Snapseed 2023: Demystify Mobile Photo Editing with Pro Tools & Guidance

1. Introduction: Excited that you found this course. This is the new and updated Snapseed course, Demystifying Mobile Photo Editing with the professional tips and guidance that I'm going to give you in this course. We cover all the tools. We go deep dive from the basics through to the more advanced, where you can start throwing in lots of different tools to achieve something, somethings like sharpening. I show you different ways of doing it. I show you different ways of doing localized editing, which is area specific. That is the real power of snapseed and puts a leaps and bounds ahead of other photo editing apps out there. And it's free. How good is that by Google? Well supported. You know, it's going to be a good product and it is inside this course, I cover everything and we have some example edits. And I'm going to continue to update and add to that library as well. So thanks for joining me and I'll see you inside. 2. Photo Intention & Storytelling - Guides Your Editing: Okay, before we get into the editing, there's an area of photography that I want to concentrate on first and that is photographic intention and storytelling. Adding a narrative to the photo, making it clear to the viewer of your photo, even if it's self immune to calm. If you're capturing these images and for memories, then having that intention behind the photo, why it is you took the photo, the stimulus, the motivation, all that sort of thing helps you and guides you in, number one, composing the photo when you're taking the photo. But secondly, when you edit the photo. Because when you edit the photo, if you go back and think about why did I take this photo, You can either recreate the authenticity of that moment. Okay, In editing that the camera might struggle to capture or you can then get a little bit more, you can enhance that creative side of that photo. So if you took a long exposure photo using a camera replacement app or some phones now have a long exposure mode, then when you go and edit the photo, you might actually go and smooth the water a little bit more. You might go in there and change the temperature of the water to bring your attention to the water, change the visual hierarchy. This is where I'm really excited to explore with this course is when you get into the local and area specific adjustments where you can actually go and actually change the visual flow around the photo. Make some areas pop, make some areas dull off, either mute the colors, blur the background. All these sorts of cool things, remove distractions, different distracting elements. You can do all that. Yeah, when you're editing, concentrate on that photographic intention, the point of fixation, and then the visual flow around the image. All right? It helps guide us in what we're doing. 3. Recommended Settings After You Download Snapseed: All right, before we start playing around with Snapseed, we need to download it onto our smartphone. First available in the App Store and the Google Play store. It is by Google. I'll share the screen here and show you what it looks like. All right, so you just type in snapseed. It'll come up like this. You'll see the logo there to just double check it. You can see there is by Google And just hit the download tap on open and you have this first prompt about Google Photos. I'm going to say, not now, and there we are. We're inside. I can now turn this horizontal. There we go, fill the screen. Now you have three little dots up on the top right here. This is where you can access your settings. So we're going to go into there. And there's a couple of things here I want you to think about. First of all, let's go down to the bottom. First one is a no brainer format and quality. We want to have 100% 95% saves a little bit of storage. We're not worried about that. We want the highest resolution photo that we can. So we got 100% click on the back, you can make it a PNG file format, which is a loss less, there's no compression. It's really good, and it looks really good on social media, that sort of thing. But Jpeg can be used anywhere, you can put onto websites, you can upload it to things, you can send it. It's just a much more universally accepted file format. It's up to you image sizing, You can maximize this. So you can say, okay, every photo I want to have maximum 4,000 pixels across the top of the bottom. I'm going to leave, do not resize it, I want to play around with it. And I'm going to undo Snapseed album because I want this to go straight to my photos, my normal recent folder. This will look slightly different with an Android, especially when you go on upload a photo or open a photo, show dark theme. I really like the dark theme. Now to do that, we need to re launch the app, so let's do that. And so now it's in dark theme, darker background. Personally, I like that because my photos will have a bit more contrast against a black. If I have a light colored photo against a light colored background, the contrast, I just struggled to see colors. I can see colors so much more clearly with a black background. Now this, again personal preference, whether you select photos that you only want snapseed to have access to or allow all photos. Okay, the next thing we do is we open from device and then you can select your album, Google Photos, Dropbox, if you're on Android. And that's it. Let's get into it. 4. Start Editing RAW Photos in the Develop Module: The first time you open a raw photo inside snapseed, you'll get this little prompt, which is pretty cool, telling you it's available. Okay, then it enters this develop module. Now before I go any further, just really quickly, sometimes the photo can look a little bit different when you open it in snaps. That can be because all our smartphones are different. Some will record in a different type of raw file format on your actual device. It will be compatible and will look amazing. And then you upload it into or you send it to someone else via e mail messenger. However Instagram message, They don't have the same smartphone. So when they look at it might look different. When you upload it to your computer, it might look different. And that could be the reason why. Another reason is that your smartphone, when you're playing with Snapseed, you have different display mode, so you might be in night mode where it adds a little bit of an orange tint to the screen so that it's a bit warmer and softer on your eyes. Personally, I like to turn all that stuff off and then I like to turn up the screen brightness on my phone so that it's completely bright like that. Okay. Just a couple of quick little tips and just set your expectations when you open up a Roy might go, gosh, it doesn't look anything like what it did. The great thing is that when you press that little tick and you output this into the normal editor, anything you do there is going to look the same no matter what device you send it to or put it onto, which is a real bonus. All right, we're in here now on the left hand side there, we've got a little histogram which is brilliant and we have white balance. And then we have some adjustment tools here. All right, and then up in the top right corner, before and after, I just hold that you can see what's happened. So first of all, let's go into White balance. He's similar to what you'll see on a standalone computer. You can go through and you can access, you can do auto, which would be pretty similar to a shot at sunny Cloudy. I don't know what's going on there. Okay, so let's go back to a shot Toro's this you can actually go and you can have a gray card or some reference point in the photo itself. And you can go and move this on there and there's my reference card. And then that will help. Then you can go and actually delete that out of the photo later. That's for another class. All right, let's go here. I'm happy with that. I'm not going to play around with that. Okay, settings, all the adjustments here. These you'll be typically familiar with exposure, highlight shadows, contrast all these things. They're all here. You just swipe up and down. The default settings, when you move your finger left and right, you'll see up the top there, you'll see a bar that moves with us. And then you'll see a numeric value in the top left corner. Also you'll see the histogram movie which is brilliant. Quick one here. Histogram, all over on the left here. This is, this is a total range. Basically over on the left here is a indicator of how much of the photo is shadows. Over on the right here tells us how much are highlights in the bright areas. In the middle is what we call mid tones. Now, apologies if these terms are familiar to you, but I just want to cover these. Ideally, we want to try and have some details here so that we have some pure blacks in the photo. And then if we have some pure whites in there, basically we'll have a really good tonal range, a good range from dark to bright. If you have a lot of information all in here, you'll end up with a gray photo. There's no variation. Variation in the photo is what gives us some depth. Okay, So keep an eye on that. While it happens here. Now you can tap on that and you can make it just a little bar graph here. Going to be simple, let's keep that there all. First of all, I'm going to go to contrast. I'm going to give this photo a little bit of contrast contrast. The contrast is the difference between two things. Because we're working on tones, brightness values of different parts of the photo. We're increasing the difference where there's some darker areas and there's some lighter areas, It'll make the darker areas darker and the lighter areas lighter Where you see this is when you get into a photo where there's some nice details here, some texture, and have a look, well, I mean, shadows hang on if we get contrast, okay, and have a look at that, you'll see there now, it does affect colors as well. So that's why I don't like to do too much because it's really saturated the colors there. You can see there when I go the other way, look what happens to the colors. A playing around with contrast does affect the colors as well. There we go. All right, so a little bit of contrast. What I love about this app is that you can zoom in Pixel peep. Get in really close and zoom back out. A lot of our inbuilt editors, particularly on some Androids, you can't zoom in, Which is really, really hard, isn't it, On a little screen? Okay. I typically, I start with contrast. Then I'll go and look at the colors. Okay, we've got saturation, which basically every single bit of color, it will make it more vivid and stronger. Not always ideal, especially if you have skin tones in there or you have green. Green can go really funky really quickly. We have some green in here. Let's have a look. See what I mean, We're in saturation and have a look at that, it's gone really funky. And orange clearly is the other one. All right, so let's swap back, get close to zero, okay? Temperature and tint the white balance, We can control that manually here. I'd rather do that here than in the white balance. Separate tool there. I'd rather do it inside here. I'm going to add a little bit of warmth to this because the story, the intention of this, this lizard was out sun baking, absorbing the sun and getting warm. If I go the other way, it looks a bit cooler and cold. But I want to try and make this a little bit warmer. Okay. Is where you can then get in your magentas greens, that sort of thing. Okay. So we'll just leave that back where it was. Okay. All right. Again, up the top right corner, we have the before and the after. So you can see there were changing those colors. We are actually changing the tone, so sometimes you need to go back. Okay, I'm going to work on high highlights. There's a lot of bright areas. I'm going to bring the highlights down quite often. I like to go all the way just to see what happens and then bring it back to where it looks good, and then bring it back a little bit. Okay, here, let's just go there. Okay, shadows. Now here I want to see what happens to the lizard when I do the shadows because there's a lot of texture. There we go, negative value. Okay, the face is starting to pop. The darker underneath the chin. I'm sure there's a technical term for its neck, but I don't know it we've got before and after is making the face in the mouth pop a little bit more. When I do that, it is darkening the background, the structures and the details and textures in the background pop a little bit more. When I have less shadows, most photographers like to increase shadows. I'm not like most, I like dark, moody, grungy photos. I typically almost always go negative there. Okay? All right, structure. This one is really cool. This is sharpening. Now structure. In the latter class I'll talk about details where the details tool where you get access to structure and sharpening inside the developed module here we've just got structure, structure. What it does is it goes around. Let's bring the cursor in here. And it looks for lines, okay? It looks for lines and details where there's a light on one side. Okay, let's get in here. So there's light on one side and dark on the other side. What it does is right on that very edge, it will go and darken the dark pixel. And it will brighten the bright pixel. What that does is that increases the perception of sharpness in the image. Pretty cool. I like it as long as you don't go too far. If you start to go too far, you'll know those photos where you've taken a photo, there's a mountain range and then you've got that halo, bright line around the edges. That's because the phone or the mirrorless, whatever you're using when it's processed the image, it's going to increase the sharpness which is what this structure is doing. It actually makes darker on one side, lighter on the other. Here we have total control. We can see it as it's happening, as the benefit of raw is that there's no halo there because we catch it in raw. Now we can actually go in here and we can add this structure and we can see whether we're actually going to introduce that or not. Okay, I can see it in here, actually, I can't see it around there, but I can actually see it here. I can see when I increase that all the way, do the before and the after, I can start to see a bit of a halo there. We're going to bring that back because we can do a little bit more of this after this developed module, the raw editing, and then it goes into the normal editor. We can do some more sharpening there. I don't want to overdo it here. I'm happy with that. Okay, and that's all the tools. All right, next thing we do is we press the tick, and now we're straight into the normal editor. So let's get into that one. 5. Straighten Your Image & Change the Perspective: Now I know nearly all of our phones have a inbuilt editor. And one of the things you can do in there is straighten the image where there's a horizon or a reference point that's supposed to be sharp. You can go and rotate it inside this app, we can go into rotate, and it works exactly the same. You can move it left and right. Let's see what happens here. It actually zooms in and crops, okay. If I press the tick, that