Snapping, Sharpening, Sharing, and Saving your holiday smartphone photographs. (Blog #12)

Welcome to my latest blog, which is about how to turn your snaps into shareable and save-worthy photos you're proud of.

One estimate puts the number of smartphones worldwide at over 10 billion. That's an awful lot of potential photographers and photographs. Everyone I know has a smartphone, and I am guessing that you do too. Snapping away when on a trip, whether that's a day visiting an attraction, town or city, or just a walk in the country, we can't resist the urge to photograph most of what we see. 

Taking photographs is now so easy that practically anyone can do it. However, when you're on that 'special' trip, a holiday of a lifetime, will your photographs be as good as they could be or will there sadly only be one or two that are really worth keeping? Could you turn your average snaps into photographs that you'd be happy to share with others, including on social media? 

In this blog I want to share some easy steps that I use when editing my photos and which will hopefully help you improve the final images you capture with your smartphone. I will not be giving you a course on how to take better pictures (although it obviously helps if already know how to do that) or an exhaustive tutorial on how to use Snapseed, which is the editing app I use and to which I will be referring in this blog.

Snapseed is a great photo editing app: it's easy to use and it's free. You can use it to edit on your phone or tablet, which is where I do all of my editing. I downloaded it from Google Play Store.

Before you begin editing you need to identify the images that are worth editing. I rarely bin any image, no matter how bad, even the ones where I have obviously put my finger over the lens!

You can share a photo with Snapseed either by sharing it to the app from wherever you store your photos, or open Snapseed, click on the screen, look for your favourite photo app and select image from menu. I prefer the first method.

My workflow is pretty constant and is as follows:

Step 1. Start with the Rotate tool. Use this to correct the horizontals. Even the best photographers mess up their horizontal sometimes. 

Step 2. Move on to Crop tool. Cropping means you can improve your composition. If you're going to post on, say, Instagram, then it's best to crop to 5:4 aspect ratio. Remember the Rule of Thirds, but be prepared to break it. Occasionally the Golden Ratio is worth exploring. 

Step 3. Next I Tune my image. This enables you to adjusts the brightness, contrast, saturation, ambiance, highlights, shadows and warmth. Sometimes I just hit the auto adjust magic wand.

Step 4. The Details tool is good for altering the structure in the image (this also brightens it slightly) or softening it, depending on whether you prefer a bold or a watercolour-like final look to your photo. You can also sharpen the image here if you need to.

Step 5. The White Balance tool allows you to give your image a warmer or colder appearance, depending on which way you move the horizontal slider tool. I generally prefer my photos to have a warm look to them.

Step 6. Next I like to explore Styles, which is a series of preset looks you can apply. Just recently I have used Faded Glow, and Bright for a lot of my photos. I experiment with these to see which is best or even if I need it.

Step 7. Finally, if you are happy with your final edit, you can apply a frame from the tools menu.

If at any stage in the editing process you decide you aren't happy with a particular edit, you can undo it using the icon at the top right of the screen, the one that looks to two sheets laid on top of one another with an anticlockwise arrow above it.

As I have said, Snapseed is a great little app, and it's the one I use to edit all of my photographs, which are all taken with my Android phone. 

I'd like to show you a couple of my most recent edits.

This first one is of the much-photographed viaduct across the River Nidd in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire. My initial photo wasn't that inspiring, but by a process of cropping, tuning the brightness, warming it up with the white balance, applying the Bright preset in Styles, and finally framing it, you can see how my ordinary snapshot has been transformed into a much more pleasing image.

The second example was taken 5 or 6 years ago in New England. My wife and I were on a tour and the coach had stopped at a well-known beauty spot, the name of which escapes me. However, I happily snapped away trying to capture anything and everything I saw. This was just one of many photos and one of the few that I thought worthy of editing.

I'm not going to say why I think the second, edited image is better than the original. I will leave that up to you.

Saving and storing your photographs is important. This is what I do. First, I always upload my photos to my Google cloud as soon as I can, especially if I'm away from home. I have two storage clouds, Google 100GB that costs me less than £20pa. This is for my best photographs and the ones I have edited and/or published on social media. My 'backup' is Amazon Unlimited which is free with my Prime subscription. This is where literally every photo I take ends up. Uploading to your cloud as soon as you can is vital in case your phone is, say, stolen or damaged beyond repair. Once you've uploaded them they can be deleted from your phone, which has the added benefit of not using up your internal storage and slowing down the phone's performance.

If you're happy with your edits, then don't be afraid of posting them on social media. I have two Instagram channels, Mike.y.53 and mike53onthemove where you can see all of my photos from my travels.

One last tip or piece of advice is, don't overdo your edits. Subtle always wins over heavy handed.

That's all for now. Happy snapping, editing, sharing and saving. 

Mike. 

©Mike Young 2023.