Read the Photos chapter in the iPhone User Guide. More details on editing tools can be found in Apple's Photos_Tech_Brief_Sept_2019.pdf
Welcome to the "post production" phase of photography where catalog and editing take place.
Open the Photos app and explore it's features. What are buttons? Are buttons symbols or words? Have you found the different views? Are the photo thumbnails big or little?
Photos is a big bin of pictures organized by date. The app includes tools to help you identify significant events, people and locations in this big bin. (Suddenly, a memory of bobbing for apples comes to mind.)
All of the same features of the Photos app are on the iPad as well as the iPhone. In this class we will look at the iPhone only. However, if you have an iPad with a bigger screen you might enjoy editing your pictures there instead. You might sit with both iPhone and iPad side-by-side and compare the Photos app features on each device.
How was your Photo Walk last week? The intention was to give you experience with your iPhone Camera app. All those photos will probably be deleted! We just wanted you to practice with all the buttons and features.
Photos app Views On Screen
Across the bottom of the screen are : Library, For You, Albums and Search. One of these words will be highlighted in light blue indicating the current view. Each time you change the view, exit Photos and then open Photos again ... the last view is still active.
Library View has more choices: Years, Months, Days, All Photos. Tap each choice and scroll up and down to see the pictures. In the Months view look for the ( ... ) button that brings up a menu of choices. In the Days view look for Select and ( ... ) buttons for additional options. The All Photos ( ... ) button brings up a menu with new controls.
At top of Albums screen > My Albums. Scroll down to see Shared Albums (if you have any). Scroll down to see People & Places. Scroll to Media Types > to see the list. Your photo walk experience added to Selfies, Live Photos, Portrait, Panoramas and Bursts. Scroll to Utilities > Recently Deleted - to see how many days are left before pictures are automatically deleted. Whew! A safety net.
Recents and Favorites albums created automatically. Swipe R to L to browse. Tap See All for a list of Albums. Tap Edit to see how you can ... DELETE ( - ) albums. More importantly, in this edit view you can rearrange the album order by dragging album icon to new location. [To Donald's disappointment, there is no button to force albums to sort in alphabetical order.]
My saved photos are not here!
If you download photos from an email, you might look for them on today's date. Nada. Not in the Library. All Photos (the Photo Library) is organized by date. They are tossed into the big barrel by creation date. But you can find them in Recents album and in the For You section under Shared with You.
You can have too many albums! Curate your pictures and curate your albums! More on that next week.
The operating system organizes our pictures by date taken and automatically creates Albums based on Media Types and apps used. The icons shown on this list will be clues when editing pictures.
Panoramas - do not have to be 180º they can be just more than your wide angle lens captures. Be a rebel, take a vertical panorama!
Portrait - uses ML (machine learning) to simulate depth-of-field, where your subject is separated from a blurry background. The "depth mask" effect can be changed when editing.
Bursts - often used to capture still photos of action sequences. You will select the best pictures in a sequence and delete the rest.
Live Photos - a fun/maddening feature to capture motion and sound. You can select a different Key Frame and Share > Duplicate > As still photo to recover space on your device and in iCloud. Turn off Live unless your subject is moving.
Long Exposures - are Live Photos of action that have been blended. Think of waterfalls where the moving water is silky.
RAW - beginners should not have very many of RAW photos. Plan on editing these photos and moving them off your device to recover lots of space!
Albums, Shalbums
You can create your own Albums, curate to collect the best pictures and arrange them to tell the story (instead of being locked into the date sequence). You can also create Folders and then add Albums inside the folder. You can build your own hierarchy of organization. From experience, I'll suggest you think big. Create top level folders and add albums into them. Remember playing 52 card pickup? You can have too many individual albums. Better to have one deck, four suits and organize your photos into order. Once an album is created, it can be renamed, but cannot be moved into a folder. Day 4 will have more on creating your own albums.
Time to introduce editing photos.
Editing a picture can be undone, known as "non-destructive" editing. When you have modified a photo, open the Edit view and look for text in red, Revert. This is an all-or-nothing option, all edits are removed and the original picture is restored. Begin editing all over again.
Open a photo you want to improve. Tap the Edit button in the top right corner. Look at the tools on the top of the screen (iPhone 13 Pro has additional features). Look at the bottom of the screen for tools: Dial, Venn Circles and Crop. Also Concentric Circles and Cube, depending on Media Type.
Use the Grid in the Camera app to help align horizons and vertical lines. Use the Edit > Crop.
Cropping & Rotating & Perspective Correction
- Flip, Rotate, set Aspect Ratio, Markup and ( ... ) Photos Extensions.
- Horizon and Perspective Correction slider control
- Wand, Exposure, Brilliance, Highlights, Shadows
- Contrast, Brightness, Black Point
- Saturation, Vibrance, Warmth, Tint
- Sharpness, Definition, Noise Reduction, Vignette
Enhancing exposure with Magic Wand
- Tap the Wand, move the slider back and forth to see image change. Stop at a place you are happy
- Review the other Dial Controls to see what was changed
- Move other controls and watch the effect
- Tap the Filters icon to open a preview slider of choices.
- Slide to the far right so Noir is selected > tap Done
- View is now the full picture (not in Edit mode)
- Tap Edit
- Look at bottom right corner for red text > tap Revert > Revert to Original
- View is now the full picture (not in Edit mode)
- Camera photo with Filter has been lost - edit to add Filter back
- Caption field (new in iOS 14) - add your own text here
- Date & time
- iPhone or Camera details
- Map
- Show in All Photos (jump to collection for a favorite)
- *( i ) - Live Lookup for additional info > tap on floating icon
- Date can be adjusted (great for scanned pictures)
- Location can be adjusted (also great for scanned pictures)
- Field at top of screen
- Moments
- People
- Places
- Categories
- Groups
- Recently Searched
- Captions - text you typed!
- Scan Text (whoa, I did not know about this feature!)