Now it's time for us to chat about what you can do with those photos after you've taken them. I want to give you a few ideas on editing. So let's dive straight into that. If you've taken your photos on your phone and you'd like to keep them on your phone for editing purposes instead of having to transfer them over to your computer or something like that, I'm going to give you a couple of really, really good apps that you can use. You can download them. You might be lucky enough to have a good photo editor built into your phone.
So let's begin with that list. The whole point of this course is for you to be able to take your own photos instead of outsourcing to someone else like me. I want to teach you how to be able to take these photos, edit them, and get them ready for your website on your own. Now, in doing that, you're actually going to end up saving a fair bit of money. So I'm not going to suggest paid apps to you. All of these ones I'm about to tell you are free. Yeah, some of them might have some options to upgrade and pay a little bit of extra to unlock some extra features, but all of the free versions of these apps are going to work just perfectly for you. They're also all available on iOS or on Android. For the ease of this, we're going to be sticking to the apps that you can have on your phone to help you edit those photos.
Let's start with my number one recommendation and I'm sure lots of other people would put this at the very top of their list too. On your phone, you can actually get the Adobe Lightroom app. It's actually called Adobe Lightroom - Photo Editor & Pro Camera. Go ahead, download that one now. You can get it on iOS and Android. So if you want to pause the video, download that, I'll wait for you and we can go through it a little bit together. So this is actually a very, very powerful editing app.
It's one that I actually use on my phone quite a lot if I'm taking photos and I just want to have a quick edit instead of having to pull out my entire computer. Adobe Lightroom is a really, really great and super powerful editing software. Lightroom is going to offer you a range of options and settings when it comes to actually tweaking your photos. So we're going to jump in now and take a bit of a look at that. When you first open up the app, it's going to show you a library. These are the photos that you've brought into Lightroom or imported into Lightroom previously. Now, if this is the first time you've had this app and you've never heard of it before, your library should say zero. So as long as yours says that, you're on the right track so far. I'm going to be using the Android version.
If you are on an iPhone, your buttons are going to be very similar and they should be in almost exactly the same spot. So if yours isn't exactly what I'm talking about, don't stress. It's gotta be there somewhere. So down in the bottom right corner for me, there is a little blue icon that looks like a picture frame with a plus logo next to it. So I'm going to click on that one. To navigate through your gallery, find the photos that you're looking for, you can just tap them and select them, and then once you've made your selection, maybe you just want to bring in one photo for now, let's start with that.
But you can select as many as you would like. So hit the photo you would like, and then click that "add" button. So for me, it's down at the bottom right, that little blue button. Now you're ready to edit. So up at the top, you're going to select "all photos." Once you're in there, you can see the photos that you have on your phone that you have imported already. So go ahead and click the one that you would like to work on. Now that you've got your photo open, down at the bottom of the screen, you're going to see some icons that are down there, and these are all the options you have for editing your photo.
So you can see that you've got light, color effects, crop, all of these ones down the bottom are going to be your best friend. And these are going to be the ones that you use to edit your photo. There are a lot of options in here down at the bottom. So I suggest taking your time, having a look through each section on its own, and just have a play with the settings in there until you understand kind of what each thing does. Now, some of them are going to be really obvious. Things like exposure is basically how bright your image is.
So you can raise that or darken that. The idea is that you've taken the best photo on your camera or on your phone camera so you shouldn't have to make too many edits to your photo. Now, my recommendation is, if you are unsure what a tool does or maybe what a word means when you're in here in the sliders, just slide them all the way to the top, all the way to the bottom. Now, don't leave it there. It's probably going to look horrible. You're going to see what it will do. And that's honestly the best way to learn what kind of tools you might want to use. You definitely don't need to use all of the tools on every photo.
If you do that, your photo is probably gonna look like trash. So definitely don't do that. Lightroom is definitely one of those apps that can be a little bit overwhelming at the start. So take your time, have a look through the app, this one's a really, really good one. All right, app number two is Snapseed. This one is also a really, really good app. It's also free. It's actually what I used to use before I use Lightroom on my phone. So this one is also a really, really good option. Now, it's actually quite similar to Lightroom, the buttons, and things like that.
You're still gonna have to go through and have a look at them. So I'm not going to go through all of that one in detail. As I said, open it up, have a play with it, and then you'll be able to learn what different things will do to your photo. I also recommend having a look at the related apps or similar apps to Lightroom and Snapseed that come up recommended on your app store. Sometimes, it's going to suggest you editing apps that are awesome, maybe other people have left really good reviews, and maybe they're super easy to use.
A lot of these apps are going to work in quite similar ways. So it's really important you find something that makes sense to you and you can understand. The more you like it, the more you're going to use it, and the more you use it, the better you're going to get. So, find something that makes sense for you and it's not too complicated that works. Now, if you're someone that is afraid of technology, afraid of the app store, and it takes you a while to wrap your head around new programs, I have a solution for you as well. Open your phone, go to your gallery, find the image you took, and click the little options button, and there should be an edit icon just there for you.
