Photo & Video Editing on the iPhone: A Comprehensive Guide to the Photos App

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In this video, we’re going to look at how we edit our photos and videos with the Photos app on the iPhone. Now I mentioned photos and videos, we can edit both photos and videos, we can apply filters to photos and videos, we can make adjustments to photos and videos. So even though I may mention just photos throughout this little video here, it doesn’t mean that you can’t work with your videos in the same way. So I’ll try to remember to mention videos, but just know that it does include both photos and videos. Let’s go and see how we can edit our photos and videos with the Photos app on the iPhone.

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Let’s go over to my iPhone.

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Let’s first look at the layout of our editing tools in the Photos app. So what I need to do is open up my photos app here.

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And then to get to our editing tools, what we need to do is open up a photo. So what I’m going to do is go down to my albums here, I have a number of photos in an album that I want to edit. So I click on albums. And now we go over to this album here. So I want to edit this first photo here. How do I do that? Well, basically, all we have to do is just tap on it to open it up. And then you’re going to see Edit in the upper right hand corner. When I tap on Edit, it opens up all of my editing tools. So let’s take a look at this layout here. And the upper left hand corner here we have our Undo and Redo. And we can use this for multiple undos and reduce. In other words, if I apply multiple filters or multiple adjustments, as I apply them, I’m able to undo them, as well as redo them.

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We go over to the right, we have markup tools. And then if we keep going to the right we have the more the three dots. With the three dots, what I’m able to do is copy edits from one photo to another. I’ll show you that later on in the video. And if I had third party apps that can work with the Photos app, I could do further editing, this is where I would open up a third party app such as Photoshop Express, I’m going to close this, we’re not going to talk about third party apps, we’re just going to stick with the Photos app here.

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Now as I go down towards the bottom, you’re gonna see that I have auto here. These are my adjustments by default. When you start editing a photo and video, what it does is it goes to the adjustments. Your adjustments is where you can adjust your exposure, your brightness, your saturation, things like that.

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If we go down to the bottom here, I have filters. This is the two circles, I tap on this. And now I have all of these different filters that I can apply. And you can adjust how much of that filter is applied. I’ll talk about that later on in the video as well. And then if we go over to the right here we have our Crop and Straighten. This is where we Crop and Straighten our photos when we’re looking at our Crop and Straighten tools. What we have here in the upper left hand corner, our our flip and rotate 90 degrees. I have my aspect ratio, I have my markup and more of course, and then down towards the bottom, I can choose between straighten. Or what I can do is do a vertical skew or horizontal skew. And I’ll talk about those when I talked about cropping and straightening. When you are done, what you need to do is just tap on Done, I’ve not applied any adjustment. So let’s go ahead and just do a quick auto adjustment here.

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Now all I have to do is just tap on Done here. And it applied those adjustments.

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Now it is lossless editing, which means I can revert back to the original. To do that, what we need to do is just go back into our edit mode.

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And being that I made adjustments to this instead of done, what you’re going to see here is revert. This will remove all of the adjustments, all of any changes that I made. If I cropped it, it’s going to remove any cropping if I straighten and it’s going to make it back crooked again. So this just reverts it back to the original photo. Also, when you are looking at a photo and you want to see the original photo, compare your edits, maybe all you have to do is just tap on it. So when I tap on this photo here,

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it’s going to show me the original for about three seconds, and then it shows me the edited version. Let’s go and make a further adjustment so you can kind of see that. We’re just go with this dark one here. And now all I have to do is just tap on this.

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There was the original, and then it goes back to my edited version.

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I’m going to revert tap on Done here. We go back up to Edit

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and then we go over to revert

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back to the original so

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Are those are our editing tools layouts are where we find all of our different tools. Now let’s take a look at how we duplicate a photo, you may want to duplicate a photo. If you want to make multiple edits, maybe you want to have a black and white version and a color version, or you want to crop it in a different aspect ratio, what you’ll need to first do is duplicate that photo. So how do we do that? Well, basically, what we need to do is just open up our photo here, we don’t edit it, we can see that I’m looking at this photo here. And then what we do is we go up to the More button in the upper right hand corner. And what you’re going to see is a duplicate, all I have to do is just tap on this and makes an exact duplicate of that photo. And now we can see I have two photos here. And I’m able to make one of them black and white as an example and leave the other one color could crop one a different way, then I cropped the other. Now if you no longer want to have that duplicate, you can also delete it. So I have this duplicate here. To delete it, what we have to do is go back over to our library.

