Phone Photography | Editing Tips

For this editing tutorial, I’ll use VSCO because it’s free and everyone has access to it.

Our settings might be different when editing but we’ll have the same process.

I used my old Huawei P20 lite to take this picture.

For this particular photo my settings where:

Filter C1 and I decreased the strength to +6

I decreased the exposure a little bit to -0,4 as the picture was a little overexposed.
(An important thing to remember when taking pictures with your phone, is your phone’s camera will usually overexpose your picture. That means everything will be too bright and you will lose detail and color. That’s why I usually bring the exposure down quite a bit when taking a photo.)

The contrast was brought down to -0,2

Sharpen +3. I’m usually careful with sharpening an image because it can easily be oversharpened. Less is more.

I brought my saturation down just a dash to -0,5. Most phones tend to over saturate their photos by default.

You can’t copy white balance. It all depends on your own photo. What feeling you want to convey. Must it be cold or warm? I upped the tint by +0,5 because there was too much green in the photo.

I added a vignette of (+5) to place the emphasis on the flower.

Now, depending on what you took a picture of, a phone’s blur isn’t always that good.
To add a better and softer lens blur I use Snapseed.

Load the photo into the app. Click on ‘tools’ then ‘lens blur’.

Adjust where you want the focus to be.
Then, adjust the blur strength and transition accordingly.
I usually never go over +30 with the blur otherwise it can look unnatural.
For this photo, I set the blur strength to +30, the transition at +52 and the vignette at +7.

(Keep in mind that your settings will differ from mine depending on your photo.)

There you have it. A very basic and simple way on how to edit your pictures.

When editing, remember to keep it simple and not to overwork it.