harsh light, unless that's the effect you want to obtain. As we said before, blue and golden hour are the best time, and when you have a window, don't stay exactly in the front of it, but just try to have it on the side 45 degrees, if possible. Next tip for portrait is always try to stay as far as possible from the background, at least two or three meters. This way, you'll be able to blur the background and therefore create depth in the picture. Even if you need to create, for example, your headshot, try to not stay attached to the wall, but stay two or three meters further away, depending on the style of picture you want to achieve might be worth having a plain background or not, and that's totally based on the situation. You can buy some basic paper on the color that you want. It could be useful also in product photography or you can use different type of background, for example, like this one that you have as a wallpaper right here, could be cool for photography, or just maybe in your house and when you are outdoor, or use plants, use whatever you want. But consider also having a plain background when you're talking about portraits, that's helped focusing directly on the subject without being distracted by what's around. With all this being said, let's see how we can take a black background dramatic portrait just using our smartphone. Well, the first thing that we need and the only thing that we need is a strong source of light. In this case, I will show you how to do it with just a ring light, and as I've shown you, we're not going to use it in front of our face, but we're going to use it 45 degrees towards this way, and it is also really important to have the key light extremely close to your face because this will create smooth shadows. I'm going to use also a fill light. A fill light, it's something that stay on the opposite side of the main light. The main light is coming this way, the fill light is coming this way, and I'm going to use a teal color with this one. Then the third light, we're going to use a yellow light on the back that is going to help us separate even more from the background and have this kind of glow, yellow glow that you see right here in portraits. Another very important factor is staying at least two or three meters further away from the background. Let's start setting it up. We can have this one right here, so we're going to set the colors, this ones will be yellow, and this will be blue, and this will be white. Cool. Then we're going to set up the phone right here and there you go. First is going to be the setup. If you are alone and you want to take your own self portraits, then you need to have something to take the focus and to manage the light first. To simulate, there was your face, and to do this, we're going to use a white t-shirt because our skin is pretty bright so we're going lock the focus and the light on a white t-shirt on this stand, but you can use whatever you have. This will simulate my face. Then on the phone, we're going click on the t-shirt and drag up and down to manage the light. But first, we need to turn off everything else. In this case, we're going to use two pair as always, then we're going to keep pressing on the white t-shirts to lock the focus and the luminosity, and then we drag down with the finger to then find the right spot so the highlights are not blurred. I think this looks fine, then we remove the holder. [NOISE] We're going to place ourselves here. Then with remote or the Apple Watch like I have right now, we're just going to control the phone or you can put a timer in your phone, up to you. Taking this original photo, we're going to import it into Lightroom. So we go into plus from camera roll and then we pick the one that we want. I pick this one, and then we are going to make it right crop in, like so. This is very zoomed in. The first thing that I want to do when we edit a portrait is decrease the texture, which will result in a much smoother skin. We decrease the texture, like so, and this is already much better than before. This is before and this is after, if we look at this area right here in the middle, and then we're going to increase the contrast a tiny bit. Maybe going to color and drag the tint towards the magenta so it has a better skin, and then maybe we decrease the vibrance a tiny bit. Then we go back in light and see what this lighters do. Here the highlights could be bumped up, maybe plus 10, there you go, and then the shadows, we leave that minus 10, and there you go. Now, eventually, this picture is already finished, there's not much that I wanted to do. However, if you have the premium version of Lightroom, we can adjust it even more, so we go in selective and we create some radial filters on my eyes. We zoom in and then we decrease the filter until it's covering only the eye. Yes, there you go. Then we're going to increase the exposure of this, and then because I have blue eye, I might want to drag the temperature towards the blue, and then in details, we increase the sharpness just of the eye. There you go, and then we'll click Okay. Then we're going to do the same exact thing with the other eye. In selective, we have another radial filter right here, and then we increase the exposure, then temperature towards the blue, there you go, and increase the sharpness of the eye. That's pretty much it, and this is before and this is after. If you want to correct your face, you can just go into Snapseed, and with healing, you are going to remove all the pimples that you have, or the imperfection that you have in your face, that's totally up to you. If you have someone that is helping you is even better, and everything you need to make sure is to have this ring light as close as possible to your face before it enters the frame, and then you're going to click on the face, and then keep pressing to lock the focus, and then drag down your finger until everything else goes black. Yeah, that's it. Now to obtain the best result is always better to rotate your