Find Three of Your Own Photos to Fix This Term
Okay. We've got an app. We've poked at undo. Now we need something to actually practice on, because I can put my tomato photos up on the screen all day long and it won't help you nearly as much as fixing your own.
So here's the assignment for the term. Go find three photos, right now if you can, and set them aside as your "working three." These are the ones we'll come back to, lesson after lesson, as we learn each new move.
What makes a good pick
You want photos with actual problems. Not your best shots, your worst ones. The blurry one. The too-dark one. The one where the background is a mess and your kid is a tiny speck in the corner. Those are gold for this class.
Here's what to look for:
One photo that's too dark or too light. Almost everybody has a dozen of these. Indoor shot, phone camera panicked, everything came out either murky or blown-out white. Perfect for practicing exposure later.
One photo that needs a crop. Something with junk on the edges. A parking lot behind the soccer kid, a trash can behind the birthday cake, half a stranger's shoulder in the frame. This is my favorite kind of fix and honestly the one most people skip. A crop is free, it's instant, and it's very hard to mess up. We'll spend real time on this.
One photo with a color problem. The blue-picture problem, I call it. Indoor lighting, everything looks a little gray or a little blue instead of the actual colors you remember. Kitchen photos are usually good for this. So are garage photos, which I know from personal experience.
You don't need three different problems necessarily. If you've got three blue-picture photos, bring three blue-picture photos. We'll get to all the fixes eventually either way.
Where to find them
Just scroll your camera roll. Don't overthink it. If you're staring at your phone for more than five minutes trying to pick "the right one," you've missed the point, grab whatever's there. These aren't going in a museum. They're going in your phone, which is where they already live doing nothing, so we might as well practice on them.
If you've got photos scattered across an old phone, a laptop, maybe a thumb drive somewhere, I feel that pain. My own photos are a mess across two drives and a phone I should probably clean out and never do. I'm not going to pretend I have a system, because I don't. For this class, just work with whatever's easiest to get to. Don't go hunting through backups for the "perfect" bad photo. Easy access beats perfect pick every time.
A quick word on what NOT to pick
Skip anything you're precious about for your very first pick. Not because you'll ruin it, undo exists and it works, but because you'll be more relaxed learning on a photo you don't mind messing up. Save the once-in-a-lifetime shot for once you've got a few lessons under your belt.
Also, if a photo has other people in it who might mind you passing it around a shared laptop or projector, keep that in mind. This is a low-key class, nobody's grading you, but be thoughtful the same way you would with any photo you didn't take alone.
Why three, and why now
I ask for three because one photo teaches you one thing and then you're bored, and ten photos means you're fussing over which one to work on instead of working. Three is enough to see a pattern in your own pictures. Most people find all three of theirs have the same problem. That's useful information. It means you've got one habit to fix, not ten.
I'll be honest, I don't finish everything I start either. I keep a running list of tool loans on a spreadsheet, and at some point I added a second tab just for photos people asked me to fix. Anthony's daughter's wedding pictures have been sitting on that tab for longer than I want to admit. I'll get to them. Probably. The point isn't that I'm organized, clearly I'm not, the point is that having an actual list, even a short one, even three photos, is what gets something off your phone and into an actual finished state. A list with three items on it gets touched. A vague pile of ten thousand photos does not.
The opinion part
Most photos need less editing than people think, not more. When you sit down with your three, resist the urge to crank every slider because it's there. We'll get into that properly later. For now, just gather your three and don't touch them yet. Let the anticipation build. I know that's a weird thing to say about photo editing, but here we are. 😊
Before next time
Get your three photos loaded into whatever app you picked, in a spot you can find again without hunting. That's it. Don't edit them yet, just have them ready to go.