Transcripts
1. Welcome!: Hey guys, Gareth Pon here. I'm Africa's top Instagramer. I'm really excited to be in New York. I'm running around Saha in Chinatown capturing some images. I'll be teaching you about how to shoot on an Android device. We're going to basically today capture three images for the project of candid moments within your city. It's going to be really cool, really practical. I'm excited to share a bit of some tricks that I've learned because I know that sometimes Android users get a bit of rejection. So here's what I've learned and ready to go.
2. Project Overview: So guys, the final project of this class will be to upload three images that you've shot and edited on your Android device. You'll be going out into cities, capturing some candid moments, capturing something that's really interesting to you. Maybe get about something weird, about something interesting, whatever really just sparks your interests. The initial project that you have will be to upload your best five to 10 images once you've gone out and taken some shots, and that'll be uploaded as a project to the gallery. The final project will be to upload your three chosen images that you've edited on your device. That's something that will let you get a bit of an experience of selecting your top images, but then also refining it down to the three images that you will eventually use.
3. Picking a device and shooting: So in this section, we'll be talking about how you choose your device and then talking about a bit of the camera apps that you can use on an Android device. So firstly, the reason why it's really nice to shoot on a phone is that you can get away with a lot more. It's this intimidating if you want to take portraits. I've often gotten to rooftops and abandoned buildings purely because they're like, "Okay, it's fine. You just have a phone, so we'll let you in." It's really nice in that sense because it gives you a lot more freedom than having a big black, clunky camera. Nowadays, using an Android device is something that's quite common because firstly, there's a lot of different features you can get across the board. So you can actually pick a phone that really suits you as an individual. You get a lot of different features, you'd get a lot of different little tweaks here and there that make each Android device quite different. I personally shoot on a Samsung Note 5. It's got a great camera, the megapixel camera is really high. It shoots beautiful images. It's got a 1.9 aperture. So these all little things that you are to consider when you're going out to shoot and when you're going out to choose your phone. So there are three main camera apps that you can use when you're shooting on an Android device. The first one is obviously your native camera. Native camera comes with your phone. It's the pre-installed camera app. There's a few settings in here. There's a lot of preset modes. I usually just shoot on order, sometimes I shoot on Pro when I have more time. Order is really great because it does a lot of stuff for you. Within the app, there's a lot of pre built-in, third party modes that you can use like the panorama, video collage, slow-motion, whatever it is, because we're mainly focusing on photos and that's what we're going to do. So the first thing with the native camera app is that you usually want to have HDR on. It just pulls up some details over the shadows. Make sure that your megapixels are set to the highest function because the higher resolution your images are, the better it is that you can crop in. If you go into your settings, just go through, the rule of thumb in this is just set everything to the highest setting possible. At the moment, I've got grid lines on, location tags on which is always nice to be able to just have that location tag on your image. Apart from that, I also have my volume keys set turn on to take a photo, which is great. I always have these little options all the voice control where I can actually say shoot and then the phone takes the photo, but I'm going to leave that off for now. Flash, I never shoot with a flash. Just it makes the image look a bit unnatural. In worst cases, you can shoot with a flash, but don't use those photos on Instagram. Your megapixels, highest equals bigger resolution. Some of your apps will have little effects on them. I just usually have no effect because we are going to be editing in Snapchat or VSCO anyways. Then obviously, you can do it in the selfie camera on, but I'm shooting with the main camera so let's do that. So that's the native Samsung camera. The next one I'll be showing you is the Google camera, which is really simple, which is why I like to use it sometimes because it's just clean. The only button that you see is actually your camera button. So there's huge shutter button at the bottom. You can tap on and it takes an image, and you'll see a little button pops up in the bottom right, that gives you quick access to your gallery. If you swap from the left, that pulls up your mode. So you can adjust or select whichever mode you want to use, minor set on camera. At the bottom, there's a little HDR, a little thing you'll see, and you can adjust the different settings in there. You can add your grid on, I put my HDR on, my flashes off and that last button is a selfie camera, which I'm not going to use. If you press the little circle, you can see all your images that you've taken. But the Google camera is nice because it's simple, clean. There you go. The last camera app is Snap camera. This camera looks very complex, but don't be freaked out. The main reason why I want to showcase this is because you can actually shoot in raw on this. So in the bottom left, you'll see three little dots. Tap that. Now, first thing about raw, your phone has to support camera API too. So that's something that only comes with Lollipop and more of the newer Android cameras. But the great thing about it is that it's soon going to be supported by apps I'm sure where you can actually edit raw images, which is great because your details and all of that will be there. You won't be doing destructive editing, you'll be doing editing as a raw image, which is always cool. So in this app, what you need to do is in the bottom left, you tap the little icon, three dots. Scroll down to use Camera2 API and make sure it's selected, and then open the settings again, and then on the photo menu, scroll down to save raw images. Once you've got that selected, you'll see a little raw function on the top right and your images will now be saved in raw. That's it for those three apps, we're going to go out now. Things to keep in mind while you're shooting is composition, lighting, subject matter. So once you've gotten familiar with these shooting apps, you can use them in such a way that the technicalities won't get in the way and you can be free and creative while you're shooting. See you outside.
