Self retoucher — cool apps for mobile photo editing | Articles | Photo, video, optics

An arti­cle for those who are look­ing for pho­to edit­ing pro­grams with use­ful fea­tures, a clear inter­face and which will not spoil the qual­i­ty of images a hun­dred­fold.

1. Photoshop Fix

The first stage of pro­cess­ing is the elim­i­na­tion of imper­fec­tions in the pho­to: wrin­kles, spots on clothes, car­rots in the teeth, and so on.

We go to the “Recov­ery” sec­tion and see sev­er­al tools here, one of them is “Spot Restore”.

Zoom in on the pho­to, click on the con­di­tion­al pim­ple and it will dis­ap­pear — the pro­gram ana­lyzes what is next to the select­ed “object” and auto­mat­i­cal­ly paints it in the desired col­or. Thanks to this tool, we can remove oth­er dis­tract­ing things from the frame: peo­ple who acci­den­tal­ly got into the frame, unnec­es­sary objects in the back­ground.

Using Spot Repair and the Stamp tool in the same tab, we can dupli­cate a sec­tion of the image to, for exam­ple, recre­ate the back­ground of a pho­to. With a “stamp” we select the area that we will copy, and with a brush we paint over the desired area.

Removed skin imper­fec­tions and recre­at­ed the back­ground using the tools in the “Recov­ery” tab in Pho­to­shop . Author’s pho­to

But be care­ful. Strokes with a brush should not be con­tin­u­ous: if you paint over an area with­out lift­ing your fin­ger-brush from the screen, then it will be paint­ed over not only with what you copied, but also with what is next to the copied area — that is, the copy point does not remain the same con­stant­ly, the move­ment of your fin­ger and “track» cor­re­sponds to what is next to the copy object.

Anoth­er cool tool in the Liquify tab is Face.

If your face — eyes, nose, mouth — is clear­ly vis­i­ble, then the pro­gram rec­og­nizes points with which you can cor­rect facial fea­tures: make your fore­head high­er or less wide, eyes more open, change their slope, low­er your chin, remove cheeks, etc. .d.

The Liquify tab in Pho­to­shop Fix. Author’s pho­to

For exam­ple, I enlarged the upper and low­er lip, made the nose less wide, nar­rowed the face and slight­ly opened my eyes. You may not notice, but my heart is calmer))

Author’s pho­to

In the same tab, the “Defor­ma­tion” tool — with the help of it you your­self change what you need: reduce the nose, add vol­ume to the lips, nar­row the waist — in gen­er­al, every­thing you need for a per­fect pic­ture on Insta­gram. For exam­ple, I love to add vol­ume to the hair, it often makes a big dif­fer­ence in a shot.

After all these manip­u­la­tions, you can go to the “Smooth­ing” tab and use it, for exam­ple, to make the skin of the face even clos­er to the ide­al. The main thing — do not over­do it!

An impor­tant advan­tage of this pro­gram is that the qual­i­ty of the pho­to is not lost, and if it is lost, it is almost not notice­able even when approach­ing.

So, I pre­fer pho­tos with nat­ur­al light, with­out fil­ters, so I often stop at this stage of pro­cess­ing. But if not, then move on to the next appli­ca­tion.

2. Snapseed

If I have not been able to, for exam­ple, make my face thin­ner so that it looks nat­ur­al, then I go to the Snapseed appli­ca­tion.

Con­sid­er an exam­ple. The pho­tog­ra­ph­er did not set the light in the stu­dio very well: there is too much light on the face, the cheek­bones are not empha­sized, the face seems too round, and there­fore a lit­tle full — it will not work, because in fact we are slen­der beau­ties. We need to solve the prob­lem.

Author’s pho­to

On the tool­bar, I select “Selec­tive Cor­rec­tion” — here you can light­en / dark­en, add / reduce sat­u­ra­tion, con­trast and detail not com­plete­ly on the whole pho­to, but on a spe­cif­ic area.

The Selec­tive Adjust tool in the Snapseed app. Author’s pho­to

I select the area around the cheek­bones, nar­row the range and low­er the bright­ness. It turns out that we do not deform the face in any way, but sim­ply arrange the light as if it were done by an expe­ri­enced pho­tog­ra­ph­er in the stu­dio or if we were made up by a make­up artist using face con­tour­ing.

Author’s pho­to

I also like to use the Curves tool in Snapseed — not every­one knows how to work with it, but if you learn, then you will have a good tool for work­ing with expo­sure — con­trast, image bright­ness.

3.VSCO

VSCO is an edi­tor that is best known for hav­ing a large num­ber of fil­ters.

Once I acci­den­tal­ly pur­chased an annu­al sub­scrip­tion to VSCO for almost 1600 rubles. For you to under­stand the tragedy, it was almost the last mon­ey on my card.

Then I was very upset — the com­pa­ny does not return mon­ey, unlike some oth­er appli­ca­tions.

But as you can under­stand, in the end I did not regret it — oth­er­wise this appli­ca­tion would not have been in my top.

So, if I don’t like nat­ur­al pro­cess­ing or I want to add atmos­phere to the frame, I go to VSCO to add some kind of fil­ter or grain.

Added the M4 fil­ter and grain to the source in the VSCO appli­ca­tion. Author’s pho­to

From con­ve­nient chips: I like that you can copy the set­tings from one pho­to and paste it on anoth­er, not yet processed pic­ture.

It is also con­ve­nient to cre­ate lay­outs for sto­ries here.

Be care­ful — VSCO spoils the qual­i­ty of your pho­to, albeit slight­ly:

• If you used Pho­to­shop Fix and then came to VSCO, then every­thing will be fine.
• If you’ve been to Pho­to­shop Fix, then Snapseed, and then VSCO, you’ll be fine.
  
• But there are appli­ca­tions that sig­nif­i­cant­ly degrade the qual­i­ty of the image, so if you have already vis­it­ed sev­er­al oth­er appli­ca­tions not men­tioned in the arti­cle, or, for exam­ple, edit­ed the image sev­er­al times in Pho­to­shop Fix, and did not change every­thing at once, then the qual­i­ty will dete­ri­o­rate great­ly and it will be pret­ty notice­able.

4. Lightroom

I use this appli­ca­tion to cre­ate and use pre­sets — you just take and copy all the set­tings to anoth­er pho­to and, if nec­es­sary, adapt them to each indi­vid­ual case.

Author’s pho­to

Unlike VSCO, in Light­room, pre­sets can be trans­ferred from one phone to anoth­er. Did you like how your friend edit­ed the pho­to? Let him save it in DNG for­mat, send it to you, for exam­ple, via Air­Drop, and that’s it — copy the set­tings from her pho­to to yours. And you don’t need to mem­o­rize by num­bers what kind of con­trast there was there, how much “clar­i­ty” and so on.

Author’s pho­to

There is also a handy curves tool for light and col­or cor­rec­tion.

Light­room does not spoil the qual­i­ty of your pho­to.

5. Edit photos on iPhone

The iPhone fil­ters are cer­tain­ly not worth our atten­tion, but the expo­sure set­tings are per­haps under­es­ti­mat­ed.

I often use the Shine and High­lights tools. The first gives the pho­to that nat­ur­al light, and the sec­ond — bet­ter “Sat­u­ra­tion” will give the pho­to col­ors.

Added “Shine” 39 units and “Light areas” ‑100. Author’s pho­to

And the qual­i­ty, of course, does not dete­ri­o­rate.