Or, the afternoon or evening after a shoot . . . whatever the case may be. It all calls for post-processing. What is post-processing, you ask? Well, to put it simply, it’s “gentle” photo editing.
Photo editing can range from creating a completely new picture (like we did in Camera Awesome in Lesson 12) to doing minor adjustments to make your photo look more like reality. The latter category of editing is usually referred to as “post-processing.” Post as in “after you’re done shooting” and “processing” as in the digital version of developing a photo.
When you take photos with your iPhone, the iPhone is making a lot of decisions for you. It decides how saturated to make your colors, how to balance the tones so that white looks white, how bright to make the image, etc. Sometimes it does a pretty good job. Sometimes it guesses wrong.
Today, we’re going to download another app. This time, it’s not a camera, it’s a photo editing tool. Good news! It’s free!
Sometimes people are disappointed when they realize that some level of editing is called for to get the most out of their photos. Using photo editing tools can help take a ho-hum picture to something much more dramatic. Often, it’s the drama that gets lost when you take a photo; you’re just putting back what your eyes saw.
We’re going to do a simple edit with Snapseed today.
I’m using an image that has a distracting background I’d like to make less distracting. To do this, I start by opening the app and then selecting the image I want to edit. The graphics below will walk you through all the edits I made to this one photo:
I applied a few simple adjustments but left it looking pretty similar to the original–just a little better. Here they are side-by-side:
Your Assignment: Download Snapseed (did I mention it’s free?). Follow the instructions to open a photo that you ilke, but weren’t thrilled with. Try making the simple post-processing adjustments above. Do you like it better? Are there still things you would like to change about it? What are the things you couldn’t figure out how to do that you’d like to change?
Snap Great Photos 
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