4. Workflow : In this section, I'm just going to talk a bit about my workflow, what do I do when I go shoot art, what I do when I go from starting to the end points of actually posting an image. The first thing is that when you go out as a photographer, you've got to feel comfortable, so dress accordingly. If you want to be a bit under the radar, dress in darker colors so you don't stick out like a sore thumb. Make sure you always have extra battery power. I carry around this, it's a power bank with a cable, obviously, so I can charge my phone if I do run out of battery. Obviously, have your phone with you, that's a very important thing. Because if you don't, then you won't be able to do this class. Have those things. Stay warm, stay comfortable. If you like to explore with friends, make sure you've got friends who have the common interests, or else they will probably get bored and you won't end up taking any photos. That's the first steps on what you should do just to prepare. But generally what I'll do, my workflow is, I'll head out, I'll capture images. I don't have a limit on how many photos I shoot, but I'll capture images that I love doing once I've scouted the area a bit. I'll maybe come back to some spots, I'll ask some people to pose. I'll get people to interact a bit with me while I'm shooting. That's the first step, is going out and actually capturing the photos. The next part of the workflow is, actually, I'll pull in some images that are my favorites. I recommend that you upload 5-10 of your top images after you've gone and shot some in your area, so that's what I'll do. I'll actually move those images into a separate folder, just so I know which ones are my favorites. On some of the Android devices, you can also just favorite the images as you're going along. But I just prefer to do it because at a later stage when you're going to archive those images and back them up, you know exactly where they are. The next step is actually editing the images, so we're going to talk through editing in Snapseed and VSCO Cam, which are the two main editing apps that I use. That's obviously the process of getting the images to just convey a bit more of the message that you've got and while you're shooting. The next part is posting to Instagram, so what does that mean? Sharing it, writing captions, cross-sharing, cross other social media platforms, doing maybe some final tweaks in the app and posting it. The final step is actually archiving and backing up your images, because little do people know that Instagram isn't a way of backing up your photos. Once they're uploaded, they get down-scaled so they're actually smaller. So it's really nice to actually have your images in a Dropbox, if you want to ever use them as for press or to get printed, they're there and they backed up, and they're always available. That's the final step for me. As we go along, I hope you learn all the steps, and you can always come back to anything that you might have missed.