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And now if I tap and hold on it, what I’m able to do is delete it.

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So let’s go ahead and delete it.

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And now we are back to just having my single photo there.

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Alright, so now we know how the tools are laid out. We know how to duplicate a photo, if we want to, let’s start taking a look at some of these edits that we can use. The first one we’re going to look at is auto enhance, well we can do is we can have the Photos app automatically enhance our photos. And then from there, what we’re able to do is make further adjustments. Let’s see how this works. Well, we’re going to do is go over to

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this photo here. I tap on it. And we can see it’s a little bit dull, what I would like to do is auto enhance it. To do that, what we do is we go up to Edit, we need to edit it. By default, it’s going to go to my adjustments. And the first adjustment we have is auto. So now all I need to do is just tap on this, and we can see it brighten it up a little bit, I want to look at the original, I tap on it, we can see it’s a little more dull, and now it’s bright. Let’s zoom in here a little bit. Tap on it, we can see it’s dull. And now to a more bright, we can also see what adjustments it made, you’re going to see that with each one of these adjustments. Here, we have a yellow circle going in a clockwise position. The longer that yellow line is, the further down is around the clock, the more adjustment it made, it can go backwards and forward. So we can see that

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this adjustment it actually went backwards, it’s at the 11 o’clock. So it removed some of that adjustment, which is

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the highlights.

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Now we can turn these adjustments on and off manually as well. So let’s say

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I wanted to turn brilliance off, I want to leave all of the other adjustments on all I have to do is just tap on this.

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And it turns just that adjustment off, tap on it again, it turns it back on, we can do the opposite as well, I can turn them all off, and then turn on an individual adjustment. To do that, we go back over to our auto here, and I tap on it

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have to tap on it twice. Now all of my adjustments are off. But watch what happens when I just tap on this being that it did an auto enhance first, what I’m able to do is add

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that enhancement pack in there, tap on it twice, tap on it to turn it off and then tap on it to turn it on. Now the key to making this work is make sure that you do an auto enhance first, then turn it off, then you can go into these individually and turn them on and off.

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So that’s how auto enhance works. Let’s take a look at some of these adjustments and the little more detail we do have quite a few adjustments here. So I’m going to go to auto enhance here.

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We’re just going to leave it off and we’re just going to do this manually here. So I have here exposure. When you bring exposure here, you just slide the slider down at the bottom to the left or right to adjust your exposure

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and you can make multiple adjustments so I can go to exposure here. I have brilliance, this is going to make a little more brighter. We have our highlights which are going to be the whites. So in the clouds, it could bring out more detail. I have my shadows which are the darks. So if you have anything in the shadows, it’ll bring out detail in those shadows in those dark areas. We also have contrast you can add more contrast. Let’s go ahead and add a little more contrast to this photo.

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I can go and adjust the brightness, the black point as well as the saturation maybe I want to bump up the saturation on this a little bit and then I have vibrant solve

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hybrant Do I want this photo to be and have warmed with this is going to do is adjust the color of it. So if it’s a little blue, if you add a little more warmth, it’s going to make a little bit more yellow, add a little more warm color to that photo make it a little bit more warmer, we also have tint, which is going to do the opposite, this is your red. So if I go and change this, you’re gonna see it makes it more read.

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We also have sharpness, you can bring a little bit more detail. And we have definition. And then we have noise reduction with noise reduction. If you take a photo at night, what’ll happen is you’ll get more noise in that photo. So the camera’s working a little bit harder to grab what you’re taking a picture of. So what it does is it introduces a little bit more noise. So what you can do is you can reduce that noise, all you have to do is just slide this over to adjust the noise. And then we have one of my favorites here than yet with vignette, what it does is it adds

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a little darker area around the corner. So puts the focus on the subject. I don’t like to go all the way. But we can see that it add a little more vignette. So that’s how we make adjustments to our photos. Now let’s take a look at filters, we can apply filters and adjust how much of that filter is being applied to the photo. How do we do that? Let’s go and cancel this.