head and your face a little bit towards your key light instead of doing the other side. Look at my face right now, now my eyes are not as bright as before, whereas if I look at the ring light, then it's much better. I'm much lighter in my face, plus this light here on my side is helping to create depth and to create a little bit of movement, same thing with the back one. If we turn these off, it's going to be the exact same thing, but a little bit more dramatic and with less depth. With this photo is exactly the same concept as we did with the previous one, so we're going to take the image and put it in Lightroom, and then this time, I want to show you how you can copy the settings from the previous one and then apply to this one. We go in Lightroom, from Camera Roll, and then we pick the photo, click Okay, then we go into previous one in these three dots in the top right corner and we click Copy Settings, then we click Okay, then we go in the second photo, three dots again, and then Paste Settings, and this already pasted into settings from before. But because I previously used some selective function, then I need to zoom in and drag these radial filters on top of my eyes. There you go. This could be already a great result. If I want, I can crop it a little bit in, like so, so I can have my left eye on the top right corner of the grit as you can see here, then we click Okay, and eventually we can play around with the colors, the temperature, or the tint, I think I like this one a lot, and then I drag the tint towards the magenta. This is the final result, we got before and then after. I'm pretty happy with the results. As you can see, I just use a simple ring light, and by controlling the light, then we can obtain some really, really impressive results. I hope you enjoyed this video, and I hope you're going to try to take your own black background photo. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 15. Creative Photography: When it comes to creative photography, the most difficult part is imagining what you want to do. It's really about the visualization of something that you'd like to create. Many times what happens is that you have something in your mind, you try it, and then something else comes up and it's even more amazing than the original idea. Other times instead, the idea you had in your mind turns out to be pretty garbage. Imagining a portrait, it's much easier than imagining something creative, something that goes beyond what we see normally in our daily life. The beauty of creative photography is that you can use a lot of different prompts to create beautiful compositions. For example, paper foil. It's something that you have in the kitchen that could be very useful in photography. Let's try to take a shot of a watch just using paper lights and a couple of lights. Now, I want to show you how it can take creative photos of this watch simply using a watch, some fishing line, our smartphone, an iPad holder or something that can help us make the watch float, and a couple of lights. The first thing is I want to attach this iPad holder here so we can then use the fishing line to make the watch float like this. Then next thing will be to open this paper foil and place it on the table. I think this could look fine and then we place the watch here on the iPad holder and we find the right distance. This could work. Then everything we need to do, we just need to use two colored lights. In this case, these are not lamp, but you can use anything you feel like bad lamps, or if you want to buy cheap options, you can get some gel on Amazon that you can place in front of your light and will make your light colored. In this case, I'm just going to use some classic complementary colors, which is blue and orange, teal and orange, but you can use red and green, or blue and yellow and other types of colors that can look good together. I'm just going to place the red one on the bottom right here, and then with the blue one, I'm just going to move around and see where it looks good and then where we can place it to then snap a picture with our phone. Now I'm just going to turn off all the lights around. Once we opened the camera, you want to have a look with the other light and see where it looks good. I think here it looks fine. We place down the light and then we play around with the intensity maybe. Also, we can rotate the phone so we can go closer to the table because the camera is on the upper part of the phone most of the times, but really depends on the phone that you have. In this case, here looks good. Then I'm going to just a few pictures, even if the phone is moving. It's best if it's not moving so let me try to fix it. This looks fine. Then we tap on the watch and maybe we decrease a little bit the exposure and then boom, we snap a picture. We can do the same thing also using Lightroom. We open the built-in camera and then we go close to the watch, tap for focus, and snap a picture. That's pretty much it. Now, let's have a look at how we can edit these pictures. To edit the first picture, we're going to first import the photo into Lightroom, if you've shot with the normal camera. We go to Lightroom, you click on Import Photo From Camera roll, and then you pick your favorite. Then here we're just going to touch up a little bit of light, maybe increase the contrast, increase the exposure a tiny bit and the shadow as well, so we see better the watch. Then we're going to try increasing the clarity maybe and see what happens. A tiny bit like so but decrease the texture. Then let's see what happens when we change the temperature. This is a good color, I like it. Then we go in Mix and maybe we drag the hue towards the blues right here and then we check what the orange is. I like this one. Let's see if this will saturate them. No, we'll leave it like this. That's pretty much it. Then I want to see if adding a vignette will create a beautiful effect. Let's see. Probably, yes. That's pretty good. The focus now is really on the phone and