5. Sorting Photos: So I've just gotten back from going out in New York shooting some photos in SoHo and in Chinatown. I shot a whole bunch of photos, it was really cool. I bumped into a graffiti artist who was actually busy doing a piece while I was out there, which was great. I captured some really cool candid moments. Now, the biggest challenge is sorting through those photos. So what I usually do is I'll create an album purely just for this project or whenever you are out shooting. You can use that in the time of the day, the date of the day, maybe the area. But as long as it's a name for the album that you know, will be distinctly for that time when you went out to shoot. So what I'll do is I'll call this Skillshare-solo missions, create that folder. The nice thing about this is as soon as you do that on a Note5, you get to select images that you want to use, and then you can just add those to the folder. So I've got some images that I selected. I really liked this one here with the kids and their little soccer ball. There's little variations, so what I'll do is just add the top ones that I like. This was the piece here where the graffiti artists was busy. There was this really nice one when where a girl walked past and he looked at the graffiti artist. I got some really cool portraits of her, we'll just put those in there. Then I got somewhat a bit of an angle, select one of those. Then I got one where I actually tried to cut the face of the painting in half and then compose the graffiti artist into that image too. Then I went down this little cool alley. There was a guy closing them shutters, so he actually looked like he was doing something a bit dodgy, but he wasn't, he was just closing the shutters on the room. I got a really cool puddle shot in there, which I'll probably end up using one of those. I got a classic selfie in the puddle. Some really beautiful colors on this wall here, but I don't think I'll use those because I needed subject for that. So the next part I went into was really beautiful with the lights. I got some shots of Mickey with his camera, so I'll use that one. Then there was some really interesting light coming in with a rainbow here, so I'll select those. Here's another shot of Mickey, which I'll pull in as well as another option, and maybe one of these. Those are the main ones that really stood out for me. So I also hopped into a New York City cab, which is always fun, press "Done." What I'll do is I'll always copy the images to the folder just so I have a backup of the raws. Pull open the gallery and then now what you do is you, out of all your selected images you go through and you sort of figure out which ones will look better. So these two are pretty similar, so I'll take that one out. I prefer the perspective in this image, so I'll keep that one. But I really like the shadows in this one, so that's a bit of a tough choice for me actually. This one is more dramatic, so I'm going to keep this one, this image that is more dramatic. I'll actually save this one as well, just for the fun of it. This isn't really doing it for me even though it's really interesting. I know that personally, for me and my feed, if I post this it won't do too well because it'll clash with the other content on my profile. So I'm going to take that one out. The puddle is cool, but if I had like maybe the Chrysler Building or something there in the background, it would do better. But just because it's a random puddle with my shoes, I'm going to remove that one. I like these puddle shots here, the reflections are really cool. This one is more candid. This one is more slightly posed. He's looking at the camera, but he's bigger in the frame, so I'll actually end up using this one because of that. So I'm going to take this one out. So these are going to be the hardest ones to decide through because they're all really great. The colors are beautiful and I'm loving how the light is are giving a bit of variation in images. But to be honest, my favorite one is this shot where you can see the artist, and you can see a bit of her painting, which is great. The others are great, but they don't really tell. For my personal taste, I prefer to have the face of the person that I'm shooting. So I'll take out all the others, I'll maybe use them later to use them as a throwback or something. Then I've got these two, the ones she's looking away from the camera and the one she's looking directly at the camera. So I personally prefer it when individuals are looking away from the camera because it leads your eyes outside of the image and it gives that impression that there's more than just the image. So what I'm going to do is actually take out that one and keep it to that. Then there was this image which is really great as well, because as this guy walked past, he did exactly what I was hoping he would, and he looked at the artist. So I'm going to keep this one in the folder just purely because I like it. Then lastly, it's these two kids who walked past. So, for me, they sit better in the frame in this image than they do in this one. So I'm going to keep this one and then take that one out. That said, I've selected my top seven images, which I will then upload to my project.