is what I have. And you can see here how much information story, contextual elements, awkwardly, crop off a chimney, you might clip the side of a building with people. You might clip people's arms. That thing, not idea. I have another option inside snapseed here. We got back into the tools. Okay. Next to crop, we have here perspective. Okay. Then I love this, rotate. All right, Before we do this, what I want to do is go down to here. Below. You can see here you've got a few options when we rotate it, it's one of three things. It's going to still, it's going to fill in that area. It's going to add white, black. Let's go with Smart. Okay. Just tap on this screen elsewhere. Okay. Over to tapped on there. Now we're going to rotate. Okay. Now, have a look what happens here. Now, when I move left and right, we have these black areas. And then when I let go, boom. How cool is that? How cool is that? We haven't lost the edge of this building. Okay, let's go over this way and have a look what happens to that top left corner. It just adds the sky. We can end up with some funky bits there. I know I'm doing this to the extreme with my changing my angle, not quite a Dutch tilt. Let's go a Dutch. There we go. So you can see here it's not perfect, but you can crop that out. You can use the healing tool, and we can use the healing tool and we can try and remove some elements that might have introduced that we don't really want there. But let's go back, we're going to straighten this image. Okay, so I'm happy with that. That's pretty good. Going back into the options here, there's a couple more here. Scale tilt. Let's do tilt first now, this is where you can change some of those perspective issues we can see here because I'm shooting down lower. The bottom of the building is closer to me, It's actually larger. And that's what happens with the wide angle ***s that we have in our smartphone. When you take a selfie, the nose is big and the ears are small, and they look wrapped around the back of the head. The perspective issue that gets introduced, the bottom of the building is closer, is big. And as the top of the building gets further away, it tapers and goes in. You can see that's starting to happen here. We can use this tool and we can straighten the building, you can tilt it. How that? Now I'm just concentrating on that left edge. I'm pretty happy with that. This left edge here now is more straight. We've got straight that way. Straight this way. We're not quite straight here. Okay, because there's two vertical references. All right, what I can do is I can go back down into here. Now I can go to free form. I can now drag this corner until I'm happy that that has lined up. And you can see that it does affect the opposite side. But you can do a little marginal change here and it's fantastic. We have this grid here. We can use that as a reference point. Pretty good. I'm happy with that. All right, last one there is scale. As I mentioned, objects that are further away can look smaller and can change the scale. So we can actually go in here and we can make it shorter or we can extend it. And if this looks really grand and large in real life, and then because it's further away, it's got smaller, we can then go in there and actually bring back the authenticity of the moment and what was actually there in front of us, that's looking pretty good. There's our before, there's our after. Okay. Now we can use black. Okay. If I go back to scale, there we go. And we can use the black feel. And you can see there, that's what happens with the black instead of the smart. We can do that. All right. And we can stretch it out. If we have this bit here, that is a bit awkward. Instead of cropping that out, we can, we can stretch the photo out. Okay. And we can fill the frame with the building. It's the personal choice whether do it this way or crop pretty cool. Hey. 6. Cropping - Game Changer in Composition: Okay, cropping a photo is the number one biggest transformational tip and technique you can do with your photo when you're editing it. Because you can completely change it, You can find a photo within a photo. Sometimes you can bring in a photo and make it a lot more closer and clear and obvious what it is. In this situation, we have a bit of distraction. There. Is the story, the bark here, or is the story and the intention of the photographer to getting nice and close to the squirrel. So let's do that. We'll go over to the pencil. All right, crop and how good is this? We've got lots of different aspect ratios here. Depending if you have this orientated sides vertical, you will only see some of them. So you need to swipe across to see the rest of them. Back to landscape horizontal, we can see them all there and then you just drag the corner. So you can drag the corner, okay, And you can change it to whatever you like or you can use one of these aspect ratios, which I'm going to stick with square now that's centered, that's good. But I do like the rule of thirds where we position something on that, those three intersecting lines. And when I say three intersecting lines, we've got these three different columns, if you like, vertical and horizontal intersecting lines. Are these points here? 1234. Okay. Now, ideally I would normally try and put an eye on one of these. Okay. But I think it's a bit tight bit of tension there, so I'm going to bring that out a little bit. Okay. And I'm going to bring it to about there. I'm happy with that. Now, when we do cropping like this, we do lose all this resolution. We do lose all these pixels. So this is exactly the same as pinching and zooming. When we take the photo, we do lose that quality because each one of these little dots that make up this picture, okay, when I press the tick, it's going to get bigger again. Okay, let's do that. Didn't pinch and zoom to make it look bigger again, It's actually each of those dots actually enlarge. That's where you actually loose some resolution. Yeah, but we can bring some of that back in. The details up here. Details, we can bring some of that back. That's cropping. I'm happy with that. Now, when I do crop, before I press the tick, let's go back edits and we'll go back to, okay? Okay. Now, when I do crop, I like to go around and do what I call Border Patrol. Okay? What do I mean by that is go around the edges of the frame and look for distracting areas. An area where there's a little bit of bright or there's a leading line that leads straight out of the frame, something like that. Now I can use the healing tool and not going to remove it, but sometimes with cropping, it's easier to just crop something out, especially if it's a busy photo and there's an unwanted neighbor in your photo, then it's easier to crop them out than to actually use the healing tool. There's other reasons why you might want to crop the image. You might have symmetrical balance where the photo a line down the middle, either vertically or horizontally. When you fold the photo in half, it looks the same and you have that balance, asymmetrical balance, which is where you have visual weight of each side of the photo. You might have something large over here, and then you might have a lot of space, and then something small there because of that space and around that small object and the distance, then that can provide some visual weight when you crop the photo. Depending how you crop it, you might ruin the balance of the photo. You might actually want to deliberately do that so that you have some visual tension. There's lots of ideas, lots of techniques around cropping. Just experiment, have some fun with. 7. Tune Image - Start Adjusting Tones & Colors: Okay, tune image is one of my favorite tools. Inside here, pencil up in the top here, tune image, okay, and then down the bottom here we have all our adjustments and auto tick when we're done. But look at this, we have a histogram as well. Now I love it, this is a live histograms. As we're editing it, we can see the adjustments that we're making quickly. What is a histogram? This is a visual reference of where all the tonality is in the photo. What do I mean by that? Brightness values of all this information that's in here. Okay, so we have some bright spots. Bright spots, this is the bright areas over here. You can see here all these mid tones and then boom, we've got a couple of bright spots here. And that is referencing all of these. If I went and cropped those out and brought the photo back in here, that probably wouldn't be there. Darkest areas, really dark shadows, not too many. Most of this photo is all in the mid tones there, which is really cool. And that's how we get this really aesthetically pleasing image. Now, if you wanted to crush the blacks, which is the term you might have heard before, where we're going to shadows, okay? And we go real strong, negative value. All right. Here we're crushing the blacks. There's a lot of information in the dark here. Not ideal for this photo, but yeah, if you want to do a real high key photo. So then we go to highlights. And with the highlights, we can't quite do enough because there's not enough information there. But you can see here the highlights. We've tried to actually go and do those, so that's how you end up with a high key high contrast image. All right, digress right there, let's bring that back. I go back to pretty close to where it was, so that's basically what it is. An ideal aesthetically pleasing photo, depending on your photographic intention, is to have a nice bell curve and have some information in here and then some information in there. If you have a section here where you've got the bell curve and then you have flat across the bottom there or flat across there, you'll have a low contrast milky looking photo. You really want to have a good range from black to white in this photo. That's what makes it look more real. All right. Okay, back into the adjustments. Let's, let's do auto first. Auto. Okay, let's pinch and zoom. Hold it. Before and after didn't really do much that we can see, but let's have a look. That's all it did was it added some shadows. All right, let's bring that back. Firstly, I like to go to ambience. That's where I start, inside tune image. And the reason for that is that it is a balance of all the tools there we have contrast saturation, highlight shadows, warmth. Ambience is like a magic slider. It looks at the photo, assesses the photo and goes, okay, all these colors that are in the mid tone, we're going to boost those, or we're going to reduce those. Let's just zoom out and have a look what it does, okay? You can see there, and you can see this information in here in the histogram. It's all those values across, pushing them across. And you can see it in the photo, there's there before and there after. We're starting to brighten those midtones, we're brightening them. And you can see what happened to the color as well. It's actually gone. And not so much the really intense colors, it hasn't made those stronger, more vibrant. It's actually picked up a lot of these more neutral colors in between the dull colors and the bright colors, the strong colors. And it's picked up the ones in the middle and enhanced those. Let's have a look. When I go to saturation, okay, have a look at that. Saturation, every color really pushes every color. All right? I like ambience better. All right, let's go back, bring ambience back. My typical process is go to where it looks good and I like it. And then bring it back a bit because quite often it's too much. All right, contrast the difference between two things. I talked about this briefly in the developed module in that class for a raw photo, we'll go over it again here. Basically it is the difference between two things. An area here, okay, where we have some bright lines. And then on the other side of these lines you have a dark edge. Okay? These pixels, these dots of information are dark. What contrast will do is it will brighten the bright areas and darken the dark areas. An image like this where we have lots of textures, it can actually go and actually make it a bit more crunchy. It can get funky really quick though. Let's have a look. Okay, let's zoom back out so we can still see the details there. We're on contrast and have a look at that. It did start to add some textures here, but then it's just gone too dark. It's gone too dark. You can see here, this is gone brighter. Darker area here Looks sharper. More punch. But it's too much, isn't it? It's too much. Some photos benefit from a good heat of contrast, especially if it's a little bit soft and blurry. It can actually really benefit from it, depending on, you can see in this photo, depending on if you've got bright areas, dark areas. Let's have a look at this histogram. When I go to the extreme, look what happens. It's pushing out all those areas in the middle. These areas that were in the middle, where there are some darker ones in the middle, it's made those a lot darker. Where there are some brighter parts in the middle here, it's made those a lot brighter. We've that histogram, we've flattened it. Okay. And now we've ended up, this is what I love about the histogram. You can see exactly what's going on. Okay, I like to visually look, okay, that's looking good, but then also look at the histogram actually that's starting to really push it. That's changing it too much there. I'd like to go there, but I have a better way. Okay. All right, so that's what contrast does. We understand that we have two other options here, highlights and shadows. Highlights are the brightest part of the photo. Shadows are the darkest parts. What we can do, remember, contrast is the difference between two things, shadows and highlights. Two different things. We can increase the distance between them. Shadows, we can decrease them. And highlights, we can increase them. And I want to show you what happens here to these textures. Highlights. Okay, let's go to the extreme here. All the bright parts in here, it's made the brighter. Let's go to shadows. The shadows, we've made those darker. So you can see here, we've actually brought out some of this texture out. We've done the same thing as contrast, but we look at the histogram, we haven't completely made a flat, and we still have a bit of a curve here, and it's looking really nice. Now, we do have more areas that are pure black, and we do have more areas that are pure white. Not a bad thing, depending on the intention of your photo. The intention of this photo is I want these textures and these details to really crunch and pop out. There's before, there's our after. Now, there are some areas here where we're starting to lose a bit there. Let's bring the shadows back a little bit, okay? Sometimes depending on the photo, you might want to do this and then go back to contrast. And I know it sounds weird, reducing the contrast. You can see what's happened here, these bands that were a bit dark. It's actually remove that issue. We've got Negative and look at this bell Curve. Look at that. We're bringing back the details again. All right. It's really nice now, there's no right and wrong. It is just a matter of playing around with it and going, you know what, that's looking good. That's not. Then