There is no doubt that the modern iPhone takes stunning landscape pictures. But what additional edits can we do to make these landscape images even more striking? The inbuilt apps allow us to take amazing pictures, edit them within the phone itself and share the image without the need for any additional editing software or the transferring of images to other more powerful devices.
The best way to learn these editing skills is to play around with one of your own images and take the time to observe the changes that each of the edits has on that image. Photo editing is a individual art that is entirely subjective. If you like the look of the edit, it is a good edit. Likewise, the edits that I like may not suit your tastes, and vice versa.
Filters
The quickest and easiest way to get the very best out of your images is to use filters. This is where others have done the hard work for you and put in place some preset adjustments that stylise your image. The iPhone has a number of preset filters that you can apply to your images with just one click of a button.
I am not a massive fan of filters, as I feel that there is always a compromise with some aspect of the preset adjustment. Jackie on the other hand loves a filter option, but mainly as a starting point. Once you have applied a filter to the image, you can go in and amend individual aspects of the adjustments to your liking.
Manual Adjustments
Auto- the first button that you come to on the manual adjustment menu. We tend to stay away from this as it will enhance your photos in line with the iPhone algorithm of a good photo. Often we find that these changes make an image too bight, over exposed and lacking in depth.
Exposure- the amount of light in the image. An image can be underexposed (too dark) or over exposed (too light and blown out). This is a very crude manual adjustment that is really a last resort. The iPhone camera is fantastic at exposing your images to the correct level. Adjusting the exposure in this way is rarely needed to enhance your image.
Brilliance- this adjustment brightens the shadows, tones down highlights and balances contrast in one move. In the landscape image here, I have actually reduced the brilliance to get the mood that I was wanting from the image.
Highlights- The areas in your photo with the most light hitting them are known as the highlights. If those spots have lost detail due to overexposure, or oppositely, appear too dim, they could benefit from from highlight adjustment.
The most common adjustment with landscape images is to reduce the highlights setting in order to decrease the exposure in your photo's lightest areas, like I have done here. Notice that it has brought more detail out in the sky, by reducing the light areas.
Shadows. Opposite of highlights, shadows are the areas in your photo with the least amount of light exposing them.
These spots may lack visual detail if they are too dark, or may lack contrast if they are too light compared to their surroundings. With the right balance, the intensity of shadows can lend to more depth and dimension in your photo.
By far, the most common adjustment with landscape images like the one opposite is to increase the shadow setting. You can see how the foreground has lightened, as well as the distant hills. This is done without changing the overall exposure of the photograph.
Contrast. Contrast brings depth into your photograph and illuminates the details. At its core, this effect increases the visible contrast between your highlights and your shadows. It is a really powerful tool, so as with all iPhone editing tips, apply it little by little until you get the desired outcome. An image can soon become too unrealistic if you ramp up the contrast too much.
Colour adjustments.
Enhancing the colours within your image can be made with a number of separate editing adjustments:
Saturation & Vibrancy. The intensity of colors, affects how vivid or muted they appear in your photo. The key to editing saturation & vibrancy is to make smaller incremental adjustments to simply enhance or even mute the colours, while keeping them realistic to what your eye truly saw. Start small to avoid over-modifying and creating an overly edited image. Be warned- if you have people in your image, increasing the saturation will turn their skin orange! Vibrancy does not effect skin tone, so look to increase that instead.
Warmth. This adjustment has many purposes. For landscape images, we often cool the image slightly as it tends to increase the impact of any blue tones in the sky. By warming an image, it brings out the browns and yellows of the image that may also be desired.
Vignette. This is a great little hack for any photo and I am amazed that more people are not aware of it.
In essence, it is an effect that changes the exposure of the corners and edges of the image.
If you increase the vignette, the adjustment darkens the outer edges of the image. This has the effect of drawing the attention of the person into the main part of the image in a really subtle way.
We always add a darkened vignette to all of our images as we have yet to find an image that this effect does not enhance.
Other settings
On the whole, the other settings that are available on the iPhone do not have a massive impact on images that the human eye can perceive. Sharpness, Definition and Noise reduction are all micro adjustments that relate to the image quality at pixel level. I cannot see the enhancements these adjustments make with my naked eye. If you are going to print your image in a large format, these may well be adjustments that you would want to consider looking into prior to printing, but it is not something that we have ever done.
Cropping
The cropping adjustment simply allows you to change the dimensions and orientation of your image.
The key to using this tool is an understanding of what makes an effective composition for your photos.
Cropping allows you to straighten the image so that the horizon is level and vertical objects are truly vertical. In addition, you can also crop the image to a desired size for printing or publication. If you intend to print your images, it is important to lock your cropping to a set ratio. Freeform cropping may enhance your image, but will cause untold problems when trying to print.
The simplest structure, that the iPhone encourages you to use is the rule of thirds. When you look to straighten your image, in order to keep the horizon perfectly horizontal, the software overlays a 3x3 grid onto the image. This provides a basis to split your landscape image into foreground, mid ground and sky thirds. In addition, key parts of the image should fall on the intercept lines, as the human eye is naturally drawn to these points on an image.
Notice in this image has now been cropped to ensure that the wall provides a leading line towards the top left third intersect of the image, pulling the eyes attention to this particular focal point.
This crop has also ensured a more even distribution of the foreground that draws the attention into the image. The secondary point of focus, the craggy rock, is now situated on the top right hand intersect point.
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