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And this time, what we’re going to do is go over to this photo here, I think this photo would be really good as a black and white photo, let’s go ahead and zoom in here a little bit. I think this would be really good as a black and white photo, well, I can do that by applying a filter to it. Maybe I want to put a 70. So look on it, I tap on it, we go up to edit.

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And then what we need to do is go to our little circles here at the bottom.

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And now we have my filters. So all I have to do is just slide this over to select which filter I want, we can see we have a nice old look there like the photo is old and worn out. But it’s a color photo. If I want to adjust how much of that filter is applied, go down to the bottom here, just like with adjustments,

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and I can apply how much of that filter I want.

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And then if I go all the way to the end, we have a few black and whites, my favorite is Noir. And from here, what I can do is I can apply a little bit of color in there, I’m gonna leave that completely black and white. Now what I want to do is add a little more contrast to this, we can apply adjustments after we’ve applied a filter. To do that, we go to our adjustments here.

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And I’m going to go to contrast.

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And now I just take the slider here, a little more contrast to it. And now let’s apply a vignette.

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So now I swipe all the way over, we’re going to apply a little bit than yet to it. And there I’ve just added a filter, I’ve made adjustments, and I’ve applied a vignette. And when I tap on it, there’s the original and there is my edited copy.

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If I wanted to undo any of my moves, I could go and undo them as well as redo them.

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Now I like the way that this photo looks, what I would like to do is copy these edits and apply them to a different photo. Maybe I want to apply them to this photo here. How can we copy edits and apply them to another photo, I don’t want to have to go through all those steps. Well, all we have to do is just going back to the original photo here that we want to copy the edits from. And then what we do is we go up to more here.

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And what you’re going to see is copy edits. What this is going to do is copy all of the edits, it’s going to copy the filter, it’s going to copy the contrast that I applied is going to copy that vignette. And now what I need to do is go to the other photo. So we’re going to go to this photo here. And when I go up to the More button,

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you’re going to see

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paste edits. And watch what happens when I paste these edits.

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You can see it applied all three of those. Now what I’m able to do is go in further edit this, maybe this photo has a little too much contrast. All I have to do is tap on Edit, and make sure we’re looking at our adjustments here I go to contrast, we can see how much contrast has been applied. And from here, what I’m able to do is just back it off a little bit.

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So we can use those edits as a starting point for other photos.

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Now, if you’re looking at your library, let’s go ahead and tap on Done. And we go over here. I can also do the same thing when I’m looking at all my photos here. Tap and hold. I’m able to copy the edits. I go over here, tap and hold. I’m a

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We’ll to paste the edits, go ahead and paste.

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And now we can see it has those same edits. And one more time, we’re going to go to our shadows, we lost a lot of the detail here. So what I want to do is bring that out, I go over to my shadows here. And if we look in this area here, as I slide the solver, we’re getting a little more detail.

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I tap on Done. And now there’s our photo based off of the edits, but then I went and made further adjustments to it. Now let’s look at how we Crop and Straighten photos.

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Going to go back. And let’s take a look at this photo here, we can see that I was not holding the camera straight when I took this photo, so I need to straighten it. How do we do that? Well, we go back up to our edit.

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And then we go down to our Crop and Straighten Tool here.

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And by default, it goes over to the straighten. So now all I need to do is just slide this over to where it is straight, we can see that it does use the rule of thirds, it puts a little tic tac toe board there on my photo.

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And what I’m able to do is use that to align my horizon. This also helps out with cropping, I’ll talk about that shortly. Let’s first look at our vertical here. I don’t use this that much. But what it does do is bring the bottom or the top end, we can see what it’s doing there. And this one goes left or right.

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So it can apply a little bit of an effect to it. I’m going to turn these off. And we’re just going to leave it at that one there. Now if you wanted to rotate it, we’ve all seen it to where we’ve taken a photo and it’s 90 degrees off, what we can do is we can rotate it 90 degrees.