6. Editing: Snapseed: So now that you've selected your top images from your shoot, the first place to start is obviously editing your photos. I use an app called Snapseed, it's actually quite common, it's owned by Google, which is great because they always cater for images that are shot on an Android, funny enough. Just to take you through a bit of how Snapseed works. Soon as you open the app, you get the options, open an image, you go through your gallery, you find your image. If you're already in the app, you can actually tap in the top left and it gives you an option to go to your gallery from there. The second part is just, you've got a little histogram. For those of you who don't know what a histogram is, it's a graphical representation of the color information within your image, so that's a great way out to seeing where you've lost detail on a graph level. If that's a bit too technical don't worry about it too much, a lot of the stuff is visual anyways. If you tap on the bottom right of the app, it'll bring up the tool set. We won't be dealing with the filters section of it because I actually never use filters. What I will be dealing with is the tool section of Snapseed because that's where you make your image come to life. You can tune the image, you can add details through sharpening and structure. It gives you options to crop, you can even fix the perspective with the transform tool, you can rotate the image, you can burn and dodge the image with a brush tool, you can use selective adjust, and you can use a healing brush even, and finally your vignette. Firstly, we'll just go into tune image. The general interface of Snapseed is if you scroll up or down, it'll go through your options of that menu, Scrolling up or down will pull up this really great menu, and if you select one all you do is just let go, and it will select that tool set. I've currently got ambiance activated, I'll pull down the ambiance slightly in this image to start gets a bit more dramatic, and then what I'll do is I'll push up the brightness, and then I'll pull down the shadows. That's just a standard tweak that I do on almost all my images, just so I have that initial edit on them. At any stage while you're editing in tune image you can tap in the top right, and it'll show you a before and after of your image. I'm losing a bit of detail in the highlights at the moment, so I'll actually scroll to the highlights, and I'll pull that down a little. Maybe it's a minus 60, and I'll pull the brightness back a little bit more and then I'm going to actually push my shadows up again. It's a subtle change, very subtle change, but it just adds a bit more to the image. I'm actually going to pull in a bit of contrast, and these two little buttons at the bottom on the left, it's a little x, that means cancel on the right. There's a little tick and that means commit, so I'll commit those changes and that basically is what tune images is. While you're in tune image there are several options that you can use to adjust how you image looks. The first one is your brightness, so that's basically your exposure of the image that will either give you more exposure on the image or less exposure depending on whether you push the brightness up or down. The next tool set is contrast. Contrast basically will bring the separation between the highlights and shadows. The higher the contrast, the more dramatic the image looks, but you don't want to push that up too much because you can actually damage your image a lot and it actually looks really bad, so play with contrast very tastefully. The second one is saturation, so saturation basically means how saturated the colors are in your image. If you push the saturation up, the colors will become very bright, and very vivid. If you push it down, then you can actually go to a full black and white image where there's no color in the image. I usually like to have my images slightly saturated, so I'll push that up to maybe 10. The next tool set is the ambiance. Ambiance basically talks about the details within the image. You can push an ambiance down and the image looks very smooth, but if you push the ambiance up, it pulls out the details within the image. You don't want to go too high on the ambiance because if you go too high, your image looks really bad. Try it, you'll see it looks really bad. The image looks damaged, it looks fake, so what I usually actually do is I'll pull the ambiance down at tad, like mine is 10. The next one is shadows. Shadows basically will bring highlights or details out of the shadows within the image. If you've shot an image that's quite dark, it's a nice way to bring out the detail within the dark areas of the image, I'll just push that up, maybe 225. Then the next tool is highlights. Highlights basically affect the highlights of the image. Some people like to blow out the highlights in their shots. I do that a little bit, but I also use it to save details in the brighter areas on the image. I'll put that at about minus 15. Then the last thing is warmth. Warmth basically refers to the color temperature of your image, so if you're out shooting between golden hour, which is an hour before or after sunset or sunrise, you're going to get images that are very warm, which are basically very yellow, they're golden, hence golden hour. You can tweak that in Snapseed, which is great, because if you're shooting with golden hour, and you don't want it to look like golden hour you can actually reduce that by adding a bit of coldness to that image. I always like to have a bit of warmth in my images, so I'll push that to just plus six, not too much. The top right, I'll press this button, and it shows me the before and after of the image that I've just edited, so that's tune image. The next tool is details. Details basically has two settings, structure, it adds clarity to the image, so if you push that up, it just makes details pop. The next one is sharpening. So Sharpening literally sharpens up the edges of the details or objects within your image. So I don't push that up too much, sometimes I don't even add it, but I'll put it at plus five on this image because I like the textures on the walls. Next one is crop. If you want to crop in Snapseed, you can do that. Some