this is the before and after. Not bad. Eventually, if you want, we can use Snapseed to remove this little lasso right here. We export the photo and then we go in Snapseed. Then we open the photo and then we go in Tools, Healing, then we zoom in and we try to remove this part. Now you can take your time doing it. You click Okay and once you're satisfied, you just export it again. That's the result for this picture. Same story if you've shot directly in Lightroom. We're just going to pick the picture. As you can see here, it looks burned, but because this is a DNG file it's much bigger and therefore, we can drag down the exposure and probably bring back all the details. Let's go in Light. We drag down the exposure and there you go. Everything is back. We can do the same adjustments as we did before or we can do it differently. That's totally up to you. I'm going to increase the vignette a little bit. There you go. With the midpoint, nice. Then I'm going to drag the exposure up a tiny bit and this looks sexy already, before and after. Not bad without even touching colors or nothing else. Even here, same thing as before. If you just want to remove the fishing line, you can just go into Snapseed and operate with the healing function. This is the final result. One more thing that I love to use in my photography are fairy lights and are the ones that you see here, here, down here. They're very cheap, but they're very useful in lots of different situation, and I think you can find it on Amazon per pack of four for 10 bucks or a little bit more, but very cheap. I have them in my bedroom, in my YouTube Studio, and I can also use them in some photo shoots with people to create depth, but not only people, they can be used also for any type of photography including clarity photography. Keep in mind that whenever any type of light is auto-focused, it will create a beautiful effect like the one that you see right here and, therefore, you can play around with both foreground and background of the picture. Let's say you have a subject in the middle, you can use fairy lights very close to your camera or phone so they'll be auto-focused creating an extra layer in the foreground. You can do the same exact thing but put in these slides in the background like what's happening here. Concept for creative photography is literally using whatever you have in your daily life, like simple objects that if put together will create a beautiful composition. In this case, I just bought some colored paper and I used some makeup from my girlfriend to create a fake IDV at home, with nothing but a ring-light. Now it's definitely not a picture that you would put as a main advertising of a huge company, but if you're a small business or you just want to have fun, this is pretty good already and can definitely enter your Instagram feed. Then you can use one of the apps that we mentioned before, to maybe create even better compositions starting with a template or creating your own. You can match your feed colors or your business mood. There is another trick that can be useful in product photography which is simply using two white papers around the object and by staying very close to a window, and simply dragging up the exposure like we did before in the last video. You can achieve a perfect white background photo. Even if it's not perfect, you can always touch it up and use local adjustments in Lightroom or a Snapseed to make it perfect. For this next example, I want to show you how we can take a cool picture of this camera with the cage. Now it could be any auto type of object. I picked this one because I think it could be interesting and it looks very professional even though there's really nothing more than a camera. I have the white table, but to make it more dramatic, I'm going to use a piece of black plastic just on the top of the table, and then I'm going to place the cage right here. As always, I have around 2-3 meters from the background, and this is a black background because I want to have this dramatic effect. Even in this case, I'm going to use two different lights, with two complementary colors. I'm using these two-night lights and yeah. We're going to just keep teal and orange, because it's a combination that works 99 percent of the times. We're going to place it very close. Now, that's pretty much done. We just need to grab our phone and try to snap a picture of this scene while turning off all the other lights. Once I'm here, I can use the normal camera or always better-using Lightroom. For the normal camera, we just click two pair, s and then we tap on the camera to get the focus, and then we drag the finger down to decrease the luminance and then we snap a picture, boom. Now in this photo, there's not much that I want to do. But if I want to touch it up a little bit, I can import the photo in Lightroom again, and maybe touch up a little bit the lighting or if there is any mistake or maybe if the image is not straight. We go into Lightroom, we import from camera roll, then we're going to adjust, to cropping. As I expected, it wasn't perfectly straight. We're just going to make it perfectly straight, and then we put it in the middle like so trying to maybe respect the rule of thirds by having 1/3 of the table and 3/3 of the background. Yes, this looks pretty good. Then let's operate a little bit with the light. We increase the contrast and decrease the exposure a tiny bit. Then maybe pick up the shadows. Then we go in color and mix, and maybe we modify the blue a little bit towards the teal, and we desaturate it a little bit. Very nice. Then maybe we can increase the clarity a tiny bit and decrease the texture, and decrease the vignette as well. There you go. This looks pretty good. If we want we can remove all these little dots using Snapseed, or if you have the premium version of Lightroom, we can use the selected function to create some range of filters in this area and just darken it up. We're going light and we drag down to exposure, there you go. This looks