hopefully with this course, you can look at this and go now, why is that happening? Okay, that's what I'm trying to help you with, is to understand why these things are happening, okay? All right, so just to recap, ambience, the middle one here, Ambience, we'll go and look at the mid tones of the grays of a photo. Not the blacks, not the lights, the mid tones apart in the middle of both the brightness of every dot of information and the color, the colors that are the muted, unsaturated, dark, no information there. Not the really vibrant, punchy, strong colors again in the mid area. And then you either increase it or you decrease it. All right? It's like a magic slider. Start there. Next is contrast. Have a play with that if that's enough. Fantastic contrast with reduced highlights, that can make most photos look really good. A photo like this, contrast with funky really quickly. That is where I've gone in there and got okay, shadows, negative highlights, positive, increase the contrast. Have more control, you can see exactly what's going on. And then I've gone in here in this particular one, and reduced the contrast a little bit more just to even it out a little bit all. Hopefully, I didn't lose you with that. I'd love for you to just play around with a photo and follow along. Yeah, good luck. Have fun. 8. Healing - Remove Distracting Elements: Now I know you're going to love this tool healing tool. Inside Snapseed, it's there to remove objects, those unwanted objects, elements or things inside the frame there that at the time you didn't notice it or you couldn't work around it and you had to have that in there. Examples can be shooting indoors and people have got bottles on the table and just distractions, just rubbish for photographers. We call this cleaning up the image. And you've seen those beautiful photos where you've got that, just that single set of footprints now, early in the morning, you can actually get that. You can get that authentically. Sometimes you just want to clean it up and just really isolate it and have that minimalization's word I was looking for. Okay, so I've got an example here that I'll show you. All right, so we'll just go to the pencil and then you'll see here healing. Tap on the healing there. Try it again. Tap on it. Okay. Basically what I recommend is your pinch and zoom getting nice and close. Because if you try and remove something like that, it's too to get an area. So what do you want to do? A quick little shortcut is just double tap on the screen. Double tap on the screen that gets you in really close. And then if you need to zoom back out here, I'm going to remove this sign. There we go. Bang done, clean that up a little bit. Little dot down there. Basically what this does is it will, where we swipe our finger, it will pick up content around it. Let me do that with the cursor so you can see it will pick up the content around it, around here, and it will fill in that area. You can see here, the closer we get, the more precise it will be. Okay. Did a pretty good job there. A little bit of murkiness there. Let's try and get even closer. Okay, We may need to just go around and give it a couple of goes. Now, an area like this where you have dark and light now if I was trying to do that. Okay. You can see here on one side I have one reference, and on the other side I have a dark reference. Light dark. It's going to struggle. It's going to go, what do you want me to fill it in with? And it's going to give us a result like that. Okay? So that's how it works. So understanding how it works is beneficial because if say we wanted to get rid of this line here, okay? Knowing that if we just do that, it actually worked, Sometimes it won't. So knowing that it quite often doesn't, we'll just do it a little bit at a time. So we might just go in there and do little bit that little bit. And then when it comes to something like here, we want to swipe that way because then it knows going to use my mouse up with my other hand. Now it knows this is going to be filled in with either side. This is going to be filled in with either side. It's going to work nearly every time. Okay, now this is spot healing. It's not a clone tool. If you want to clone tool, there are other apps out there that you can use. One that I absolutely love is Touch Retouch. Now I know this is a Snapseed course. Want to touch down on this really quickly because sometimes the results aren't ideal. And this app, it is a subscription app, but it's fantastic. Basically we have these options here, objects lined mesh clone is fantastic. But here I'm just going to go in here and do objects. I'm going to get rid of that piece there. Now what you can see is here, it's gone. And muck that up a little bit. What I love about this app is that we have this restore button. Okay? We can actually in here pinch and zoom and go, oh, you know what it marked up that bit. And you can go and undo precise and then you can go and reapply it. You've got lasso, you've got lots of different tools here. The clone is fantastic. So basically you just pick an area that you want to copy from and you just swipe in an area and you copy it in. Good. Anyway, the healing brush inside snap set does 90% of the job for you. It's well worth going in there for Border Patrol or anything where there's some distracting element that you just want to get rid of it super quick and easy. 9. Details - Add Sharpness to Your Images: Now, every photo benefits from a bit of sharpening. If you capture your photo in a Jpeg file format, which by default most cameras do, Smartphone, even mirrorless dedicated cameras, then it will apply some sharpening to it already. Okay? Because that's what it's there to do. Make it look sharp, contrast punchy, make it look really nice. Okay, We want to have some control over that as well. So that's why I have a lesson on raw and the Raw developed module inside Snapseed where we can go in there and add some structure. I want to show you the details to inside snapseed. Now the photo like this is all about the details. It's all about getting in nice and close again. Pinch and zoom. Get in really close. Go over to the pencil over here. And then up the top we have details. Okay, get the cursor out of the way. Double tap getting nice and close. There we go. All right, now we can see straight away up here we have structure. The way to change that is we go down to there and we can swipe up to sharpening or swipe down to get to structure. The difference between the two structure, what that does is that looks for existing areas within that's already maximum zoom. That looks for areas where there's dark pixels on one side and light pixels on the other. And it will go and brighten the edge on the bright side and darken the edge on the dark side. Now this is how we end up with that halo ghosting effect on a lot of photos. Here's an example. This was a photo that I captured on my iphone 13. It was the Jpeg file format. It's already applied some sharpening to it. And let's have a look up here. This is what I'm talking about. So you can see here, it's sharpen the image. That's to give us the perception of sharpening because it's darkened the edge on one side, lighten the edge on the other. So this is what structure sharpening does inside snapseed. We are going to make it more contrasting, make those edges pop a little bit more. Okay, if I go back into snap set, here we go. All right, so now that we understand what we're doing, we can look out for that and make sure that that's not occurring. Now there's no real light and dark. These are kind of all mid tones, so we're not going to see it as much but just being aware of it. Okay, Getting in nice and close. Okay, structure. Let's have a look. See this, because the intention is to make this really punchy and that sort of thing. We can go crazy with it. Now, it does add some artifacts around the background because we do like to have that nice and blue. I do have another lesson on stacks and masking and how we can actually go back and deselect all the area that we've actually sharpened. So just concentrate on that. I don't want to get distracted here. I want to show you what this does. Now what we can also do is we can also go in a negative value. Okay, So we can actually smooth off, look at this background, see that's nice and creamy and smooth now. And then we can go to sharpening. This tool goes into every single dot, every single pixel, every little bit of information, and indiscriminately sharpens everything. Okay. Doesn't just look for lines to give that perception of sharpness and increase the contrast, it looks at everything. So this one, we can go a little bit crazy as well. Now we are starting to see it's looking a little bit funky. And around here, let's go to the extreme. I'm looking at this big screen here. I'm talking to you because it is hard to see on the little screen, but I can see it. We're going to go back a little bit, back up to there and look if we do both, let's just go to the extremes here. We do both look at that. It's no good, it's crazy. But we understand what's happening. Where it's doing the lines where there's dark and light and it's making those really crisp. And then it's making the whole photo crisp. I think for my preference is to go that way, because I want the background creamy and smooth. I don't want the background all sharp, and then I'm going to go crazy with that one. Okay? There's before, remember hold the finger on the screen and there's our after. If you want to see the complete before and after, you can use the top before and after icon. There we go. That's sharpening, it's a great tool. 10. Tonal Contrast - Start Adding Depth with COntrast Where You Want It: Next. All I want to show that it's one of my favorites inside Snapseed is called tonal contrast. It's an alternative to the details because as we've covered in details structure will go and pick up the edges where there's dark pixels on one side, light on the other, increase the contrast and can end up with halo effects, that sort of thing. With tonal contrast, we're doing the similar thing, but we're targeting the highlights, mid tones, and the shadows. Now the easiest way to show you this is with the black and white image. Because we can remove the distraction of color. And we can just look at the brightness values and how these sliders affect everything. So let's have a quick look. All right, when we open this, you'll see there that it has applied some default settings immediately. It's pretty cool most photos, these default settings, and you don't get to say this very often apply to most photos, and then you just go and tweak it. I think this is already straight away. It's made this a bit more punchy and pop and it has done a great job. But let's like always zoom in and see what's happening now with this photo. The intention of this photo is to draw you into the rope and the textures and the details of the rope. Now, I don't want to sharpen it so much that then we start having some other distractions reveal themselves, and artifacts and that sort of thing. So let's go in here. This is not a mirror list camera, so let's set expectations here. It's not an SLR, is, is a smartphone. Okay. So the resolution. And I captured this photo about three years ago, so it's old technology. So let's just put that aside for the moment and it's actually not a bad thing because I can show you quickly how we can see these effects. Okay, Straight away we're going to go to midtones. All right? Okay. Now it's applied some there, let's go negative back to zero. Okay? And let's go all the way to the end. Now I can see, yes, it's doing a great job in the mid tones, which is, you remember, midtones is not the dark area or the light. It's the area in between. All of this is mid tones. Okay. This has some mint tones in there. Absolutely. It's got some bright areas as well. Not too many shadows apart from the lines there. The shadows got lots of shadow here with midtones. I'm looking here and you can see that's at a zero value. That line that goes through there has disappeared. What I want to do is I want to increase it to a point where it's starting to reveal itself, but not become a distraction away from that. Because I don't want another leading line. Now. I know I'm getting in really close because an image like that, you're not going to notice it. But it's a great example of what's going on here. Okay, we can see that line there. What I want to do is I get to a point where I go that looks good. And then bring it back a bit. Okay, now we're going to go to the high lights, the high tones back to zero. Let's go to 100 and see what's happening here. Now I can see that we're losing detail across there. It's too bright. Okay? I want to bring that back to about there. Looks good. All right. Low tones. Low tones. Let's have a look. Okay, I can see here that when we go to the far right, I'm starting to bring out some details here. Not a bad thing. Not a bad thing. I don't mind that whatsoever. I like having some detail reveal in the shadows because it adds to the mystery in the mood of the photo, doesn't it? Brings in the imagination. What I'm looking at is the rope as well. Okay, happy with. You got a couple of options here. Protect the highlights and shadows. Basically what that does is when the shadows become too black and too dark, it will bring back the contrast over a whole area. Might be easier if I show you instead of explaining it. Okay, that has made this area, they're all around here, a little bit soft and smooth. It's like noise reduction, I guess, but it's actually gone and smoothed that off. It really is a balancing act between the two. There's no right and wrong, Truth be told, I rarely touch the protect shadows and highlights because I'll show you. Let me press Tick. Give you a sneak peek into one of the upcoming lessons. Is up here, we can go view edits. All right, and you can see here all the steps that I've done with this photo. Okay, total contrast. You can see this has affected the clouds. Okay, well I'll have to go. Okay, well it's going to go all the way back. All right, just here we go. All right, so then you can see now that we're inside the tool holding, before and after is just this tool. And you can see the clouds are a bit dramatic, aren't they? That could be what you're after. But if it is what we can do. Well, if it is not, I should say. What we can do is we can do this masking. Now I can go and say, I just want all this stuff that we're doing all in the center of the frame. Press tick. Now the sky is left the way it was and the tonal contrast just in the boat. That's why I don't worry so much about to protect highlights and shadows because when I'm using this tool, I'm using it area specific. Because I don't want tonal contrast or sharpening applied to the whole image. I just want it applied to just that area. Yeah, Pretty cool. Very powerful. Brings out and extracts details out of just about any photo. 