people like to do 5 by 4, some people like to do 1 by 1. That will basically give you a great aspect ratio that you can post to Instagram with or Facebook or wherever it is. In the bottom of that tool is a little square. If you tap that, you'll see all the aspect ratios coming up. So I actually prefer to crop in Instagram just so I have the full image. So I'm not going to do anything to that. Rotate is a great tool because if you shot something really skew, which a lot of people do, you can actually straight and up your image by opening the Rotate Tool, and just swiping left or right. As you can see on the screen is some extremes, but you basically just want to match up horizontal or vertical lines when you use the rotate tool. So I'll tweak mine a little bit and then leave it at that. With this tool, you can also rotate the image, obviously, by pressing the two buttons in the center of the image. So the next tool is Transform. So Transform Tool basically helps you adjust the perspective of a shot. So you can also rotate your image and that image on the last tool, but you have your vertical perspective which will basically pull the image. It'll physically pull the image up or down within the frame if you want to adjust the perspective. I shot this image pretty straight, so I'm not too worried about that, but I'll tweak it a little bit just so it sits better in my eyes. You can do that tweak on the horizontal or the vertical perspective, just give it a try. What people use that tool for usually is if they've shot a photo that's slightly off center or slightly at a lower angle, and they would have preferred to show it at a higher angle or more in the center, than they just use that tool to adjust that. The next tool is Brush. So great thing about brushes is classical dodge and burn. So for those of you who don't know what dodge and burn is, it's basically how people use to edit before we had digital and phones. So you can bring it out highlights, and you can kill shadows with this tool. The basic setup is that in the middle of this tool is arrows. So the arrow on the left will obviously add more of a darker brush, and in the one on the right will add more of the highlights. So I'm going to just bring out the highlights on this image. It's very simple. You set your setting and you use your fingers to brush over sections of the image. It's very subtle so you might not be able to see it in the video. Then I'm going to again go to minus 10 and then just brush in a bit of the darkness there. Now, this isn't always necessary. I'm actually seeing in this image that I don't need to do it, so I'm not going to commit that. But just as an example, you can see how to fix the image in that sense. The next tool is Selective adjust. So Selective adjust, when you open it, you need to tap somebody on the screen, it'll bring up a little dot, and then you can drag that dot anywhere on the screen and let it settle on the image. So I actually want to make the shadows on these windows a bit more brighter. So I'll push the dot onto the shadows, and then again, if you scroll up and down, you'll get three tools that pop up, Brightness, Saturation, and Contrast. I want to push the brightness up very slightly, and maybe you do a bit of saturation on that. Just makes it pop a little. The reason why I did that is because those shadows are behind the guy in this photo. You can add more dots, and select or adjust different parts of your image by pressing the little plus in the toolbar and just tapping on the screen. The next tool is the Healing brush. So this is basically like a stamp tool where you can fix little defects in the image. So I usually don't like branding. I've zoomed into this little sign, if I tap there, it'll clean up that sign. It's quite magical actually. Oops. So now there's no sign, there is no branding on that sign. Let's commit that. In the main menu, if you hold down your thumb on the photo, you can see before and after edits on the image. The last tool is Vignette Tool. Vignette is great because you can actually accentuate the light. A little trick I do is I'll place the vignettes in the brightest part of the image. If you use two fingers, you can shift the width of the vignette, and then the two options you'll have is the outer brightness and the inner brightness. So as you can see, if you drag the little dot around, you can see how it influences your image. I'm quite happy with this image, so I'm going to probably not edit it more, but before I exit the app, in the top right, the three little dots, you can have the option to undo, revert. Revert basically takes you back to the original image, or share, so share will give you the option to share it to any social platform. Then you can also have a help function or the nice thing is image details, which actually shows you the file name of your image, the resolution, size on disk, and how it was shot. So it gives me all the information there. The last thing I wanted to show you guys is just the steps. So in the top right, there's a little square with a number in it. If you tap that, it'll show you all the steps that you've done, all the editing steps of your image, and you can actually go back and fine tune those. So for example, if I want to take out the Details section, I can go in there and just delete it. Then when you go back, just reactivate the other steps by tapping the topmost step, and press the "Close" button in the top left. So I'm pretty happy with this image. Go try it, Snapseed, it's a bit complex at first, but once you get the hang of it, you'll see that you'll be editing images very, very quickly. I'm going to press the "Save" button. Once you're done, you do that too, and then we'll move on to VSCO Cam.