fine already. We export it to camera roll. If you have a little bit of budget and you'd like to invest in something that could help your product photography, your creative photography, I love absolutely love the smoke machine, which I have here and I think is around $30 or $40US on Amazon. It's pretty cheap, but I use it very often. In this case, I want to spray some smoke around and see what we can do with our smartphone. Even here, we tap on the camera, then we drag down the exposure and we snap a picture, boom, there you go. That's pretty much it. We don't even need to edit too much, but let's see how we can maybe touch it up a little bit. We import it in Lightroom if you haven't used it before, and then we're going to just touch up a little bit the light, so increase the contrast maybe here. Then let's see what happens with the highlights. I like it a little bit more, then we decrease the shadows to make it even more dramatic. Then we go into effect, we decrease the vignetting because I want the focus to be in the center, like this. Then we increase the exposure a tiny bit because the vignette made it a little bit darker. There you go. I think that's pretty much it and not much that I want to do before and after. Once again, creative photography is all about imagination. If you think you don't have enough imagination, then let me tell you that you're not alone. It's normal, even for me, not having many ideas out of the box is absolutely standard. But also let me tell you that the majority of people just copy what they see outside and they add their own touch. Trust me on this, even if you try to copy everything you see, you're always going to end up with something slightly different than what you expect it. Because it's very difficult copying paste the same exact thing. My suggestion, especially if you are at the beginning, is this one, open TikTok or IG Reels or YouTube and watch 10 videos, not 11, not nine,10 videos, and then you stop. Pick three of them and try to copy at least one of the ideas that you see, just with things that you have at home. Try to make it your own, try to take action, because that's the only way you can develop ideas and you can train your brain to see and to visualize what the result could be. The majority of the ideas that come to my mind are there because of the process, and because I'm trying things out, and then oh, another idea will pop up. Oh, maybe if I put this one on the other side and I didn't think about it, then something will happen. Just train your mind, and then your brain will start seeing more compared to what you see right now without experience. This is really key. I hope you enjoyed this video. I'll see you in the next one. 16. How to Start a Photography Business: In this video, I'd like to introduce you a few key concepts that could be very helpful in case you'd like to start earning doing what you love, or like it happened to me, transforming it in a full-time activity that is now generating a much higher income that I would have ever imagined in a few years back. The reason is very simple. I started making videos and taking photos only for fun, just to share them with friends and family. This last bit is where the magic happens. By posting it online, you're going to dramatically increase your chances to be asked by someone that you already know to create some content for them. Yes, you probably never land huge multinational paying clients as your first job. Instead, it will be probably be someone very close to you that will ask you to take simple photos or videos of their small businesses or even better, you propose yourself to the small activities around your place, wherever you live. It could be as simple as, "Hey, John, I went to your restaurant the other day and I loved it. I'm starting out with photography and if you want, I can take some shots of your dishes to post on your social media for free." While it's very difficult to land paying clients at the very beginning of your career if you're shooting with your phone, it's much easier when you doing it for free. Here it comes down to you. The hard option is waiting until someone comes to you and ask your services, or easier, you start proposing yourself in a very informal and chew way. I absolutely know that it is very embarrassing at first, but listen, what could be the worst thing that could ever happen while you propose yourself? The public just blindly tell you that for the moment they prefer to stay as they are, and that's it. Obviously, you need to start with businesses that don't have amazing pictures already because then if you you and you take picture with your smartphone and they're not very good, then it doesn't work. Don't go for the biggest chain of your city as they probably already have marketing gauges who're taking care of all of this behind them. Instead, you can go to smoke businesses or friends and just ask them nothing to lose trust me. However, if you feel too shy to go and ask, there is an easier yet less impactful way to build your portfolio. I mean less impactful because the emotions that you feel while asking is extremely beneficial for your development and future business. Sooner or later, you'll have to deal with these things, so better to be as early as possibly and learn as much as possible. Anyway, the second birth is to create content on your own with things you have at home. This means finding whatever objects, person, or landscape to create content with. Despite my pretty solid portfolio today, I keep doing these random on-page shootings just for myself to strengthen my expertise, to expand my portfolio, to learn new things and just because I love it. For example, quite recently I wanted to create this Gucci campaign at home, just with my phone and with things that I had in the house. I wanted to challenge myself and doing this helped me pushing the boundaries of my creative thinking. Now that we have understood the first key concept on how to start creating a portfolio, we need to apply the second