Hey, welcome back. It's Karen from photography playground. nerd, you have an overview of all the features in VSCO, we're going to edit our first picture, we're going to do some basic editing with this one, adjusting the crop and mostly working on brightness, contrast and color. This is the end result of the editing process, and these are the steps I took to get there. I open up the app and select the photo. I select the slider icon and the preset section opens up.

Here you can see all the different presets. The lock in the corner indicates it's paid preset one that comes with the yearly subscription. When you click on the presets icon, again, different view modes open up, try them out and select the one you like the most. I prefer this view mode because you already have quite a clear picture of what the image will look like with all the different pieces. It's a little far out there for me for this photo. So I'm not going to choose a preset.

If you don't want to choose a preset, just leave it as it is and click on the slider icon. We already walked through all the tools in the previous lesson. So I'm not going to do that. But I am going to change the order of the tools because you can do that and I think it's a great feature. I'm going to change the order into my workflow order. I always start with adjusting the crop or aligning the horizon or something like that.

So I want to adjust to be on top. The next thing usually is adjusting the exposure and white balance and after that I work on tone and contrast. They go together for me and I'll explain why later. Next up is saturation, clarity, sharpen and vignette. And actually the last few tools I hardly ever use. So I'm going to hit save.

And as you can see the order of the tools is changed. Great. First step is to adjust the crop. I like this picture in a square format because it emphasizes the diagonal lines. That's all I need to do here. Perfect.

It's a little underexposed, so we're gonna adjust the exposure, we need to slide to the right to make the image brighter. Yeah, something like this. Okay, then we're going to adjust the white balance. I think it's a little bit too yellow. So we're going to add some blue and just a little bit of green. It looks a bit flat now, and what we're going to do next is make it even flatter with the total.

So I'm going to brighten the shadows quite a lot and I'm going to darken the highlights a little Not too much. So we have this very flat image and we're going to increase the contrast. Why do I decrease the contrast? First, you probably wonder, we're aiming towards more contrast usually, right? Yes, we are. But if you just increase the contrast, chances are, the highlights will blow out, the shadows become pitch black, and you have very few mid tones in the middle.

By decreasing the contrast, first we introduce more mittens. Then after increasing the contrast, again, the image has more mid tones in between the dark and bright tones. Next up is saturation. Not too much just a tiny bit to make the orange umbrella pop a little more. And I like this. Next up is clarity.

Just a little bit to make the image pop. And we're going to sharpen as in Snapseed, or any editing app. Never Oh Do your sharpening. As the last thing, I'm gonna add a little vignette. Again, not too much just to darken the edges a tiny bit like this. And then I'm actually going back to exposure and brighten the middle part of the image because the edges are darker now because of the vignette, I want the middle part to be a little brighter to make it stand out more.

Before and after. Okay, that's it, this image is done. But first, let me show you another great feature. Here you can see all the steps you took. And then maybe you think well, I would like to make the colors a little more vibrant. Then you just swipe to the left and this opens up Click on the slider, you go to the tool and adjusted again.

Selecting the little bin will throw away only this adjustment. So in this case you only delete saturation. Okay, well I'm going to save this photo. This is a safe where you can always go back to. So if you want, you can go back and adjust some more. It's to save inside VSCO if you want to save it permanently as a copy, you need to save it to your camera roll.

Obviously, you should always choose its actual size. So now it's saving. Ah, that's it for the first edit. See you in the next lecture and in the meantime, happy editing