7. Editing: VSCO: The second application that I'm going to take you through is VSCO Cam. It's really great because it's got a lot of really nice presets that don't look too overdone. I generally use this application when I have very specific things that I want to do to the image, so maybe I want to fade the image, maybe I want to just to highlight the shadows but with a fade, which is great because VSCO does a bit of editing, VSCO edits images in a very unique way. What I'll do is I'm going to pull open an image of Mickey who was actually filming me today. I got him pose in a hero pose in some darker areas. Basically what you do is once you've opened the app in the gallery, you'll see that there's a little plus at the top of gallery, you press that. If you go through your images, there is a folder that you made earlier in the previous project and then you'll go and select the image that you want to edit and then you press a little tick button. Once that image is pulled into your gallery, you can tap it again and you'll be created by little tool tips at the bottom. The one on the left is as a Preset, the one in the middle is Uploads of VSCO gallery, which we won't be covering, and the one on the right is the "Share" button. You'll basically tap the one on the bottom left and you'll be greeted with a whole lot of filters. Then if you go right to the end of the filters, there's a little shopping cards and you can actually buy more VSCO filters, which is great, which is a bit of an addiction because they make really grateful tools. What I usually do is I'll use one of these filters as a starting point. I like to play with 04 because it pulls up the darker areas of the image, I could watch them really nicely between 04 and 05. I'll usually fall to through these options to see what looks better on the image. On this specific image, 05 seems to be doing a bit more of what I wanted to, so I'm going to select that. If you tap the filter again, you can adjust the intensity of that filter on image. If you go all the way to the left, you'll see it has a zero application, but if you go, maybe to five or six, then it'll apply it halfway. Just test that out, you'll see that these filters can be applied in a very intense way, or maybe just a little bit all the way on. I'll press the little tick and that'll apply it halfway. If you scroll up from the bottom, you'll see there's a little dot, a little arrow on the bottom of the app. Pull it up and you get greeted with four little buttons. The one on the far left is your "Preset" button, so that'll bring you back to the Preset menu. The second one is your "Fine Tuning" and the last two are "Undo" and "Revert", which I'm not going to press because then I'll lose all the settings that I've adjusted. I'm going to go into the Tune Image section. I'm going to just run through these tools very quickly. The first one with the little sun is the Exposure, so you can adjust the exposure, make the image darker or lighter. I'm actually going to pull this down slightly. The next one is Contrast, so Contrast will, similarly to Snapseed, it will adjust the extremities between the highlights and the shadows in an image. I'm going to leave that as is. The next one is your Rotate or your Straighten tool. Now, the nice thing about VSCO is that it lets you straighten your image very, very specifically. Snapseed gets a bit too hectic when you're scrolling on the screen but with VSCO it allows you to straighten the image very, very specifically. I've straightened up this image a little bit. Next one is "Crop". Once again, you can crop the image like you did in Snapseed, but I'm not going to crop mine because I'll do that in Instagram. The next option is Sharpen, so sharpening your image will bring out the details again. I'm actually going to leave that only at a plus one because the image is pretty sharp already. Next tool is your Saturation, I'm not going to add any saturation because it looks terrible. Now, the main difference between Snapseed's highlights and shadows function is the highlights in VSCO Cam will actually save those highlights, so it'll bring back the exposure specifically in the highlights, so that's nice because this image is quite dramatic. I'm going to add a plus two to that and that'll save a bit of the highlights going on Mickey's face and the highlights on the wall, which is great because I'm getting a bit of that detail back. The shadows already faded out in this preset, but when you do shadows in the Tune Image settings, it will basically fade those shadows, so it'll bring out the details in the shadows the more you apply the Shadow setting. Let me it just add a bit of a plus one there. The next one is Temperature, which is very similar to Snapseed. But if you drop the temperature, it'll make it cooler, if you push it up, it'll make it warmer. I'm going to leave it as is. The next one is Skin Tone. The nice thing about this toolset is that it lets you adjust the skin color of people in the image. It picks up the colors that look like they're a skin tone and it'll adjust those colors. The more you push it up, the more red they'll go, the more you push it down, the more washed out they'll be. But you've got to play it because each image will be different and it'll have a different effect when you adjust the skin tone. The next one is a Vignette tool, which again, we'll just add a bit of a hue, a darker hue around the image, I can add a little bit, maybe a plus four. The next one is Grain. I never add grain to my image because it doesn't look good. But if you want to have a bit of an effects, maybe you want to make the image look a bit aged, you can add a bit of grain. But I personally don't like it, so I'm not going to. The third last tool is the Fade tool. The Fade tool will basically fade your entire image, it basically reduces the contrast in the image. It gives a bit of a wash over it as if you were looking at the image through a screen. I only really want to fade my highlights, which I've already done, so I'm not going to add any fade here. Now, the last two tools are the Shadow Tint and the Highlights Tint. This basically lets you add a color to either the shadow section of your image or the highlights section of image. I'm going to add a slight, slight blue tinge to this image's shadows. You can select the colors as soon as you apply the setting. Then if you tap again on the color, you'll get your adjustment of how much has actually added. I'm going to add it at about a four, this gives a bit of a difference. I'm going to commit that. The main difference between Snapseed and VSCO is that VSCO gives you incremental adjustments, so you go from usually 1-10 or 0-10, or that setup whereas with Snapseed you can fine tune those details. I'll usually hop between the two apps and give a tweak here and there. In Snapseed it'll do the finer details but then in VSCO I'll do very specific edits on those certain parts of the image. I'm pretty happy with this image. I'm going to press a little arrow at the bottom again and I'm going to press the little tick. Now, in the bottom right you'll see a little circle with few dots, a circle made up from dots. Press that and you can say "Save to Gallery", and that'll save to your image gallery. Go and play with VSCO Cam, edit your second image that you've selected, or edit all of them. The more you edit, the better you'll get, and we'll get ready for the next section.