11. Lens Blur - Add Depth and Guide Attention Away From Areas: Next tool I want to show you is ***s blur. This is fantastic for adding a blow to the foreground or the background, depending on the image. Let's have a look at this one. Clearly, I've already edited this photo, but I think it'll be a good example here. Press on the pencil and then we're looking down the bottom here. ***s blur. All right. Click on that now. Default straightaway turns into a circle. Our cameras don't work like this. I don't know why snaps. This is the default. This is the one we want. Click on there, okay. Now it's linear. This is how depth of field works. Depth of field is where the focal plane is on the subject. And then depending on the aperture that you set on your dedicated camera, you can increase the range in depth that is in focus. And then before it is out of focus and then after it is out of focus. That's what we're creating here, is that we've got this area in front that's in focus. And then if I go in here and I'm just going to do this just so that you can see much clearer, okay? All right. Now, blur strength just to really emphasize this, okay? Bring that a bit closer. You can see here. All right. This is what it does is I just press that before and after. There we go. Okay. Before it's out of focus. This is where the area is in focus. The depth of field and then past it is out of focus. Now in the background, that is a long way away. So that's okay. The tree is not. So you can't actually make the tree in focus and then the sky out of focus here because it applies it to everything in an image like this, I would just concentrate on adding a little bit of foreground blur. I wouldn't worry about background blur. Now I know a photography purist will look at that and say, well, how have you got depth of field here, but not in the background. Yeah. Okay. Doesn't matter. This is creative, This is our artistic right to do it. How would we want? Doesn't matter. Now, in theory, we could apply the background blur to the clouds and all that sort and then go and mask out this, but it's just too finicky with this particular photo. All right, let's reduce this blur strength. Okay, I'm going to pinch and zoom on the lines there to make them bigger. And you can change with your fingers. You can put a finger here and a finger there. And you can twist them around. And you can twist that around like that. You can even make that vertical if you want. Okay, Twisting it around. Okay. Now I want to make it so that this rock and the tree is in focus. Now, I don't mind if it starts to go out of focus, but we might actually bring that a bit more. Okay, now that is out of focus. All right, let's go into the settings down here. And you can see that it's also applied a vignette. Now this image, I've already done the vignette, so I don't want to add anymore. So let's take that out now. It is just about the blur. We have transition, which I'll play with really quickly, is we can increase and decrease the transition there. Okay? And then strength of the blur, go crazy. Bring it back to where it looks, okay. And I'm pretty happy with that. I'm pretty happy with that. This one over here, this is where you can change that blur and you can change that Boca Look if you love hearts and stars. I don't know why you'd want to go to these. I'll just leave it as the circle, personally. It's to replicate different ***ses that we used to use. And then when you're happy with it, just press the tick. Okay. And that's it. ***s blue. 12. Vignette - Another Tool for Taking Attention Away from the Edges: Vignette is a fantastic tool. It brings your attention back into the middle of the frame. Instead of going out of the frame, we darken the edges. Let's have a look at this photo inside ***s blur. We go down here, we can see the ***s blur there. When we apply the ***s blur, you'll see here in the settings that you have vignette strength. Okay, so let's just see it does. So we've gone and darkened, all the edges around here can look a bit funky if you've got sky there that gone and darkened parts of the sky. The other tool is the actual vignette tools. As we scroll there it is down on the bottom left corner. All right, where we drag this blue dot outside of that is where we have plo the vignette. Let's go full strength so that we can see it. This is like a spotlight, if you like now. We can't change the shape, make it elongated, but we can make that larger or smaller. This way we can try to avoid the sky like this. Okay? Make it bigger. Reduce that strength. It's crazy just being silly. And you have inner brightness as well when you make that smaller. All right, let's create a spot light here. We can actually brighten up that inner brightness, inner circle. In the outer circle, we can make it darker. One thing I do like to do, and you can do this in light room. When you do the vignette, is to brighten the highlights in these areas. In Snapseed is a separate step, so press Tick. Go over to tune image, we go to Highlights. I'm boosting the highlights. I'm not worrying about here, because look at this, Go into history view edits. This is where I'm going to mask it and I'm going to put it just where I want. We've applied that vignette and like I said, where there's highlights in a vignette out in the dark areas, it's a creative thing. We may and I do personally, I like to bring those highlights back. Yes, I've darkened the edges where there's a vignette, but I haven't made it look fake and weird. I think that looks much better. Yeah. What do you think? 13. Selective & Brush - Start Elevating Your Photography with Area-Specific Editing: Now I'm going to show you a few tools here for local adjustments, area specific adjustments. And that's one thing that's missing with our default editors on our smartphones. Inside Snapseed, we have the selective tool and the brush tool. I'm going to show you the difference between the two pros and cons and on this beam. Let's have a look. Now with this photo, I'm going to do a real quick adjustment. I'm going to go into the looks, and I'm going to go smooth. Boom, look nice and quick. I'm pretty happy with that. Now let's get in here and do some local adjustments. So let's go into the pencil and then across to selective. Okay, now that we're here and the blue plus is activated, that means where oppress the screen. That's where it's going to drop the pin. So we're going to just drop the pin there. All right. Now pinch and zoom with our two fingers. We can see when we pinch and zoom and we're increasing or decreasing, We're increasing and decreasing the threshold of pixels in the area around that has similar pixel qualities to what we selected. If I tap on the screen outside of that area, just tap somewhere, you can see that pin is deactivated. Now there's the activated. I can pinch and zoom again, tap on the pin. So now I'm telling the app, okay, now I want to concentrate on this. Again, pinch and zoom. We can get in there, and this isn't actually selected, the bright part. So I can put my finger on that pin and I can drag it around. Well, I lost it. There we go. I can drag it around. How could this? I love that you've got that circle that shows you the color that you're selecting. Instead of selecting the brightest part, I might want to actually select the darker area. Now I can pinch and zoom again, and we can see that it's selecting just that area. Okay, now I might want to just edit, just down here. See how I pinch and zoom? It's added in this area up here, that area there. I might not want those. What I can do is I can press the plus button again. I can drop a pin there, Press it again, drop another pin there. Now go and activate that original pin by tapping on this again. Have a look what happens when I pinch and zoom again. Pinch and zoom, It can't overlap one selection over the other. Now I'm just going to concentrate on just this pin here. Now, you did see that it started to bleed out over there. That being the case, I can tap on this one now I can say, you know what, I actually want all of that, I'll go back to here and it's actually minimized it. Or I can drag this even closer, activate that. There we go. So you can see that we're controlling the area of where we're actually selecting a selective tool. All right, now that we're here, swipe up and down on the screen away from the pin. You can see we have got a few controls here. Brightness, contrast, saturation structure, how goods that I've got your imagination going here now. So now I can go in here and you can tell, just drag that off there. You can see how this is a bit bit muddy and a bit yucky, okay? So I can go in there and I could actually play around with these and go structure. Okay, I'm going to smooth that off. I'm going to reduce the contrast, or increase the contrast. Whichever works for the particular photo, you're playing with what you're doing. And here, saturation. I'm going to bring the yellows right back. Okay? Brightness may need to brighten it. Okay? And we can see how that looks. Okay. Before. Okay, let's go on to the B. Now I want to concentrate on the B. Okay, plus, and I'm going to add it to where the hairs are, make sure that I've selected the hair. Yes, I have structure that was saturation structure, that was funky. All right. It's two S through structure. There we go. Structure, you can see there is sharpening that collar. That area of the not the whole, just that area which is pretty cool. We can zoom backwards. I have to deactivate that pin. Zoom back, there we go. And we can see before and after. It's just applying it to those areas, not the whole image. This is called local adjustments are specific. It's cool for someone like here you might want to go, you might think, okay, that is distracting. Okay, I actually like it because it adds a bit of depth. But you think that's distracting, or this bit here is distracting. Might do is might drop a pin here on that spot, Pinch and zoom. Make sure that I'm just isolating that area. Brightness, I can reduce the brightness and look at that. I've gone and darken that whole area. Now I can drag that pin again and I can drag it further up there. I can increase, decrease that area. Look at that. It's a way of removing those distractions without using the healing tool and getting rid of them. You're minimizing it without reducing it. Reducing it. Minimizing it without removing it. That's what I'm trying to say. All right, so you can see this is a lot of finding, you can spend a lot of time here tweaking and playing around with this. There is another tool, the brush. Let's go into that tick to select that. Back over here to the tools icon. Okay, and then we're over to brush. Now this is like finger painting. All right, So we can actually go in there and swipe over where we want to apply it. It's a little bit rough, but you've got some great tools here. You have Dodge and Burn. Which is brightening and darkening. You've got exposure, which again, is brightening and darkening, but a lot more severe, a lot stronger temperature could be really handy here. We might want to make something a little bit more warm and a little bit more yellow and then saturation. So you can selectively go into an area and you know what, that background, I don't want that as vibrant green. I want to desaturate that a little bit in these particular areas. I'm looking at this and I'm going, okay, I might want to desaturate this area. I'm going to select saturation. And then down the bottom here you have plus or negative. I'm going to go negative. Okay, I'm just going to swipe in there. Now we do have the eye icon so we can see where we're swiping. And we can do the before and the after so we can see what's happening there. Personally, I think that is desaturated too much. I actually don't like that. What I can do is I can go over here and go to eraser. Now, I can swipe over that and erase it. Okay. How good is that the brush didn't work so well. There I would go back and I would go selective drop a pin over on the green decrease. Make sure I'm selecting that area. And remember saturation, I can go in there and desaturated not in increments of five. That's 25% 50, 75, 100% Like it's really strong selective tool, sometimes like this where the brush is a little bit aggressive. You can go in there and use the selective tool. I think that looks much better. Let's tick on that. Back to the brush, Let's go saturation again. Now we want to go in here. Okay, double tap. Getting nice and close. Not that close saturation. These stripes on a be, everyone is familiar with orange stripes on a bed. We do have them here. We've really cropped in tight here. We've lost some resolution. But let's swipe on here and increase the yellow in the there. We'll go back before it's what we're used to seeing, isn't it's what we expect on it. Yes. That's a little bit aggressive, but I think it looks quite good there. Let's go minus ten. Okay, And we might go and swipe over the, whoa, look at that too much. Instead, we'll go minus five. Let's go and erase it first. Get rid of all that. Let's go minus five. Yeah, I don't like it. Again, is an area where the selective tool will do a better job. Now, I sound like I'm saying this brush is no good. But there is another one that I quite like, this one here, dodge and burn. This is fantastic. Now this is an area where we can get in and it's a lot more subtle. Okay? So we can brighten these areas with this brush. And then we can go in here, and what now I'm going to go negative. And the dark areas, we're concentrating on increasing the contrast here. The more we swipe over it, the more we're compounding that effect. So we're making it darker each time we swipe over it. Okay, there we go, in this way, and that is looking really good. That is an area where I would definitely use the brush. There we go. Selective tool. Pros and cons of each. Personally, I like the selective tool and the Dodge and Burn within the brush. There, the two that I use. 14. White Balance - Correct and Manipulate Any Color Casts: So the next tool we want to play around with here is a white balance pencil up at the top right corner there. White balance. What is white balance? When you capture a photo, your camera does an amazing job 99% of the time of working out. What a proper accurate color rendition of the scene in front of you. In a processes, it does a pretty good job. Sometimes it doesn't do a fantastic job. Or sometimes you might actually have a studio set up where you're doing some product photography or just having some file indoors and you might actually have some artificial lighting that's actually throwing a color cast in there. So we have a few options here. We have auto white balance. We have a neutral picker, and then you have your adjustments. So let's go into the neutral picker first. Okay, and this actually we'll try. And it gives you manual control of going in there and looking for an area to reference as a neutral color. So an 18% gray. So let's go in here. And I think that is pretty good right on the front of the B there. Because you can pinch, you can pinch in and get really close and then come back. Now you may have a color chart or an 18% gray card. You can add that into your photo and you can use that and put it in sit in the environment where you're taking the photo. And then use that as he put the picker on it and then you can crop that out or heal that out using the other tool inside snapseed here. That's pretty good. Okay, I'm going to go