Ever wonder how to get gorgeous photos from your smart phone? I mean, your phone was not cheap, and the majority of that cost is due to the awesome camera inside. So how do you get your pictures to turn out how you want them? That’s exactly what you’ll learn in this episode.

When it comes to editing, you can’t rely on it to fix your photos. It’s so much more important to get them right in camera. I teach all about this in Brand Builder’s Bootcamp, but for now, just know that it’s best to get a nice clean shot and then work from there. 

When editing a photo on your phone use an editing app. The native apps are actually quite good, so if you are comfortable with that, everything that I’m going to tell you is available there. But if you want a little more versatility, try out one of these apps.

Lightroom

• This app is focused more to the amateur photographers who love taking a bunch of photos and want to edit them on-the-go. I love this app because you can use RAW images (more on that later) and the slider system is so simple.

VSCO

• VSCO has a great selection of presets, it gives you great control of changing the look and feel of any image. However, only the basic features of this app are completely free, you have to make purchases within the app to do more complicated editing.

Snapseed

• Google’s Snapseed is one of the best ways to make edits to your photos and is available for both Android and iOS. It uses an intuitive technology where you do most editing by hand if that suits your needs better.

There are a million other editors out there, so play around until you find out what you like best. 

Here are the 5 steps to my editing workflow...

1. Crop and Align
2. Adjust the exposure and contrast.
3. Fix color balance, Temperature and Tint
4. Adjust Shadows, Highlights
5. Saturation / Vibrancy

Check out the podcast for all the details on how these work.

So what if I’ve just scared you off from editing your photos and you are saying, “But Brittany...what If I just want to use a filter?” Well here’s the quick and dirty...

Filters can be awesome, but they’re easy to get wrong. When people use them, they tend to be the first and only stop in most people’s process. Which doesn’t really work. The problem is they aren’t smart, so they can’t read if your exposure is off, what the subject is, or what you want to accomplish. 

For example, Instagram’s Juno filter will increase the contrast and vividness in your photo whether or not it needs it. If your photo already started out with high contrast, it’s going to look really bad. If you want to make a filter like that work for you, you need to hand edit the photo first and then apply the filter, compensating for the effects the filter is going to put on. And that all sounds like a lot of extra work to me. 

Speaking of all of this work...why even edit your photos in the first place? Well because it can really do wonders for the image that you took. Editing is like putting the icing on the cake. It’s that final piece that pulls everything together, enhances the emotion, and creates a finished product.

But here’s the thing. Don’t over do it! While today’s phones are super powerful and truly amazing, the sensors are still a lot smaller than a full sized digital camera. It can only capture so much light and information when taking photos. The more you alter a smartphone image, the more the quality disintegrates. Remember my very first tip. Try to get it right in camera. You can’t save a bad photo with editing. 

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