key thing, that is the one that is blocking the most people and this is posting everything you create online. This is how I started my career and it's the cheapest way to get your first paying clients. One of my biggest job for a Mercedes Benz Hong Kong arrived from a request of a friend. He was an influencer in Hong Kong and he asked me to shoot a video for him with the new service that Mercedes was offering. That was the very first time that I saw the effect of these posting online thing. To be honest, I didn't start like ten years earlier. It was maybe about six to ten to 12 months since I started posting constantly. Yes, with time I saw some pattern that kept repeating while getting jobs, but keep in mind that these things take time. Therefore, the earlier you start, the easier it is to see results. Imagine you own a business, you have plenty of things to do. You're launching a new product that took you ages to develop and you should be proud of. The very last thing that you want is to hire a random guy that made you a good price to take some pictures of your products that will look [NOISE]. Instead, I'm pretty sure that you absolutely want someone you trust and you know that they'll do an amazing job. This is called safety and it's exactly what everyone is looking in any kind of cooperation. Guess what? It is achievable by showing consistent result over time. If a person sees you posting two amazing videos per week online, no matter the platform, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, whatever, if they constantly see your creations and your style is related with their business, there's a very high chance that they'll think about hiring you because they saw a radian to have proof of your amazing talent. Thanks to the use of social media, we are infusing trust into Joes who see our content. But this happens only if you maintain certain consistency. Find people to delegate. It is difficult and social media are an extremely powerful tool to connect our work to someone who's looking for it, even if we don't notice this. But here's the problem, the majority of people keep their amazing work in their hand disk and never publish it. Well, in this case, there is zero chance that people will start noticing you. I'm extremely aware how difficult it is to start sharing your work online. Loads of doubts, thoughts about people criticizing you, the self-confidence that tells you that you have nothing interesting to share and that your work sucks and so on and so forth. There's only one solution to all these problems together, just do it and stop caring about anything else because other peoples' critics won't pay your bills. To be very honest, I've had no one criticizing me directly for posting photos and videos online. What's the problem? As long as you stay humble, there's nothing to worry about. Someone might do it behind your back but first of all, you'll never know. Second of all, same concept, they won't pay your bills. Well, on the other hand, if your problem is not about fear, but time, well, it's even easier to solve. Make time based on your priorities. If monetizing your passion is not a priority, that you probably won't make time for it. You are in full control of your actions and organization of your tasks. Indeed, it does require an incredible amount of time, but my experience has proven that the time used was simply invested and not wasted. Well, this being said, the third concept is exactly this, time and consistency. There's absolutely no reasons why you shouldn't make it, why you can't make it. The only reason could be because you just give up too early or not put enough effort throughout the process, which means not dedicating time to mastering your craft. I don't want to stay too long on this because the concept is very simple. You start and based on the amount of effort you put, you'll make it sooner or later. The only thing that could truly stop you is that you give up. Now that we understood that we need to create a portfolio, post it online and be consistent, how do we actually start making money out of this? Even in this case, the concept is pretty simple. The more solid your portfolio is, the more leverage you have to charge higher amounts to any type of client. There's no way I can tell you how much to charge your client because it really depends on loads of different factors. But let me tell you this, after you've completed some free gigs, you can start looking online how much a photo or videographer charge per their service and based on that, you can start proposing prices. This is very much associated with the type and the quality of work that you do and most importantly, your region. If you live in India, probably the prices of these services will be very different than from New York because the lifestyle, the style and loads of different things are very different from two different countries. I'm pretty sure you can find creators that post online their price list, so start from there and then it's all about adjusting. You can start low then increase every time the amount you ask and when you'll start losing several jobs because the price was too high, you have probably found your sweet spot for that moment. These can change at anytime and we'll gradually increase once your confidence and portfolio become stronger down the line. One more thing that you can do, which worked quite a few times for me, it's asking directly to your client a rough budget to have for that project. You can also ask them an indicative price of what other videographers proposed for different services. Don't be afraid to ask. Well, with all these being said, the final question is, can I make money just with mobile photography? My answer is absolutely yes. But yes, there's a but. Getting external clients to pay for photos and videos with the phone is not impossible, but it's definitely difficult. The best way to start getting paid if you have only a mobile phone and don't actually want to invest in the camera is actually building