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Just keep tapping it. And then we can also flip it. So when you tap on this, it flips it. This could be great if you take a selfie and the writing on your shirt is backwards. Sometimes that’ll happen when you take a selfie. While what you’re able to do is flip it to where the writing is the correct way again.

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When I flip it back, let’s take a look at cropping. Next,

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what we’re going to do is go into this photo here. Let’s go and edit this. And we’re going to go down to my Crop and Straighten.

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To crop it, what we need to do is just drag any one of these handles around to the photo or video. Remember, I mentioned that you can do this with a video as well, you just take any one of these handles and drag it around. Now by default, it’s going to be a free form crop, which means when I drag it, I can make it any aspect ratio I want. If you want to lock it to a specific aspect ratio, what you need to do is go up to the top here, you tap on the aspect ratio lock here. And then down at the bottom, you’re gonna see all of the different sizes. So I have here square, which would be great for Instagram. I also have 16 by nine. So if you want to make it look good on an iPhone, you can use 16 by nine or on a television 16 by nine. Now for an iPhone, you want it to be portrait. How do we switch this crop to a portrait? Well, all we have to do is just go to the portrait mode here and watch what happens. It is now cropped for portrait.

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Now we can easily use the rule of thirds when we crop our photo, the rule of thirds is something that photographers use. And it’s been used for decades to where they can line up their subjects. As an example, what you want to do is you want to have the horizon line up with the rule of thirds. So what are the rule of thirds? Well, it’s basically a tic tac toe board. When I move this photo around, you’re gonna see that there’s a little tic tac toe board there. And what you want to do is you want to line up the horizon with either the bottom third line, or with the top third line, so I don’t have to zoom in, I’m just pinching to zoom in. And now I’m using the rule of thirds. What that does is that gives a nice pleasing effect with the photo. So when I go down here, we can see the water there. The skies at the top, we have the building coming in. And what we also want to do is make sure that at the end of the pier there that is the vertical line, my rule of thirds, you can see that I’m lining everything up with those rule of thirds. If you’ve taken a picture of someone, a lot of times what you want to do is you want to have the eyes where the lines intersect, so we can see right down here, that’s where they intersect. That’s where I put the eyes so you can use his rule of thirds to crop your photo.

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When you are done, all you have to do is just tap on Done here.

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And now we have my nice photo that is formatted for

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or an iPhone?

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Now, what about bursts? How do we work with bursts in the Photos app now bursts are only for photos. So this is not going to work for videos. With bursts, what we can do with the iPhone is we can take a burst of photos. So it might take like 40 or 50 photos. And then what we’re able to do is select which photos we want to keep. So let’s go and take a look at a burst. So I’m going to go back over to all of my albums here. And then when I swipe up, you’re going to see I have an album for burst. This is where all of my photos that have births are going to be located. So now what I want to do is I want to edit this photo here, I tap on it. And we can see that this is actually 51 photos. Well, I don’t want to have 51 photos, I’d like to select just a couple of them. Where we can easily do this with bursts, all we have to do is just go to select down at the bottom, we’re not going to edit it, what we’re going to do is select we’re going to select which frames we want to keep. So I tap on select. And now when we look across the bottom here, we can see all of the photos, there’s all 51 photos. Now the photo that I want to keep is right down. Let’s zoom in here a little bit, right where this log right is coming over here. So I want to keep that photo. So we go and find it here.

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It looks like that one right there. So now what I do is I tap on the little circle here.

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And it’s going to keep that photo, we can see it’s going to keep this photo, I could go to that photo and deselect it. Let’s go ahead and keep it. And then what I’d like to do is have this photo here. So now I just make sure that it is checked. And now we can see that three photos are selected.

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From here, what I do is I tap on Done. And when I tap on Done, what it’ll do is it’ll ask me do I want to keep everything do I want to keep all 51 photos, or just keep the three photos, if you just keep the three photos is going to throw all of the other photos away and to the trash. And it’s going to put all three photos in your library. Now I’m not going to tap on Done because I like to use this as a demo. So I don’t want to really separate these out. But it’s pretty simple. Just tap on Done, you’ll see an option there to keep everything or just to keep the three photos. I’m actually going to tap on cancel here.