with auto white balance. Okay, Let's have a look before and after. Okay? Before and after, not bad. Let's see what it did by pressing on the little adjustments here. So we have temperature and tint. Temperature more orange. More, more blue. Okay, it went ten. I think it's a bit strong. It's personal preference. You might actually like it being strong and having a lot more orange in the scene. Tint goes between magenta and green. I like that it's actually going towards the magenta is actually taking some of that intensity out of the green. We go the other way, look what happens to the green. Okay, really strong, taking some of that intensity out of it. 12 I think is starting to bring in a bit of magenta. So that's the, let's just bring it back just a tiny little bit. All color cast that can come from, like I said, fluorescent lighting shooting a plate of food. You might have a white plate with some other the food on top. And the color of the food might be so vibrant that it's actually throwing the camera off. You can do some local area adjustments and you can change the color of the plate, or what we're doing here is what we call a global edit. So it's applying and removing or adding a color cast to the whole photo. I've got another example here, quite extreme. Let's have a look. All right, I told you it would be extreme. This color cast here is coming off all these fluorescent lighting in there. I mean, it was really cool. This is what it looked like. But just an example of what you can do. Pencil, white balance. Let's tap on that. Auto white balance. Bang, how good is that? That's insane. There's our before, there's our after Riley skin tones there look pretty good. Mitchell's is a bit blue, but we can go in there and we can do some local adjustments and enhance that and bring back the color. But overall, that has done a pretty amazing job, and we can fine tune that a little bit. So we might want to go in here. Whoops. So what happened there? Long press, Okay, for before and after. I just wanted to swipe finger on and then start swiping so we can bring back some of that. Okay, And the tint, you see how it's gone crazy, added a lot of green to get rid of a lot of purple. Okay. And that gets rid of even more. But we might bring some of it back because, you know, sometimes you want that the authenticity of what happened in the location, but it might have been a bit too intense. So you can bring some of it back. You've still captured the moment, what it looked like. It's not fake, but I think that is a much better looking photo than that. Didn't take much. That's white balance and I do this before then going to the tones and I'll show you why. Here's just a range of colors and you can see what happens here. Ok, temperature, and I'm going to change everything there, okay? It changes the brightness of these different colors. When you add some blue, look what happens to the purples. The reds. It all changes brightness values. Okay, we go down here. All right, look at the green. All right. We can see a big difference there. This is why I change the colors first before I then go and look at the brightness values, change the shadows, the highlights. Because colors can go and change it again. So there's no point changing, getting all your exposures right, going into the color, playing under the colors. Because then you may have to then go back into tune image inside snapseed here and readjust again. So we want to try and avoid the duplicity and bouncing back and forth. My process is colors first and then we're going to the tune image to work on the tunnel range. 15. Black and White Conversion - Advanced Tips: One of my favorite ways of editing a photo is converting to a black and white. Now, not every photo neat or benefits from black and white colorful flower photos. No, the story is all about the color. But when there's photos where there's some texture details, shape, shade, fall off of light around things, or some distracting color that's pulling your attention in the wrong direction. Then a black and white conversion can be really good. Sometimes it's really good. Also for photos that haven't worked out so well, they're a bit blurry. Converting it to a black and white is a great way to recover those shots. They're important that you really mean something but you couldn't quite get it. It's a lot more forgiving in black and white. And with edit you can really crunch it and just go crazy with exposures and tones and bring them something back out of nothing. Now we're going to show you this photo here, we're going to play with you. See here we've got lots of textures in this photo pencil. And then we go to black and white, straightaway neutral, basically just desaturates the colors, doesn't remove them. And I'll show you how we know that. Because down the bottom here we have color. And we can select and it will change the image based on the colors that are in there. We've got another photo, I'll show you in a moment with a blue sky. And I'll show you what happens when we play around with these presets here. But anyway, let's go back. We have the presets here. Contrast the bright, dark film, dark sky. We've got a few options there. I quite like dark here. Go back. And then what we can do is we can reduce the strength of what's going on in here. And we can bring that back. Here's the before. After It's got a bit of a blue tint to it, hasn't it? Let's go back and just go with contrast instead. Contrast, bring that back a little bit. This is just the way to convert it into a black and white. And then you go into other tools and you can play around with things and make things pop and blur areas, increase the textures in other areas and create that visual flow. This is just a quick little tool to turn it into a black and white image first. But I want to show you what happens with this using another image. Okay, we have a blue sky here that I want to concentrate on. Let's go black and white. Okay, It's desaturated, taking the color out. Let's have a look. Now that I go blue, let's have a look, what happens to this blue sky up here? Boom, it's gone. All right, Opposite of blue is red. Look at that. We've created instantly a dark sky so you can play around with it. But when I flick on between the two, have a look at what happens with the word bakery, it changes all of that as well. Okay, we're changing all the different tonal values based on the color that we're selecting. Now you might really like what's happened to the sky there, but not like what's happened there. So we can press Tick, okay? And we can accept that. And then we go and we do this again. We're into the stacks here. Press on that, we can go in here and we can go, okay, the sky is awesome, love what had happened there. Really funky, like it. Select it. Okay. Now that we've done the sky, now we can go back and we can go and do the black and white again. Black and white. And then we can change this one and go, okay, now I've got best of both worlds. I've got the sky the way I want and I want the bakery the way I want. That makes sense. We've done it in two steps there. Not very often you would need to do that or want to do that. It's just a way that you can get around because once you apply one, it applies to the whole image. I think that looks much better. I like that it's a contrast there. I love what it did to the sky, but I didn't like what it did there. I did it in two steps, black and white. Conversion masked in using the history stacks tiles, whatever you want to call it. Fix that first. Then I went and did it again using a different color. And I've brought that back. Just another way of doing it. Another thing you can do here is going to edit. And when we go in to mask, remember we can change the level that we apply it. We can actually make this not completely black and white. We can make it so that there's still a little bit of color there that can look great for those really grungy, gritty photos that you want, especially when you're applying it selectively to color photo. 16. Curves - Getting Technical Now: We're going to explore one of the most advanced tools inside Snapseed or any editing app. And that is the curves tool. It is a little bit intimidating to play around with and that's because you might have experience where you play around with it is like oh, that's gone funky, you've inverted colors. You've done some really weird stuff. Gentle, we do it nice and gentle and easy. When we're making these adjustments, especially on a little phone, it can be a little bit tricky. It does two things. Number one, it changes the tones, the tonality of the image. So you can add a, what we call an S curve, and I'll show you in a moment where you can add a bit more contrast, a bit more pop to the photo. You can change tonality a little bit different to tune image. That one is a little bit easier to use, but you can use it inside the curves tool. The real benefit of the curves tool inside Snapseed in particular, is where we can do our color grading. So we can do split tones, we can do color grading. Basically, that means we can add or remove a color cast from the shadows, midtones, and the high light. An app like light room has a color grading section, easier to use because you have more control. But let's have a look and see what this does. This is what it looks like. Bottom left is the dark tones, the top right is the light tones. Okay, So this is a histogram. It doesn't move. I don't know why snapseed doesn't move here. If you're playing around with tune image and you're playing around with the tones, it will actually live. It will change. And show you over in the bottom corner here, which is fantastic. But here it doesn't do anything. That's okay. All right, we've got some presets. These are brilliant. We can scan through and we can actually see a live preview of exactly what any of these presets will do. Okay, so you can not only see the result of the photo, you can actually see what's happening here. It's a great way to learn as well, because we've got white, which is our overall totality of the image. And then we have three separate colors here. We have green, red, and blue. Now hold that thought, I'm going to show you an image here. This is what it looks like. We have red, green, and blue. All right, so we've got three different lines, red, green, and blue, as well as the white one. With the red one. When we drag this line in this direction, we're adding red. If we drag on the bottom here, we're adding red to the shadows. If we drag from the top outwards, we're adding red to the highlights. Okay. Midtones the same. When you go the opposite way, you're adding teal. Any should say over here is the same. You've got green all the other way. You've got purple agent this way, blue and yellow. This is where you can control the temperature of the photo using these two and a bit more controlled. So you can make the shadows a bit more blue. You can make the highlights a bit more yellow, and create a bit of an atmosphere or a mood in your photo. So going back to our original photo here we have the presets there. Fantastic, we're going to go over to neutral now. First let's do soft contrast. All right, if I tap on there, we can get rid of all the presets. See what's happened here, what it's doing. This white curve hasn't touched the colors. We're just going to concentrate on the white curve for the moment. With the white, it's dragged the shadows down a little bit and it's popped up the highlights a little bit. The reason why it's done that is it's adding some contrast. It's giving you the photo a bit more of a pop. There's out before finger on the screen and there's our After you can see it's adding more contrast in the image. We have strong high or hard contrast, they've termed it as hard basically. It's drag those pins a little bit more and you can see the result there a little bit over the top, I believe. But you can use these presets and then you can go and actually adjust them. So what I'm going to do is put my finger on one of these dots here, this one here. And see what happens. I've put my finger on the dot. It's doing the before and after. What you do is put your finger on the dot and you slide it straight away. Finger on the dot and slide it, okay. Now I can move it around, see how funky it can get. Okay? When I'm trying to get really precise what I'm doing, instead of moving it out that way, I'm actually dragging the blue around. I'm dragging that blue dot around. Okay, I'm dragging it around. I can actually have a bit more control. Okay, so I'm going to bring that back a little bit. Picking up the bottom one again. Got at that time if for some reason you end up way out there. Okay. What you can do to reset is grab that blue and drag it and then flick it off the grid so we've got a finger on it and we're dragging off the grid and it removes it. Okay, You can actually put up to ten dots on this line. Okay? You can have some real control over it and really muck it up too. Did. All right. All right, so there we go. So we can actually have the S curve, but we can have a little bit more control up in the highlights here because we might not want to blow out the sky. So if I drag that down, see how the clouds are coming back. It's just the experiment. No right and wrong. You can see that it's affecting the clouds, which is great. But then the tractor is looking funky, so it's just back and forth and dragging those around. But I start, personally, I start with the preset and I go from there. All right, let's go into, before I do, this one here faded. I think this is a really important one inside tune image where you have your histogram and you can see it over here When you have these lines here where it's not reaching the dark point, not quite reaching the light point. What you can do, I'm just going to get rid of these two just to highlight here, this is the black point. Okay, we lift it up, it's becoming low contrast milky. If you have a photo that is a bit milky and looks like that, you can simply drag that across. See how all the blacks are becoming more black and it's affecting the overall image. You can do that. Same with the white point. If you've got the sky that's completely blown or you're not sure if it's completely blown, you can drag this down. You can see, okay, it's just going gray. There's no details there. You can play around with both of those. Okay, that's the black point. White point. Now that we've played around with these tonality ones, now we get into the all these, this is where we can start to see some color grading going on an orange, yellow, yellow tractor. Go around these ones. There we go. Quite like that one. That one's better, okay? All right. Now, I'm going to tick on that. Now, over on the left here, I'm going to have a look at the color channels. First of all, red, and you can see here what they've done with the red. They've added a bit of an S curve, so a bit of a contrast. They've bumped the reds, the highlights up a little bit, can't remember, opposite red. If we want to have a look, let's just drag the middle one and we say, okay, that's red, that's green. All right, in the highlights here, adding a bit of red where it goes below that diagonal line like here. We're