It might be easier for you to start with the editing app built into your phone. Usually, this one's pretty simple. But it should actually work pretty well for you for this section. We don't need to make any crazy edits because hopefully, your photo came out pretty good after you use all the techniques we've already spoken about. The built-in editor is still definitely going to get the job done. So if you find the others a little overwhelming, keep this one as your backup, definitely nothing wrong with using it.
Now we're getting to the really important part: talking about the accuracy of colors and why it's important. It's so important for you to be showing the colors as accurately as you possibly can on your website, social media, and everywhere this photo is going to appear. You want your customers to be aware of exactly what they're getting when they order it online and that really, really includes the color. Color is so important.
And it doesn't matter whether your product is a candle or a pen or a clothing item, people are expecting a certain product from what they see online. So it needs to be accurate when it arrives at their house. Obviously, this isn't going to be as big of a deal if you have a black or a white item, but whites can tend to look a little cream if you have too much yellow light and the blacks can look a little gray if you're not careful too. While this is important, mostly for colors, also take note of it for blacks and whites. So let's say, as an example, you're shopping online and you see this beautiful jacket. You love it.
The color is awesome. It's kind of this goldish-green khaki color, and you think, "That's gonna look awesome on me. I'm going to be able to rock that," hit "buy." It gets shipped, arrives at your house, you're so excited, you open the package and it doesn't look anything like it looked online. It's more of like a faded, shiny gold color with a little bit of green in it. You're not going to be stoked. You're going to want to send this product back.
It's not what you asked for. It's not what you ordered. And it looks so different from what it looks like on the website. Maybe you'll quickly go and have a look at the website, you'll compare the color and you've got your jacket and the color and the jacket and the color. And it's super different. What are you going to do? You're going to email the company or you're going to say, "Hey, this is not right. I would like a refund and I want this returned. I'm not happy with this product." Now, this may seem like a really specific example and that's because it is.
My partner, Nicki, had this happen to her less than a month ago. It does happen all the time. And the jacket she actually bought was from a really, really big well-known company. Not going to call them out here, but it can happen to everyone. So just be really, really careful when it comes time to edit your photos. Maybe you edit them, you put them up on your website, have your product sitting next to you and take a look at it in person and just compare those two. Make sure that they do look correct.
The last thing you want to be doing is misrepresenting your products online and having angry, disappointed customers who are leaving bad reviews and wanting their money back. Not good for you, not good for your wallet. If you aren't careful with the color of your images, I promise you this is going to happen at some point, and that means return of stock, loss of income, and that person who bought from you once, probably not going to buy from you again because now they won't trust everything else that's on your website. They'll probably shop somewhere else.
That's definitely not what you want. So it's important to get these things right the first time and show people exactly what they're going to get. I wanted to give you a real-life example of this, something that happened in our lives, just so that you understand how often this can actually happen and how easy it is to make this mistake. It's really easy when you're editing a photo to get carried away by the beautiful colors. And maybe you just want to add a little bit more saturation to it because the greens look better when it's like that.
But when it arrives at that person's house, that's not what the product actually looks like. So to save yourself a lot of hassle in the future, make sure it looks as close to person as possible. On the topic of lifting that saturation slider all the way up, by the way, if you don't know what saturation means, it doesn't mean pouring water all over it. It actually means how intense and how vibrant those colors are. We've all seen those overly saturated, super crazy color photos and they look terrible. Honestly, they don't look good.
You know the ones I'm talking about. It's someone, like your grandma, who's editing on her iPad and has just lifted it all the way to maximum, and she's like, "Wow, the colors look so great. It's like a painting." Anyway, don't take that slider all the way to the top. I know I said you could do that in your editing process, but don't leave it up there. If you want to take it all the way to the top, all the way to the bottom just to give yourself an understanding of what that tool does, awesome. Don't leave it there.
Less is more when it comes to editing and having a photo that looks like it's beautiful and doesn't look like it's over-edited, that is the key. Hopefully, by being careful with your lighting and your props and everything else that's going on in your photos, you actually won't need to do much editing or much tweaking to your photos in post-production or in the editing stage. If you get to the editing stage and your photos look great and you only have to make a few tweaks, you've done a good job. That's how you know.
Play around with the settings in the app, make a few edits, make a few tweaks, make sure that your product is easily visible, nice and sharp and crisp, and all of the colors are accurate. One more thing you want to take notice of when it comes to editing your photos is the horizon line or how flat the bottom line or the flatness of the surfaces that you're working with. You've all seen these landscape photos of someone taking a photo of a mountain.
It looks like they took it on a big angle or as they were on a boat and they went over a huge wave. You want to keep that horizon line nice and flat and all the vertical lines, keep them nice and straight. This is going to keep your image looking nice and aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Sometimes if you look at an image and it's just a little bit wonky, it looks a little funny, and your eyes are drawn to maybe the errors in it. By keeping your horizon lines nice and level, as well as the vertical ones, it's going to make a big difference. Hopefully, people won't even notice you did it. And that means you've done it perfectly.