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So that’s how we work with bursts. Now what about live photos? How do we work with live photos.

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This is another feature for the iPhone. Instead of taking a burst of photos with a live photo what it’ll do is it will take like a three second video. So I’m gonna go to my live photos here. And we’re going to pick on my wife Beth here, she Dutch dances, we have a tulip time festival here in Holland. So what she does is she just Dutch dances in front of the crowd there. And the Dutch dance involves a kick.

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Now what I could have done is use birth to get the proper photo. But with live photos. In addition to turn this into a photo, it’s right now it is a video we can see her kicking there. The advantage of live photos is it is a short little video. So you can actually see her in action, you wouldn’t be able to do that with a burst. But now what I’d like to do is make this a photo and make it a photo to where when she’s kicking right there. I want to make that the photo. So how can I do that? Well basically what we need to do is we need to go to edit in the upper right hand corner here.

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And you’re going to see a new tool down here. Live Photos, remember we normally have just three tools, adjust filters and Crop and Straighten we have a fourth tool, we can now

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edit our live photo. So now all I need to do is just take this and drag it to where she’s kicking. So I take it right about there that’s the photo that I want or I want to turn this into a photo with that particular frame. Now all you need to do is just tap on make key photo this is key you have to tap on make key photo and now that is the photo. So if I go back, tap on Done here, we can see that as the photo, it is still a live photo. If I tap on it, we can still see her kicking but when I let go, it goes back to her with her high kick. Now if you want to turn this into a standard photo and turn off live photo, you can do that too. To do that what we do is we go over back to our Edit

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and then we go to our live photo tools

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and all we have to do is just go up to the top where it says live I tap on it

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is no longer a live photo, tap on Done, I can tap on it, tap and hold, it is not going to play that video. Being that it’s now a photo, guess what I can do. Since I’m using iOS 16, I can lift her out as a subject. Because it’s no longer a live photo.

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We also have other effects with this, I’m going to go to a different photo here, we’re going to go to to quantum falls here, this is a live photo, I tap and hold, we can see the water going there. What I’m able to do, when I’m looking at the photo here, you can see it’s live. I tap on this and I can make it loop.

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Which means it’s just going to be an endless waterfall, it’s just going to loop the video

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doesn’t stop, the water never stops. Or what I can do is make it bounce. So now it’s going to go up and down.

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You can see it’s bouncing back and forth. Kind of a neat effect. But my favorite effect, especially with water is long exposure. When I tap on this, we can see that

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it turned it into a long exposure. When you use this trick, make sure that you hold the camera steady. That’s a key tip to making long exposures look really good. This also works with lights when I go over to this photo here. This is a live photo, the carousels going around, what I could do is I could loop it,

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then now it’s just going to go around indefinitely. But also, it looks kind of cool when you turn it into a long exposure.

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So live photos are really pretty powerful, you can create some nice effects, and you can choose the exact frame you can even turn it into a standard photo.

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So that’s how we added our live photos. Now, we all know that we can take portrait photos with our iPhone. So I’m going to go to my portraits here, I have this picture of Beth and I with the portrait mode. What it basically does is it blurs the background this is called bokeh. So if we look at the back there of methanol, you’re gonna see it’s a little bit blurry. The iPhone did this through computational photography, what we’re able to do is adjust that bokeh.

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So when I go back to my edit mode, so I tap on Edit in the upper right hand corner, just like with live photos, what I have here is a new tool down at the bottom. So if we look down here towards the bottom, we have my portrait mode tools. Now there are basically two tools with this, we have studio lighting, and then we have app stop. I rarely use studio lighting, I’ll just show you what it does. But basically with studio lighting here, what I’m able to do is apply studio lighting.

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Apple went to various photographers and tried to figure out the best way of implementing this. So if you’re a photographer are familiar with studio lighting, you can apply that also what you are able to do is apply how much of that studio lighting you want in there. Again, I don’t use that that much.