8. Final Edits: I've just edited my three top images which I'm going to upload as a project. Basically, I'm just going to talk through these, the first image is the shot of Mickey, as you can see, I did a final tweak on it in Snapseed just before I added it to the folder, and I pulled out the blue tinge a little bit. I really liked the dramatic highlights in the shot, and the shutters also add a bit of something. But it was too blue when it was in [inaudible] , so I pulled it back into Snapseed and pulled in a bit of warmth into the image there. That's great, lots of interesting details. That's why I chose the image. I've been shooting everything in portrait because Instagram allows you to post in portrait now, which is also cool because posting in portrait gives you a bit more information on the screen; it utilizes the entire phone. The other image which you guys actually didn't see me edit is the shot of the graffiti artist who was busy. I really loved the shot because there's three faces in it, on the wall that she painted, but then the really interesting thing is there was a person who walked passed and he did exactly what I wanted him to as he looked at the graffiti artist as he walked past. There's really great leading lines visually like she's looking at him, she's looking at the painting and in the paintings looking at us as the subject. That's really great and I love all the information going on in the top and the windows as well. That's the second image that I wanted to showcase. Third one, which is the final image, is a typical [inaudible]. You go out, paddles make for great reflections. I didn't do too much editing on this image because I really liked the light in it, these little details of light coming in on the wall on the right. It's really bright in the background and it gets dark as it comes closer to the front of the image. I didn't get too much editing in this, basically brought out a bit of the warmth, added a bit of details, and fix the perspective little bit. But those are my three images. I'm going to upload them to my projects gallery now. You guys need to select your top three images and add them to the project gallery.
9. Uploading to Dropbox: Now that you've finished editing all your photos, this is a step of the process that I never forget because your final edits are really important because those are the images that you want to publish. Those are the images that you share. If you ever get into press or articles, people often use your images that you've taken and it's really great to not have to go back and look for images that you've edited. What I do is I create folders in my Dropbox. What I've done now is, I'll just create a new folder, I'll label that New York City Skillshare class. The reason why I always back it up firstly, is that you've got a backup. It's always good to have a backup of your image, but secondly, it makes them more shareable. Like I said, if a newspaper wants to use your image or if you want to get back to those images at anytime for whatever reason maybe, you always have them in a Dropbox folder which you can straight away get access to and either send to someone or download to your new phone if you decide to get a new phone at some stage, or whatever it is. Backups are important, that's my main point. I've made this folder now, I'll have my images in my gallery, and there's two ways of doing it. Is you can either do it directly from the app or you can be in your gallery on your phone and you can select those images by a long pressing on them. You'll see little ticks go on images, and then you press the share button and a little pop-up will come up from the bottom of your screen, and you can say "Add to Dropbox." Now it'll pull open a Dropbox menu you can browse to your folder. I've put mine in a little temp and my folder is New York City Skillshare, and I add the images there. That's one option of doing it. The other option is straight from the Dropbox. In your folder, there's a little plus in the bottom right, press there plus and it says, "Upload files." Photos or videos or other files, we want to obviously upload photos or videos. You can select those three images and say, "Upload." Because we're in really great fast internet, they'll upload within a few seconds, and you can have peace of mind knowing that those images had been backed up. That's something I always do just before I publish to Instagram just I know that I've got that step out of the way. I do it before I've posted to Instagram because after you've posted to Instagram, those images, sometimes if you do adjustments in Instagram, they get saved at a lower rate. I prefer to do that before, purely for that reason. Next step we'll do is publishing is Instagram.
