The Picture Perfect Project {{4}} - Edits

This month's Picture Perfect Project just kind of snuck up on me. I blame it on March being an absolute whirl wind of a month (St. Patty's Day, Easter, a 4th Birthday, teething, RSV... and on and on...). And my photo ideas for this month never came to fruition (and I still have yet to pull the trigger and actually shoot in manual - because, I'm terrified!).

After a conversation with some of my favorite blogging ladies about photos and editing I figured what better topic to discuss for this month is editing and programs/apps used.

So, instead of photos themselves, I thought I'd go through two apps I use on my phone for photos. One I've been using for quite a sometime (Afterlight), the other is relatively new to me (PhotoWonder).

Let me preface this entire post by saying I just tinker around with my photos until I like the way they look. I've never taken any classes, nor do I claim expertise. These are just a few tool I use, and thought I'd share them. I'd also like to point out that for the sake of demonstration, most of these edits are quite exaggerated, to the point of being over edited, so they are easily identifiable. Typically I don't like my edits to *look* like edits, if that makes sense...??

Afterlight

If I'm doing quick edits on my phone I use Afterlight. For 99 cents I think it's a packs a pretty good bang for the not-even-buck.

Here's the original photo I'd like to edit:

Taken with the trusty iPhone on a cloudy and rainy day. 

1. Open app and select photo
2. Use photo selected
3. The two tools I primarily use are the adjustments (arrow on the left), and the size and tilt tool (arrow on the right).
4. Opened the adjustments and meddle with exposure, saturation, brightness, shadows, and the like.
5. Open the size and tilt to straighten and crop the photo.
6. Save photo onto my camera roll.

The edited photo.

PhotoWonder

If I'm looking to enhance my photos by more than toying around with exposure and shadows and brightness, I really like PhotoWonder. This app can greatly alter an image (sometimes too much so), but I use this primarily for eye enhancement.

Before any adjustments to the eyes.

1. Hit Edit button, and then select photo to edit.
2. Click the Beautify button.
3. Scroll over to the Brighten Eyes option.
4. Select the size of brush to use on eye (this particular photo I used the smallest option), and fill in eyes. Once finished, click the check mark in the upper right corner to save the edit.
From there, simply save photo to camera roll.

The edited eyes.

Here are a few other programs I'm currently playing around with when editing on my phone:

VSCO

ReTouch

PicTapGo

Color Story

Major thanks to Erin for introducing three new-to-me apps that will hopefully produce some pretty photos (because have you seen her stuff?? Swoon-worthy)!

What are some of your favorite editing tools to beautify your pics?

Be sure to link up with the Picture Perfect Project hosts and share your photos, tips, and tricks!