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Because I’m not a photographer I would know a studio lighting is but the one that I do use is the F stop again, I’m editing my live photo. So when we go up to the top here, you’re gonna see has F 4.0. This is what the iPhone is simulating with this particular bokeh. If you’re familiar with cameras, you can set the F stop. Well what I’m able to do with computational photography is a justice post. After I take the photo, maybe I want to have a little bit more blurry or maybe it’s too blurry. All I have to do is just tap on it. And now down towards the bottom here. I just take the slider and watch the background here you’re gonna see that it’s getting more blurry. But if you look at Beth and I we are not it’s not affecting Bethany, it’s just affecting the background and now it is less blurry. So we can actually adjust how much of that F stop we want to be applied post.

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We can only do this with photos that are in portrait mode. Let’s take a quick look at videos we can trim videos as well now like I said what we can do is we can apply most of these edits to both photos and videos. So I can apply filters I can Crop and Straighten I can make adjustments. Well we can also do that to video so I’m going to go back over to my albums here. And I have this video of the monorail this is over a Disney World now when I took this

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it’s a little bit long you can see the monorail is coming in over here. But it’s taken a while so I would like to do is I would like to trim this I would like to actually have the video start right about here. So I’m not waiting so long, right? Well in order to trim it what we need to do is we just need to do

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added it.

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And then you’re gonna see we have a new editing tool video editing tool. And all we have to do is just take these little sliders here and slide them. So this is going to be the beginning. And this is going to be the end. So I take this and slide it, and I just slide it over and I want it to be right about there, I can do the same thing with the end. I’ll go right about there. So now I’ve just trimmed that video. When I tap on Done, I have two options here, I can save it as a new video clip. So it’s going to keep the original long one and I’m going to have a shorter one. Or what I can do is just save this video, it’s going to overwrite the longer one. So if you know that this is what you want, and you want to save space, what you want to do is save the video, it will erase the old one, so you want to be a little careful with that. All right, let’s go back over to cancel here.

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And the next thing we’re going to look at is marking up photos, we can also mark up our photos. So I’m going to go back over to my photos here. And let’s take a look at this photo, what I would like to do is mark it up. In order to mark it up, what we do is we go back into edit.

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And then we have our markup tools here. Tap on it.

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And now all of our different tools are located at the bottom I can draw on it, I can right on it. I have an eraser, I have a ruler.

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I even have a magnifier. So all I have to do is just tap on it. We can see the thickness and the Opacity. And now I just draw and there it is, I want to change the color, I go over to the color here.

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And let’s go with a blue. And now it is blue. I want to change the thickness. Let’s make it really thick. And now it is really thick. I want to undo I go up to undo here. Tap on it three times. And it brings me back. I have a little fine marker here.

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We also have our eraser. So I can erase what I’ve drawn. I can’t erase anything on the photo itself. But I can erase what I’ve drawn. I also can select so with this, what I’m able to do is select anything on the photo, I have a ruler.

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And we can rotate this around I’m just pinching

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to rotate it around my color wheel. And then when we go to the plus we do have more tools. I can add a description I can add text, I can add a signature, I have a magnifier, I can add shapes.

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With the magnifier, what I’m able to do is move this around. Let’s go and make zoom in there a little bit, we’ll make this a little bit larger.

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And now we can see I’ve just magnified

32:56
that photo or that area of the photo. When I tap on Done in the upper right hand corner.

33:06
We have my new photo there with the magnification in there. And again, I can always revert back to the original.

33:14
So that’s how we edit our photos on the iPhone I should say photos, and videos. As you can see we have a lot of tools that are available to us.

33:26
And most of these tools we can apply to photos and videos, we can make adjustments to both photos and videos, we can apply filters, we can Crop and Straighten photos and videos. With photos we also have tools for our portrait photos as well as live photos. And first we can select which photo we want to use in a burst or in a live photo. And with videos we can trim them. And then with photos, we can also mark them up. There’s a lot of different markup tools that we can use when we go to markup. And of course it says lossless which means we can always revert back to the original. So that’s how we edit our photos and videos with the Photos app on the iPhone.