starting a little bit of green to the shadows. Okay, Next one, green, All green. We know this one in the center that funky because we've got all these other dots next to it. Let's get rid of these dots. Grab one in the middle. Okay, if we drag it out that way, goes green, we drag it this way, it goes the magenta color. All right, there are some greens in this image, in the shadows. We might want to add a little bit of punch to those because they're a bit dark. We've lost the green there. We might want to grab this pin down here, D that up. But you can see there we're starting to get a color cast over all of it. We might want to make sure by having a couple of pins here that we are isolating that to just that area. Okay, I'm bringing that back. There we go. Now we just have a little bump here after you can see we've added just a little bit of bump of green to the shadow. Dark area now that affects the shadows everywhere. So just be mindful of that next blue to the left adds blue that way adds yellow. Now we have yellow in our mid tones. I want more of that. Okay, that's good. I like that going back green. I want some more. I want some of the magenta in the sky. See how that's going funky? I want that pin. There we go. All right. A little bit too much but have a look, when I go to the extreme, have a look at this like it's affecting the sky but then also the reflection on the rail here, which is fantastic that okay, let's bring that back to where I like it features about there. I think that's pretty good. Okay, let's go with Luminant and we're going to add a bit of contrast to the whole thing. There we go. There's our before, there's our after you can see what's happening there. Let's play around with this photo now. This was just a photo that I picked up on Pixabay. If you haven't already, Pixabay is a great location for stock images. You can download anything and you can just play around with it. You don't need to wait until you've taken your own photos. Let's go pencil and curves. Okay, let's go back to neutral now, photos like this are dark, straight away. You see what's happened here. Basically, we have just grabbed this pin and we've dragged it down. Okay, we can replicate that, a pin. And we've darkened it. Okay. We can lighten the whole thing. For some Instagram accounts, they like to have everything bright. I like moody, dark. Now, you might not want that to affect se ha, drag down the lighter areas as well. You might want to add a pin here and drag that. We've just pulled down the shadows there. Okay. Next we're going to go into the colors. I'll start with blue in this instance because there's already some blue there, The shadows. I want to add a bit of blue to the shadows a little bit more. I'm going to go up, I don't want it to affect all of it, just I want to bring a bit of warmth to the high light. There we go. There's before and after, it's coming along. Next is the green channel. Okay. If you can't remember Green Agenda, there's no right and wrong. You can't break it. If you do break it and you go like this again, just grab that, drag that pin and then swipe it off the grid there. Okay, we just want the highlights here we go. Add another pin so that it's isolating at just in the highlights there. That's good red. There's lots of red in this image. I want there to be more red in the shadows. I'm going to go the shadows that's boosting the brightness of all the image, but I just want it in the shadows. There we go. There we go. That's looking really cool, really funky. I like that. Okay, hold the screen. There's a before. There's our after. Now this is just one step, okay? If you wanted to try and have a bit more punch to this, then you would go to tonal contrast. And you can see there, we've added more punch just with the default settings there. Here's a before, there's our after. Pretty cool. You can add so much mood in there. Now again, this is just one step. I added a second. One third step I would do here is this might affect here, we know this is white. Okay, we've put a color cast on the white. I might want to go into my selective tool. Okay, And I'm going to drop a pin on the white. Drag it around so that I can see that it's going on just that area. Pinch and zoom, so that I can get in what it's going to select a lot of that area there. You call those things crock, that up. There we go. Now by dragging these other pins. Dragging these other pins closer. Now this one in the middle is going to be, I can't pick because it's too close. Now that one, we'll do a more specific selection. I'm going to go saturation. And I'm going to reduce and get rid of all the colors out before there, after a little difficult to see. But this is something that quite often happens when you start playing around with color cars. Using the curves, is that where there's pure whites or these whites and there's things in there, it can affect that as well. We haven't gone too aggressive with this. It hasn't impacted it too much. But if it does, that's how you go about it. There we go, before, after. It's a great tool as long as you use it gently. But why not go crazy? Just experiment. Have fun with it. 17. Changing Colour - Getting Creative Now: This one's a little different. Okay, I'm going to show you how using curves and double exposure, how we can change the colors of things. So here's the original and then here's how we do this inside snapseed. So if I go view Edits, I can show you each step the original, okay, added the yellow, magenta, teal. Let's see how we did it. So we're going to curves at the adjust. You can see when I go to the color, you can see here the blue channel, the blue channel. I've dragged that all the way down there as we know that is yellow on that side. As we know with blue channel, we go that way, it goes blue, this way, it goes yellow. So we drag it all the way we get to there. Now what I did then was I used the mask tool to go in there. And just basically went up to 100% and then just drew on those leaves that I wanted to, those petals, I should say leaves, the petals. And then also in the middle, I thought it looked really nice in the middle there too. Really rough there. Again, next one was the magenta, basically same again. I went into here, went into the green channel. And I dragged that down to the furthest point to make the magenta use the masking. And then went in there 100% And basically went in and painted over top of those petals. The next one did the same. This one here is really cool. I used the double exposure if I go into a setting. So basically what I did here was I picked up a color wheel, added a photo, went into my album, and then dragged this scene. What I like about this is I've got lots of different colors here. Basically, I just grabbed a color, you can expand it so that it fills and covers that whole petal. Press the tick. Then using the paint, I can went in there and painted that again. Now the secret when you're doing a double exposure is stick around that 50% opacity. If you go to 100 and then we go into these b***d modes where if you've got a before and after it you're sticking on top. Okay, the default and overlay basically just go slap on top. And then when you mask and reveal parts of this layer, you see this layer b***d modes. We'll look at both of them and go, okay, what's the pixels doing on this one? What's the pixels doing on this one? If this one is lighter, this one's darker. Depending on the b***d mode, it will reveal what's on top or it will reveal what's on the bottom. It's b***ding the two based on the information from the two of them. Okay, now with snaps. For that to work, you need to be around the 50% And you can see, let's go through lighten, dark, adding subtract, overlay here. I think darken is quite good, or default. Let's go with dark and press the tick. And then you can see the same again with the masking. You can do 100% or you can reduce the values. I've added 100% there, but we could actually do 75% that. We actually keep that texture details basically because it was just the color wheel. It was just color. It didn't b***d any texture or information. Just the color. All right, there we go. That's how you can change the colors on things. It's tricky, it's cumbersome, but it's just a cool thing to know how to do it if you need to change the color of something. It's not ideal for mobile to do that sort of thing. Now with photo shop generative feel, you can go and select a jumper and say replace the color of the jumper with this bang 12 seconds later it does it, but this is a really cool thing. I just wanted to show you what you can do with the curves and the double exposure. The next one here is basically the same thing, but we're making the background black. What I did there was basically with the normal tones, you just drag all the way down, make it black. Press select, and then you're going to the curves and we can say exactly where with 100% we can make the background black. Again, it's a little finicky because you got to get in really close. The closer you get, remember the more refined the line is. If you do happen to find a spot like this where you need to go in the middle there, it's easier to cover it all and then use the eraser and go back this way. It's a lot easier to do that than it is with our fat fingers trying to get in there, you just can't fill it in. And then go with the eraser and then do that. I hope that makes sense. All right, good stuff. Have fun. 18. Stacks Masking - By Far the Most Powerful and Useful Tool Inside Snapseed: As you know, Snapseed is a really simple, easy app to use, has a clean interface. Quite intuitive to use, but there's so much more in there that most people don't see using the stacks and masking layers. And masking, if you like, where you can go in and use any tool inside Snapseed And can go in there and actually swipe and and apply it exactly where you want, Which is fantastic for enhancing visual flow, changing hierarchy, visual elements and that sort of thing. And there's a few tools in here, Your vintage, your grunge, all these retro lx grain, all these sorts of things that are fantastic. And you can apply it H, DR scapes, another one. You can apply it exactly where you want in the photo, so you don't have to apply it to the whole image. Let's have a look at this one. All right, so this icon up here, these stacks layers, it's a history icon. You can press on that and there you can press onto, just saw the QR looks. So this is where you can create a QR code, share it with someone else, and they can apply this same edit to their photo. Anyway, I digress view edits, that's the one we want. And you can see here when I opened this image, it was a Pro Raw. So I've already put in some adjustments there using the develop module. Okay, so I'll get press back. I'm going to go on a tool and what I want to play around with first here is the HDR. Where is it? Hdr scape. So this one over here, I want to do that pretty full on, all right? But it's brought out colors, textures in the belly here. I love that it's brought that out now. It's applied the HDR scape to everything and I don't want it applied to all of these because I want the to go away from the background and more on the lizard, I can selectively apply it just to the lizard. I can select some different ones here, people strong. Take a look at fine and nature. I think nature has done a really good job there. I can tap on this, the adjustments down the bottom there. And then change the filter strength so I can actually bring it back a bit because I think it looks really good. And then I bring it back a bit. I'm happy with that tick. All right. Now back up to the history icon, the tiles view Edits. Now you can see this is the next step that I've done. Each time you do an edit with an adjustment. Each time you do it will come in here and we can tap on this. How this we can either bin it, no good, we can reapply and adjust the enhancements or this one here I'm really excited to show you is the brush where now I can actually go in here and select exactly where I want to apply this. I wanted to apply it on this part of the lizard because I thought it just brought out the color and the detail really nicely. Can see. I'll outside the lines. There we go. Bring that back. Bring that back. Okay. And I want to bring, we'll bring in a little bit more there. And remember the closer you get, the more precise that mask will be. All right, holding on the screen up before and after on before like that, we've applied it to just that area. Okay, there's the develop when I did those adjustments that now shows you what we just did, really cool. A couple more I want to show you here that I really like. There is drama, which is really good for bringing out colors in skies. That thing you can see here can make clouds really dark and gloomy grain, Grainy film is really good vintage. This one over here, number 1011. Use these quite a lot. 11 is my favorite for this type of photo where there's already brown tones in there. Look at that. Looks fantastic. Now I can go in and add blur. Take the blur away. I prefer to take it away personally. We can go into adjustments. We can go in here and it's added a vignette. I don't want that much vignette. Bring it back style strength, increase it, decrease it. But where it was around that 20 mark was quite good. Press the tick again up to the history view edit. Now I can go and select exactly where I want to apply this. I don't need to use this. I can just see what's happening. So I'm going to go and add this to the background there. Add it to the foreground. Okay? All right. Now I can see where am I applying it? Okay, that's really good. Okay, happy with that. It doesn't matter that I've touched the tail a little bit in the feet. Doesn't matter if I b***d it in that way. There's the before, there's the after. I'm really liking the way these looks. Okay? All right, so let's go back into drama. Because I want to see reduce the strength, okay? Reduce it quite a bit there. What I want to do here, that's really funk, isn't it? What I want to do here, I want to mask it in. I can change not only the strength in the tool, but now that I'm here with the masking, I can now go in here and change it here as well. I'm just going and darkening the foreground. See there, how I've darkened the foreground 100% to there. I think that's looking really good after it's actually directing our eye back onto the lizard. I think we definitely need some up there. All right, probably 75 is a bit strong. Let's bring it back with the little icon down here. You tap that, you can see that we've got 100% strength here, 75. And you can see how we're b***ding it through. All right, there we go. Before these tools on their own, I wouldn't, I wouldn't use drama on this photo, no way you saw what happened, but by using it here, we've actually gone and desaturated the colors here. We've made them, I like the HDR scape how it brought out some depth and details in here and enhanced made that color. Pope's fantastic. Let's go and have a look again. Edits. When we opened it, added the H DR scape just to the lizard, the vintage, we've applied that kind of brownish kind of tint to it all and then drama. I've decrease the saturation. Increase the darkness in the edges there. There we go. That's the history tool. It's fantastic. Go in there and you can go and change anything. It's brilliant, I love it. It's a hidden feature in here that I think is overlooked and a little bit intimidating. But if you can get into this and really play around with it, so many aspects or different ways you can use it, you can go into structure, reduce the structure 100% which is a blur. And then you can add that to cloud skies where you're getting some, you know, it looks a bit gritty and grainy. You can go in there and smooth it all and you can swipe over the sky exactly where you want it, so cool. Have fun. 19. Looks Styles - Take a Shortcut and Save Your Own: Quick one here. One tool I want to show is how do you save these? Edits are similar to a preset on light room inside snap seat. These are called looks or styles. Depending if you're an Android or iphone, for some reason, they can call two different things. All right, let's have a look at this photo now. Again, just in case you're jumping around between lessons and you're not flowing from top to bottom, the icons. If you hold a vertical, it says Looks or styles on an Android. And when you hold it horizontal, it now turns into the rainbow underneath me, underneath the video. Tap on that. If you're inside one of the editing tools, just tap on that and it'll bring up these looks and styles. These are a great way, if you're not really sure which way to edit, you can go in there and select one of these. Now if you swipe all the way across, you'll see a when you hit that plus you can then name this look and then it will end up in this gallery here. This is great. When you have a lot of photos that you want to apply the same edit to, the same adjustments, you can just save it as a style preset. And then when you go into that option, you'll see yours then saved there. And you just go in there and click on that and press the tick, and you're done. 20. Double Exposure - Add a Photo to Another Photo: This tool is a bit of fun double exposure. I'm going to add a squirrel to this image. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add this photo again. And then this part here of the helmet. I'm going to expand, it'll bring that so that a pivots there and then I'm going to have a squirrel poking out of it. It's just a bit of fun. All right, Pencil up to double exposure. All right. I'm going to add this photo again. Okay. So by default it comes in at opacity, 50% thereabouts. Which is really handy because it allows us to move this around and see what we're doing. What I want to do is I want to pivot on this bit here, and I want to actually move it around like this, lining up these two dots here. And then I'm just expanding it with my fingers, making it bigger and smaller. And piping it around so that I'm creating this gap in the helmet for the squirrel to poke its head out. All right, so let's have a play with that. I think that is reasonable. Now we're going to make it 100% opacity press tick. Now this is what it looks like, but we want to go up to the stacks, layers, whatever you want to call it, View Edits. Now I want to use the Mask tool here, and I want to mask it in. And select exactly where this goes. Just swipe over it and you can see here, this is what's happening. Okay. Boom. And I'm going to leave that there, and I'll explain why in a moment. Let me just finish this. I want to get this line right. I want to make sure it's b***ded in down the bottom here. Now, if you go over the edges like I have here, see how I've gone over the edges here. I want to bring this back. We just make it back to zero. And we go in there closer you get. The more precise that line will be, the further away, the more blurred that transition will be. But I want it nice and sharp there. Okay, back to zero. I want this to be the original here. Back to the original there. All right, back to the original. The original. I want to follow these lines. I want this to become the new line. The edge there, it's allowed to overlap there a little bit. Okay, that's good here. Let's just, I can't remember which is which. Let's go 100% not that one. I want to go 0% Okay. And want to swipe over these areas. If you're not sure we've got the little icon down the bottom there, you can press that and it brings it back. So I want to go through here, make all this. Because I swiped from so far out, it's actually picked up a lot of this. But I want this to all be original here. Okay, same here. I want that to b***d a bit better. There we go. Looking very good. All right, now what I want to do is add another one and I want to put a squirrel poking a tad out of here. All right? Okay. So I'll go into the pencil and I'll go to double exposure and then I'll select my photo. There we go. There's my squirrel again, it's 50% I can just move this around. There's not much of a gap there. So I want to have, I want to have at least one ear sticking out is not going to be fantastic, because I'm not going to be able to see the whiskers and that sort of thing, But this is just a bit of fun. Bit of fun, All right? I want to orientate it around that way. Move it in there, increase the opacity 100% Then I want to go into the tools. Okay, And swipe where I want by getting nice and close. This line here is going to be my new edge, so I'm going to select from that and swipe along there. Okay, same there. Want to swipe along from there? Okay. Here he is, poking his head out over the lines there. Just a bit of blur. All right. Now I want to go in here. Yeah, I am going to lose those whiskers, but that's okay. We're going to zoom back and you're not going to notice that they're not there. We can actually draw those back with our lines. We can draw those back with another tool if we wanted to. You could even the text. That sounds really we. But you can even use the text tool. Yeah, that's okay. All right. There we go, hawks. That that's very cool. Now we can go in and use the brush tool. Let's just do that really quickly. We're going to go in here, brush tool, and I'm going to double tap, getting nice and close here. And I'm going to change it to exposure because I want this to be really harsh. There we go, I can actually make this nice dark. It looks like a shadow inside the helmet there, all right. Up to that point where it pivots. We could spend a lot of time and make this look a lot more natural. I've got the wrong line there. We go back to rays. You get the point. What I'm trying to do here. Then we can do a lesser one and we could just darken that off so that it looks like it's in the shadows a bit. Darken that off. Let's go all the way. I'm becoming a perfectionist here are I'm getting distracted the more you swap over it, more intense. Anyway, there we go. Heckles, that double exposure. A bit of fun. There are lots of practical applications for this, but I just wanted to show you away a more amusing way of doing it. 21. Expand - Handy Feature to Add Canvas to the Sides of Your Image: This tool expand is often overlooked as a bit of a gimmicky thing. But it's so cool. I'll show you why with this particular photo. So we go over to the pencil again. Over here, expand. All right, now we can see here we have three different options. We've got Smart, white or black. Now Smart is similar to the way the healing tool works and we talked about earlier with a perspective with rotate, that it'll actually pick up areas inside the frame here and copy it and paste it there. Now you can drag each of these sides out like this, or you can pinch and zoom and do all of them all at the same time. Have a look at this bang, how cool is that? Now it does leave, leave some little bits in here that you can use the healing tool, get rid of those, or you can crop it. Or if you find that that didn't quite work, you can incrementally do a little bit at a time. So let's go back here and we'll go in and let's just undo that. We'll do one incremental at a time. So expand, okay? And we might just do a little bit, okay, starting it has actually picked up the antenna already, so it might not work so well here, a little bit more. It actually got rid of it a little bit more. Look at that. Oh, there it is. It came back, but you can see there, that's not as bad as what it was the first time when I just went like that. And it actually picked up at the top of the B as well. So doing a little bit of a time, it works really well. Now, why would you do this? Well, you would do, if you actually want to create a 169 photo from a 43 photo. If you actually took this as a 43 aspect ratio and then you cropped that as a 169, you could end up cropping all the top and bottom compositionally. Sometimes it's better to expand and give you some extra over here. Okay, so if I go back. All right, so that's where it was. Instead of cropping a photo and cropping at the top of the bottom here, compositionally to stretch this out into a 69 aspect ratio, we might want to do it that way. And if this has happened, all right, we might want to go, you know what? I actually want some more space over here so I can crop that out. We can do it again, expand, and then you can go in there and you can do that again, and then you can bring this in. Okay. Well, I can't undo that. That's okay. Now I'm going to crop, and I'll choose 69. And look at that compositionally, that looks fantastic. We've changed it into a longer photo. This would look better on a TV screen, that sort of thing. The other thing this does pencil. Okay, expand. Now, before we said was down here got white and black. This is a great way of adding an instant border, A white. All right. We can just make the border thinner smaller. Okay. I'm going to make it as small as I can there that you can go in to expand. We can now make it black. Then we can add black like that. Pretty cool. That makes it framed a lot more contained in the image. I really like the look at that. Obviously there is, you can go into down the bottom here. And you do have some options here for frames, but that's just a nice simple way that you can do it as well. 22. 6-Step Editing Process - You Can Acheive this in Under 60 Seconds: This six step process I want to share with you is the starting point for most of my images. All right, let's get into it. Here's an image that I captured just last week. It was an image where I was driving along and I thought, oh, that looks like a great photo opportunity. It took me a few seconds and I'm, well, I've got a phone. Go back and get it. So I did a tube, went back, parked up, walked in nice and slowly so that I didn't disturb these cows. This was a dam just on the side of the road, but it was late in the afternoon and it just completely still water. The theme for our Facebook group that week, because I have new themes every week to continually inspire and motivate and for us to have that community of learning in that Facebook group. Still water was a great topic and very popular topic and this was a perfect opportunity to grab one of those instead of just grabbing a photo on my camera and resharing something here. When I pulled up, you wouldn't believe it. I got about three shots off. And then one of these cows, the one on the right just happened to walk straight in there and just completely ruined that still water. But this was a classic example of what motivated me to take this photo. Was lost in the camera. Like the skies, the color was amazing. The reflections on the water was really smooth, had nice gradual from blue to the colors. This will be a great example, I think, to go into here the first step of my six step process. Well, I'll go through each of them. It's basically rotate perspective to rotate the angle cropping. Next thing is tune image, then we're going to enhance the details, make it a bit sharper, We're going to do some healing, which is where we're going there to remove different parts of the image. And lastly, some add some blur. And I'll explain each of those and why I do each of those processes when I tap on the pencil here. Now, it depends which way you're holding the phone at the moment. I'm holding it in landscape side, holding it side and horizontal. Tap on the pencil. There's one here called rotate. Now naturally you would think, okay, I want to rotate. Straighten it. That is the one, that's what this tool is for. But you'll see there when I rotate, I'm going to do this to the extreme so that you can see exactly what I'm doing. You can see it actually zooms in as well. That cow on the right for example, This horizon wasn't quite right. You really need to get the horizons right. You'll talk to people in my Facebook group. I'll tell you, Mike, you're telling us about the horizons. That's because the horizon, no matter how good your image looks, if the horizon is not perfectly straight, the person will subconsciously go, that photo is wrong. It doesn't look right. That's why we've got to get those horizons right. But using the rotate tool, you can see here when we do that, it zooms in and then potentially you could crop something out like that cow, I'm not a fan of this one. There is an alternative, and it's right next to their perspective. It is hidden away there in here. You've got perspective control. We can change the perspective of how it looks. And we've got one there called rotate. Now, when you tap on the bottom here, you've got a couple of different things here. I'm going to explain it after I tap on it. So we've got smart. Okay. When I go and rotate, see there the cow on the right is still there. And then we've got those black areas on either around it. Right. What Smart does is it picks up what's on the inside the other side of that black edge and fills it in. I'll go to the extreme look at that. It straightened it, but it hasn't zoomed in the other way. Same deal. How could that. It's real Photoshop stuff. It's quite amazing. Now if I want to go in there and change that to black, what it'll do is it'll just fill it in with black. But I'm going to choose smart and bang. It's just really incredible, you can do that. All right? I'm pretty happy with that. Another thing you can do here is you can, you can tilt it so it looks like that. It's from a different angle, but this image is pretty right, so I'm going to leave it there like that. The next step is crop back into the pencil, the tools, and I'm going to go second row, first one, a long crop. Now most of my images at home, what I like to do is crop everything in 169. The reason for that is that I don't really print many photos now because I go through so many photos and I want to stay fresh. And I don't want to wait until it gets printed and then ends up on the wall and stays there for a year. I want to rotate through my images. I quite often go to 169 because I can display it on my TV. This image here, I really want to get rid of that cow there. I'm happy with that. 169 C. Now I need to look back and go, Okay, what was the intention of this image? The theme was still water. I could crop it down there. And then the main focus, if you like, because it's 23 of the image is still water. That is what I'm trying to communicate. If it was the colors in the sky, I would move it up and then two thirds of the image is the sky. Then