This is something you should aim to do in your camera when you're taking your photo. Sometimes on your phones, sometimes on your cameras, it's going to have a little line on the screen that'll show you where flat is or where level is depending on which way you're shooting and should offer that. If it doesn't, try and use some of the lines in your scene as guides for that. If you weren't able to manage getting all of your lines straight exactly how you want on your phone or on your camera, using the crop tool in your editing software or your program is going to save you here. Now, just keep in mind, when you do crop, it will rotate the image a little bit and by cropping, it will actually zoom in a tiny bit.
So just make sure when you're taking your photos, you've still got lots of room around your object. If you take your photo super, super close to the product and the lines aren't straight, when you crop in, you might actually be cropping out some of the useful parts of the photo. If you leave the lines all wonky and not straight, it's going to basically tell people you don't care about your photos. So why would you care about your products? So why would they buy from you? Just fix those. It's a super simple little thing to do, and it will make a really, really big difference. Also, with cropping, you can use this to resize your image.
Maybe you took your photo horizontally on your phone, and it's a really long, skinny landscape image, the same resolution as your phone screen. But maybe you need it to be a square. So you can actually crop that into a square shape. Usually, on your editing app, you will have a default size. So something like one by one or one times one, that means that it's going to be a square and the sides are going to be equal lengths. So this is a perfect square, you can use this.
You might want to use a cropping tool to crop a little bit more focus in on your product. As I said before, be careful about how much room you have around it. But by cropping in the sides and maybe cropping in the top just a little bit, you might be able to show your product off a little bit better and draw your eye and more attention directly to your product rather than everything else that's in the scene. Just keep in mind though, that when you crop in or zoom in your image, it is resizing it. All of that bit you're cutting off the outside is image data or image pixels that you are losing. So the more you crop in, the lower resolution or lower quality your image will be.
So don't take your photo all the way back here and then crop it all the way in here. It's a really good way to have a really low-quality image. So try and get the distance right when you're taking the photo. Basically, think of it like a cake and you want to crop your photo in or crop your cake in a little bit. So you're going to take a knife and you just cut all of the crust or the edge off your cake. And you take that off, you throw it out. Now you've got a smaller cake, exactly the proportions that you want, but all that outside bit gets wasted. So just keep that in mind, it is going to make your image smaller. Taking the photo right instead of fixing it all in the editing process is really going to save you a lot of time and a lot of effort. Now that you've finished your edit, the colors are looking good, your horizontal lines and nice and flat, your image and your product are looking really sharp and crisp, and you're happy with it, it's now time to export your photo.
If you're asking them what the hell an export is, it's basically a fancy word for saying, saving your photo. If we go back to the cake example, when you're editing your cake or editing your photo, it's like you've just made a bunch of tweaks and the original cake is still there or your original photo is still there. And all those settings aren't quite saved onto it just yet. So when you hit that export button, it's like throwing that cake in the oven super quick and everything is baked in.
So all of your edits and are locked in or baked into your photo and it's ready to go. The reason we do this is so that all of your edits can be seen on your website, social media, wherever this photo is going to go. Now, I personally recommend using a JPEG or a PNG file, and these ones are really great for the web. They're small files and so they won't take up a ton of space. They'll load nice and quickly on your website too, which is going to keep your customers extra happy. Now, depending on the app or software you're using to edit these photos, it might give you an option for a quality slider that you can use on that photo.
Always crank that to the maximum. You want your photos to be as best resolution as possible because you want people to see nice crispy images on your website. You don't want them looking at it and thinking that they might need some glasses. Export everything, maximum resolution, keep it looking good. Sometimes, instead of a quality slider, depending on the program or app you're using, it might ask you about something called the PPI or the DPI. Now, stick with me. If you do find this section a little bit confusing, just sit back a little bit and relisten to it.
But I won't go into too much detail and you probably don't need to focus on this too, too much. So PPI means pixels per inch and DPI means dots per inch. So pixels per inch or PPI, this is what we refer to as how many pixels are in that inch on each image. This is for digital files. So anything that goes on a screen, your phone, laptop, anything like that. DPI is dots per inch, so how many dots are in each inch on that paper or on that page.
The reason it is dots per inch instead of pixels is that this is for printing. Anything that gets physically printed, your printer will print a certain amount of dots, and that's how color actually ends up on the page. Now, the human eye can see up to around 300 dots per inch on paper once it's printed. Whereas on screens, we can only see somewhere between 72 and 144 pixels per inch. If you've ever taken a look at an older phone or looked really, really closely at your phone, you will actually be able to see lots of tiny little dots and colors that make up the image on your phone. If your image is going to be printed, I recommend 300 DPI because that way your image is going to be really high resolution and crisp, and you'll be able to print it on a range of different things.
When it comes to your screen. I recommend anywhere between 72 and 144 PPI because this will keep your image nice and crisp on the website or anywhere it's showing up digitally. Now, all of that went over your head, either rewatch it or just ignore it completely, totally okay. Basically, export your images at the maximum resolution. That way, you're going to have the best quality-looking images. And that's all you really need to know.