10. Instagram Tweaks: Now that you've got your final three images, you're going to upload them to the project folder online. But also, obviously, you're going to upload those images to Instagram. The great thing is that, obviously, Instagram has come a very long way. They've got some really cool tools within the app. You know the layout of Instagram, so I'm not going to go through that, but publish a photo, press little button in the middle. It'll bring up recent images. I'm actually going to publish this one here. It's really great. I love the image, the colors are great. There's a lot of really nice repeated patterns and this little detail within the image that speak to me. I'm going to publish this image now. I select the image from the Instagram gallery. I like to pull in a bit of an Instagram filter. The nice thing is that you can adjust the intensity of the filters now. One of my favorites is Juno or Ludwig. This one, this particular image works a bit better with Juno so I'm going to use that. Tap twice on Juno and you can adjust the intensity of it. I'm going to bring in it very subtly. What I'll do is also add a bit of Lux. Lux works really well on this image. I'm going to add it at 40 percent, come at that. Then what I like to do is a bit of fine tweaks. All the tools that you found in Snapchat and VSCO, you can find it in Instagram now, but they treat the image very slightly different. I'll put a bit of vignette on this because I think it needs that. I'll push up the highlights a little. I'm going to drop the shadows a tad. It makes the image of bit more dramatic than what it is. If you hold your finger on the image, you can see it before and after. I feel like have made the shadows a bit too dramatic, so I'm going to push that up a bit. Come at that second before and after. I quite like that. Press next.
11. Captions: So if you end up shooting someone in the street, it's really just nice courtesy to find out what that person's username is. I was shooting a graffiti artist, who paints these beautiful portraits, and her username, I asked her, was ninapandolfo. So I'm going to search for her P-O-N-D-O- L-F-O. Find her. There she is, and I'm just going to tag her in the image. There we go. That's the first thing I do, because I usually forget to tag people, so I always do that first, now. Second thing, is add a location. We're in Soho at the moment. Soho, New York Fashion District. There's always a lot of options. I'll either go with the first or second cause they are the most popular. I share to Swarm, just to say that I have checked in. The nice thing about that is it also shares that image to Swarm as a shared image. So people can see that image within the Swarm app. I share to Tumblr as well in my personal blog, and I share it to Facebook, and Twitter, what I'll do, is I'll upload that image separately on Twitter but then just put a link back to my Instagram accounts. You can learn more about that in my other Skillshare class about branding. The last thing to do is actually just write up the caption. What I'll say is, because today is about Skillshare, I'll say, shooting a @skillshare class today, I'll @skillshare ,which is always fun. Shooting a @skillshare class today and seeing great arts by ninapandolfo. Let me not spell the name wrongly.I add a little hashtags. Spotthegprocket is a personal hashtag of mine, because a hide a little rocket in every one of my photos. Try and find it. I use GP meets in whatever the location is. Currently I'm in USA, so GP meets USA. I will say hashtag the device that I've shot with. I shot with a Samsung Note5. I'll add that in, and if I want to add a graffiti or something like to be more obscure but it's sort of like places the hashtags. That also really helps. What I want to also add in here is just a little teaser. Stay tuned for an Android class coming soon. I'll just give it a quick read through. It's very important even though you can edit your captions now, it's always better to post it with proper grammar. Shooting a skillshare class and seeing great art by ninapandolfo, sounds good. Stay tuned for an Android photography class coming soon. My hashtags looks good to me. Bristle a little tick and it's live. I'll just double-check that the tags click through and everything seems to be working, cool. That teaches you a little bit about publishing. It's really great. If you want to learn more about how you should publish your images and how often you should do it, that's something you can look at in my other class, but for now, I'll hope you published images in a way that you see fit.
12. Closing: Great guys. Hopefully you've uploaded your three images to the project gallery. Hopefully you've learned a bit through this class. Just remember that practice does make perfect. I've taught you how to use two main apps on Android and how to do a bit of shooting. Just keep going out, shooting a lot more, editing a lot more, and the more you do it, the more you'll learn and the better you'll get at it. If you do want to do a personal branding class, I do have one up as well in my classes directory. But also feel free to re-watch any of the classes or the sections of the class that you might have missed or you want to just get a refresher on. Also, I always love feedback. So if they are things that you were like, oh, maybe I want to learn a bit more of that or this, feel free to just give me feedback on that on future classes because I'd love to give you guys more tips and more tools to make you more amazing.
Gareth Pon, Filmmaker : Photographer : Creative Consultant
