Easy Edits to Enhance Your iPhone Photos

At this point, any smartphone can take pretty good photos.  However, just like with camera photography, half the work is taking the photo, and the other half is editing. I usually spend about 60 seconds (or less) making adjustments in an editing app before I post any iPhone photo on social media.

I’ve been using the Photoshop Express mobile app to edit my iPhone pictures since I got my first iPhone in 2013.  It used to be free in the App Store, but now you need to have an Adobe plan.  Since I’m a professional photographer, I have the Adobe Photography Plan (affiliate link*), which is $9.99 a month and includes desktop and mobile apps for Photoshop and Lightroom.  If you don’t use Adobe, the free mobile editing apps that I’d recommend are VSCO, Tezza, Snapseed, and Afterlight.

Here are five tips on how to edit your iPhone photos quickly. These tips use basic functions that every editing app has.  You could even edit the photo right in your Photos app if you want (click Edit in the top right when you’re looking at one image).  I like my pictures to be bright and colorful, and I use these tips to edit pretty much every iPhone photo I post to my Instagram story. These edits work for any kind of photo, whether it’s a picture of a person, a landscape, or a meal!

I’ll use a photo of myself from graduation as an example. It was taken on an iPhone 6s.

1. Start by increasing the exposure.  I’m standing in even lighting, which is the most important thing for portraits, but there was a lot of cloud cover, so this will brighten up the photo.

2. Next, lighten the shadows.  I don’t want to do too much, but I kind of want to see more of a difference between the black stole and the black gown.

3. After, I’ll decrease highlights. When I brightened up the photo by increasing the exposure and lightening the shadows, I made the sky and clouds too bright.  Decreasing the highlights will bring back a lot of the details in the brightest part of the photo.

4. The photo already looks a lot better than the original, but it still looks a bit flat.  Increasing the contrast will make the lightest parts of the photo lighter and the darkest parts of the photo darker, helping to increase the depth of the photo.

5. Lastly, I’ll increase the saturation.  The phone camera doesn’t often pick up on the vibrancy of the subject, so the colors can look a little dull.  Increasing the saturation will make the colors will pop more. Be careful not to go overboard, especially with photos of people because you don’t want the skin tone to look too crazy.

In the end, you can see how much of a difference these 5 adjustments can make!  This photo is now ready for Instagram!

To summarize:

1. Increase the exposure
2. Lighten the shadows
3. Decrease the highlights
4. Increase the contrast
5. Increase the saturation

Hope this helps! I’ve included some more examples below.

*Lively by Laura is a part of several affiliate advertising programs. This means that if you click and/or make a purchase through certain links on this site, I may make a commission from it, at no extra cost to you!  All opinions are my own. Thank you for supporting my blog!

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