that becomes the story. I think when I captured this image, that was the intention. But I really like those colors. I really want to bring those colors out for the purpose of this training. Tick on the pencil when we're right. Next one is tune image. We want to go back into the tools and tune image is the first one. Top row on the left, tune image, down the bottom there, you can see an icon for it. Just so you can tap on that or you can just swipe your finger up and down and it'll open up things. I want to go to Ambience. Now, I'm going to go through this a little bit quickly. Don't be too concerned if it goes over your head. That's fine. In the course, 21 days, enthusiast in 21 days. I'll go through each of these in much more detail. I'm just going to go through it really quickly, swiping to the extremes just to see what it does. When I see where I like it, I bring it back a little bit. Contrast, zoom in a little bit, okay? Highlights reduce those bright areas just enough that it doesn't look a bit. Grungy shadows, I'm going to bring these back because there's a bit of light on the edge of that cow. All right, moving around here, Saturation is where I can change the intensity of the colors. Now, I might make that a little bit stronger because I want those colors there. All right, Press on the tick. Next was sharpen. I'll go into details. Top row, second from the left sharpen. There's two sections to this. There's structure and there's sharpening structure. Looks for lines within the image where there's some contrast. And it'll take those lines and it'll darken and light on one side. Whether that's black and white or color, it'll do the same thing. It just makes that contrast a little bit stronger. It can very quickly get really grungy. All right? You can see there, see around the Cale, see how we got that white line. You're getting that halo. I'm going to bring it back so that it sharpens it before we get to the. Really can't add too much. Next one, sharpening, indiscriminately sharpens every single little dot of detail to sharpen that up, tap on that. Next step is healing. Now I can go in there and look for those distracting elements. And go in there and just get rid of them in the water here. Look at this swap over, you can see red, let go, gone. It's fantastic. It's so good. Limitations all the distracting element of we got here. Let's say for example, I want to get rid of that. Get rid of those. There we go. Do it. So this is the thing. It won't work to get rid of a cow. Because the way this works is where I swipe my finger, it's looking for content and details, and information, if you like, on the other side of the red and then it's filling it in. We're not let go of this. Either side of the cow is going okay. What do you want me to fill in here and then it can come up with some dodgy results like that. Not fantastic. Another app in the course enthusiast in 21 days, I'll show you another app that does a much better job but for little quick fixes and that's what Snaps is really handy for, is just quick little steps. Actually, let's give this one to go. We might be able to get it in the shadow, see how this goes. No, that didn't work either. Okay. Zoom in. Approach from different sides, different angles. I want to see when I zoom back out what this looks like. There we go, one cow without a shadow. That's pretty creative. Okay. Bit of a bright spot there. Cool. That's funny. Tick on that. Happy with that. Next step is blue. Now with the blur that is ***s blue, it's the far right, second last row, ***s blue. Now this is where you can go in and make the main subject in focus, the rest of it out of focus. Why do you think that is? What it does is it attracts your eye to what's sharp and in quite often, what's brighter and then what's and focus. Your eye doesn't go there. This is where we can start really manipulating the viewer. It could be yourself looking back at this photo as a memory and years that come. What happens is your eye goes over there. For us amateur photographers though we're looking at this, go well, that's not how a camera works. That looks weird because, because the way focus works is distance from the camera to the subject is out of focus, section is in focus. Then beyond that is out of focus, having a portion like that in focus. And then out of focus just doesn't work. It looks wrong. You have this option down here where you can go linear. We can move this around, move it around. Going to adjust the transition, we reduce that transition. I want to make sure the cows good on just vignette, strength vignette is where the darkening of the edges. So you can see by default it's already added some darkening there. I want to bring that back just a little bit. I want to want to too much. You can see what's happened here though by doing this. Any pixelation or artifacts in the sky, we've blurred it all out. That's why I like that tool. All right. So there we go. There's our before, there's our. After a nice quick, simple process, I've gone through a little bit of detail. I told you we could do this in less than a minute. So I'm going to go in there and open up another image. All right, 60 seconds. Here we go. Perspective. And I'm going to rotate this one. Happy with that? I'm going to crop, make it a square crop on this one. Yeah, that's good. June image. Okay. A bit of ambience shadow it, light spring goes right down. Overall brightness there. That's good details. Yeah, that's great. Because that's what I really wanted to show off was the details in this one healing. Whoops. Oh, zooming first. What do I want to heal out of this? What do I want to remove? Okay. What am I do is just the top there. Just get rid of that. Just a bit of Border Patrol and blur my last one. There we go. I was only seconds away. Wasn't there's, there's our after you can see that with the right image, you can't get under 60 seconds. 23. Before & After - Strawberries: Quick little before and after edit here. This is the before and this is the after. We're going to go through step by step process on how we did this. So back to the before image. This is the original. I want it to be that grungy look. I wanted to have that nice depth and darkness to it and make the details really pop al right at the moment. This is like an Instagram pose that's nice and bright and airy. That's not what I want. All right, so we're going to tools the pencil and tune image. The first thing I want to do is desaturated a little bit. Okay? So we're going to bring that back a bit, okay? Press the tick to accept that change. Next thing I want to do, I want to add some structure and some details because it's a bit soft. We can see that when we go in here, you can see there's not much detail there. So I want to bring this right up and make it crunch a bit. Okay about there. If I get further down the process and it's not enough, I can always go back into that history icon and I can go back and readjust and add some more. But for now I'm pretty happy with that. I'm going to do is curves. All right, up the top here, curves, okay, neutral, that's where it is. I like the hard contrast that has done most of the heavy lifting for me already. Now I'm going to play around with the colors a little bit, starting with the red. Obviously there's a lot of red here. I want to start with that first. I want the darker look. I want the red to be darker. Like if I want to correct it and not have it for the rest of it, I'll put a pin in the middle there. So that goes back to where it was. And you can see here, actually I'm covering it, You can't see it. There's a bit there, because we've dragged one side, it becomes a bit of an S curve. So I want to put another pin up there. And I want to straighten that out so that we're actually not affecting the highlights with the red. Because I don't want red in here and I don't want too much red there. There is already a color cast, a capture. But anyway, we'll leave that how it is. Next. I'm going to go into the green. Okay, I want to add a little bit of green to the mid tones, probably not that much. Just a bit. There we go. I like that because we've got a big green there. Let's see if we go the other way. What happens? Actually, I like the other way. Adding a bit of magenta changed my mind because green is one of those things. There's already green there. If we go and boost that green intensity even more, it can look a bit funky. All right? Funky. There's a real technical term there. A shadow blues always look good. When we have blues in the shadows, I think I want to go the other way. I want to go the other way. I want a bit of yellow in there. Okay, correct that. There we go. Drag that pin a little bit more. I'm happy with that. My before there's my. After looking good. Looking good. All right, I'm going to add a little bit more punch to this. This one here, I love tonal contrast. Look at this instantly bang. Now it has affected the background, the wall in the background, but all of this area here. Because I can go smooth this later and reduce, take the attention away from it by smoothing all this. I'm really looking in here, I'm liking the way this looks. I might even add a little bit more to the mid tones just to make that pop just little bit. All right, next thing to do is add an overall guns to it, color cast. Okay? This is the background and the foreground. All that thing. Quick little tip here, we can go to grunge tool. Okay. Yeah, that's not what I'm looking for. What I'm looking for here is I want to get rid of all the textures. No, textures don't need that. Okay, brightness, bring that back. Okay. Basically what I want to do is I want to go through the different styles and look for a background style that I quite like. Okay, I'm going, I think about there now I'm looking at this for the background. This is 100% opacity and intensity. But what I'm going to go into history, icon view edits, and now I can paint in exactly where I want to apply this. I'm going to do, let's go 50% around the back here. See here, there. It's darkening and it's adding that kind of color to it. I quite like that. Yes, I've gone over the lines, I could see that already. All right, let's pinch a zoom. Get in here, and I'll make that zero. So this is like an eraser. So I want to go in there and erase it from there. Okay, I don't want to going over there, I don't want to color cast here, I just want to. Just the background I want. Okay, excel***t. Look going over the lines again, What was 50% Okay. Go right in there. It's easier to remove that. It is. Add into a tight little space like that. Okay. Happy with that. And I might even try 75% down the bottom here. Yeah, that's really good. I really like that. Nice. All right, That's looking really good. Did any go in there? I think it did, yeah. There we go. I can see it. Okay. There we go. All right. So there we go. That's the before I did the grunge effect, that's the after. It's really making the foreground there isolated and pop, which is really cool, really like that the background. I want to smooth that. So I'll go to details and structure and I can go negative value like that too much. Don't want that. I just wanted a little bit, okay. I just want to get rid of some of these vertical lines that you can see here that are pulling our attention away. I want to try and reduce that see the before and the after. I'm just reducing some of that texture again. I can go in here and I can paint that in exactly where I want it, 100% That's good. I like that. Okay. I may need to come down the middle here, make sure I haven't gone too far over the lines. It doesn't matter so much on the strawberry because I want that detail. Okay, there we go. Because I didn't go crazy with that amount. It doesn't matter so much, you don't really notice it there. Okay, next thing I want to do here is this strawberry here. Not quite sharp. It's a bit out of focus at capture because you can see the background out of focus, the foregrounds out of focus a little bit here is the depth of field. Wasn't quite right, so I want to add some sharpness here or perception of sharpness. Selective tool drop a pin there, move it around, expand, decrease. I just wanted in that area to structure. I'm going to crunch it can't getting nice and close. Look at the before after. That's good. But you could tell there it's added some brightness to it as well. At the same time, I want to reduce that. That's just sharpening. There we go. Great. Looking really good. Okay, the old trick, Look away, close my eyes, look back at the photo. What's grabbing my attention? This area and in here are both pulling my attention as a distraction. Yeah, maybe that, but I'm not too worried about that. That's okay. But definitely, that's not bad. It creates isolation. Not sure, I'll worry about that, but I definitely will. Let's go into the healing. Double tapping, nice and close. Okay. Not sure how this is going to work. Yeah, it didn't work a little bit of a time. That's better? That's much better. Okay. That's looking great. All right. Last thing I want to do is a little bit of dodge and Burn. I want to go into the brush. The area that I want to look at is this area here. I want some separation there with the cream. I want to go into Dodge and Burn. Here we go look wrong ways. I want to go negative. That's what I want. I want to just darken that area. This is one of those tools, but more often, more frequently go over it more stronger the effect if I keep going over it until I get that look that I want, it's getting there to the top as well. Yeah, that's looking great. Add a little bit down the bottom there. Yeah. All right, Let's just add a little bit there. Yeah. Perfectionist can't help it. All right, what's next? All right, I want to do the same, but I want to go in, Where did my brush go? There it is. Now I'm going to go in, brighten some of these areas here just to make them pop and stand out a little bit. Okay. I'm just going to swipe over my finger over these hot spots or make them hot spots. Okay, here we go. There we go. Just enough that it grabs our attention and we can see that, wow, look at that fresh looking fruit over there here. Just a couple again. Make that come to life, basically, that's what we're doing, Finger painting, making it come to life. Okay, let's go back out. All right? Yeah, that's looking really good. Press the tick, and I'm pretty happy with that. There's the before, there's the after. 24. Your Project - Post Your Images: You made it at the end of the course. That's fantastic. It is project time. Now, this is where you can share your photos. Show me what you've learned. I would love to see your photos in there. Have a play around with photographic intention and matching the editing to that. Have a go at the filters. The looks and styles that are inside snapseed there. Play around with the grunge tool, play around with the vintage. All these other things that you don't normally have to go at, use the stacks, the masking now that you've got all the advanced stuff and get in there and do the real local adjustments and create a real different aesthetic and visual hierarchy. You've covered a lot, we've covered, you've learned a lot, and I'd love to see your photos in the project.