an audience in whatever niche you're in. Then would be much easier to get brands that will pay your posting services. Not directly for the content creation, creating and taking photos or videos. One clear example is Jordi Koalitic, who is a genius content creator who's been probably making a fortune thanks to his phone transitions and mobile creations. You could be the next Jordi, which means exploding in a very short period of time and start earning loads of money on the spot, or which is easier, you won't be like Jordi, but you'll be like the majority of us by first start doing free gigs around you, for you and for others. Second, posting these things online, while also third, putting a lot of effort and doing it consistently. Then there will be time in the future to talk about pricing strategy and in-depth market analysis that will help you boost your sales. But I think for the time being, this is more than enough work for you. Before ending this video, I'd like to mention one last thing, that is probably the most important comparing to anything else, believe in yourself. Let me tell you again, believe in yourself. I'll see you in the next video. 17. Bonus: Tips and Tricks: Welcome to the last and bonus video for this course. First of all, if you've reached this point, it means you are really committed to increase your photography skills. Thank you very much for watching. I'm really proud of you. I want to tell you few tips and tricks that I use every time to increase my productivity when shooting photos. How do we shoot real photos? How do we shoot photos that look different from amateur? One of the biggest difference is finding different angles. What does that mean? Many people when they shoot, they just take out their phone and they shoot pictures right from here without moving, without stepping maybe forward, backward, right, left, just take pictures like this, in the eye's perspective. Yourself, you should try to bend down, try to take pictures from below, very close to the ground, or maybe try to shoot pictures from the top, like this. Try different angles, try different perspective. Don't shoot only one picture, but shoot multiple one. In the same spot, if you find a building that is interesting, there's a car that is interesting, there's a landscape that is interesting , try different angles. Maybe put an object in the foreground, or maybe stay very close to the ground, maybe take one at the top, take many. After, on the editing side, you're going to choose which one works the best for you Instagram feed, for your Facebook, or just which one you liked the best. For examples, here you can see some photos where I shot very close to the ground. Actually, if you haven't looked at my Instagram feed, I would say 90% of the photos that you see there are shot very close to the ground. One of the reasons why you do it is because first of all, you have a different perspective. The second of all, is easy to find leading lines, railways, hand rails, fences, rails, buildings, roads, street, anything can be good for picture. Anything if used properly, can be interesting in a picture. However, you need to be careful because you have to try to eliminate all these elements that create distraction in a picture. If there is a person extra, try to eliminate every object that is not purposely in that picture and also try to give a meaning to every picture that you shoot. Try to capture emotion, try to describe the picture when you're taking. Don't just go and just [inaudible] Take a minute, try to think about this. Another tip that I can give you when shooting with your phone is try to shoot through things. For example, if you find a fence, try to shoot through that hole, try to shoot through that fence, because the fence and the object in the foreground will be blurry while the background will be on focus. You're going to create depth in the image, as we talked before. Another example that you can try is to take flowers, like anything or any other object, and put it very close to the camera like this. In this case, at the same time, this object will be blurry, but the background will be on focus, and you're going to create photos that will be much more interesting. Try it. One thing extremely important when shooting with your phone, you need to clean your camera every single time that you're shooting. Very time it gets dirty, when you put it in your pocket, when you're using with the hands, maybe you touch it, maybe you don't see it, clean the camera every time with a t-shirt, with a piece of cotton, with literally anything that you have and you find in your pocket. All right guys. Thank you very much for watching. I know that throughout these videos, I've given you a lot of information. Feel free to watch back all the videos that you want. If you don't remember something, feel free to go back. Feel free to message me on Instagram. I try to respond to everyone. One more thing. When you're asking me a question, try to be as specific as possible. It is not because I'm a bad person, but if everyone would ask me, can you teach me photography? It's way too difficult, and it would require me too much time. So please, if you have any question, feel free to reach out, but be as specific as possible. Show me one of the picture that you've shot and ask me something specific. For example, how about the composition, how about if I do this. Try to take your time asking me the question because if you write me hi, and then I need to reply back hi, and then you write me the question, and then I need to go back, its going to take too much time, and it won't be possible. It is not respectful from other people that are waiting in response from me. Once again, It would be really appreciated if you could share any picture on your story. If your learning anything, if you're taking picture using these steps, feel free to tag me both in your post and in your stories, or even on TikTok, wherever you want. Thank you so much again, guys, I'll see you in the next one. Ciao.