Taking photos with your phone is just how people do it nowadays. While this makes it really easy to instantly share them, before you do, you can crop and apply a number of edits to make your photos look their best.
Smartphones are an almost perfect dissemination technology. Take a picture and a few taps later, it’s on the Internet. Before you do that, however, take a few moments to fix up your photos with cropping, color adjustments, and enhancements
Both Android and iOS have a pretty decent set of editing options included with their systems, meaning you can really set your snaps apart if you want to take the time to experiment.
And we do want stress, this is as much about experimenting as knowing what you want to do. There’s a lot you can do to your photos, so it’s a good idea to spend some time just messing around and seeing where your creativity takes you.
Editing Photos on Your iPhone or iPad
Editing photos on your iPhone or iPad is really easy. The Photos app on iOS packs a lot of features into it. When you want to edit one of your photos, you just select it and then tap the “Edit” button in the upper-right corner.
When you open a photo to edit, you’ll see four controls along the right edge. The magic wand at the top automatically make fixes it thinks your photo needs.
The four editing tools squared in red. Whenever you’re happy with your changes, you can tap the “Done” button in the upper-right corner.
The crop tool let’s you freely rotate your photos or drag the corners inward. At the top, next to the “Done” button, you will see an icon to rotate your picture 45 degrees.
If you change your mind, tap the “Reset” button.
Note also, if you want to constrain your crop to a specific ratio, you need to tap the small icon next to the “Cancel” option in the lower-right corner.
Beyond simple crop and rotate controls, Photos also has a few presets you can try out. This is completely non-destructive, so if none of these are appealing, you can simply revert to the original.
Anything you can select from the preset effects can be accomplished using the manual controls, or you can use the manual controls to further edit one of these effects.
Manual adjustments let you change your photos’s lighting (exposure, highlight, shadows, etc.), color (saturation, contrast, cast), and also black and white levels (tone, grain, etc.).
When you make adjustments manually, you can slide the control up or down to flip through changes quickly. If you really want to dig into things and perform fine-grained edits, click the icon below the selector.
Here are the sub-options that we see if we do this with the Color selector. Tapping any of these will let you make even more specific adjustments to the photo’s saturation, contrast, or cast; you make adjustments in this same way to the other two (Light and B&W) as well.
Whenever you’re finished making edits, you need to tap the “Done” button in the upper-right corner. If you decide you want to discard the changes, you can tap “Cancel” in the lower-right corner.
Finally, if you realize you want to undo all your changes, reopen your edited photo and tap “Revert.”
Once you’re finished editing and you’ve saved your changes, you can share your newly reimagined photo and wow your friends with your skills.
Editing Photos on (Most) Android Devices
Android 5 Lollipop (at least how Google distributes it) also comes with an app called “Photos” (part of Google+) and like its iOS counterpart, it too has a pretty extensive set of editing controls.
When you open your photo with the Photos app, you’ll see three buttons along the bottom, tap the pencil to edit.
Editing in Android isn’t remarkably different from iOS. The controls are laid out along the bottom instead of the right edge, and there’s a bit more control immediately at your fingertips, but the functions are largely the same.
Like iOS there is a magic wand auto-fix feature, but crop and rotate are separate controls.
The crop controls also work similar to iOS; you just drag inward from the edges or corners. In the bottom-right, you can choose free crop or constrain it to a square.
There are also quite a few “Looks” you can flip through to alter a photo’s appearance. At any time you want to compare the new look to the original, you tap the rectangle with the vertical line icon (pointed out by our handy red arrow).
To discard changes, tap the “X” and to apply them, the little checkmark.
With many of the editing options such as “Tune Image” and “Selective”, you can choose different controls by sliding your finger up or down, then slide your finger left or right to adjust the selected control.
Sliding your finger up and down lets you select controls while left and right lets you make fine-grained changes with that control.
Remember, you can easily compare your changes with the original by holding the original button (previously mentioned). If you tap the help button (circle with the question mark), Photos will show you how to use each feature.
Android’s Photos app also has a few effects you can play around with (Vintage, Drama, Black & White, etc.) and you can add frames.
Notice in this example, we’ve selected the “Tilt Frame” effect, which you can drag and change to your liking. In the lower-right corner, tap the “Style” button so you can choose different styles within each effect.
There’s a lot to play with and again, we encourage experimentation. If you change your mind you can always go back. To do this, tap the three dots in the upper-right corner and choose “Revert” from the list.
Before we conclude, let’s take a moment to note that many Android users may still be using the older “Gallery” app, such as if you have Android prior to Lollipop. Gallery too has almost the same editing features, which can be opened by tapping on the brush.
And, as with our two “Photos” apps, you’ve got all the same types of functions and controls at your fingertips.
That said, if you’re running a heavily modified version of Android such as a Samsung variant, the photo app on your device may be very different. Don’t worry, it should have all these editing controls and perhaps even a few more.
If you don’t have Google’s Photos app, it can be downloaded as part of Google+ from the Play Store for free, but it’s more than likely the app you have on your phone will do everything you need it to do.
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