Picking a Free App (I Use One, You Don't Have To)
Okay. Before we touch a single photo, we need something to edit it with. This part trips people up more than it should, so let's get it out of the way quick.
I use one app. I'm not going to pretend I've tried them all, because I haven't. What I can tell you is what to look for, and then you go pick something and we move on.
What you actually need
Here's the whole list:
- Crop and straighten
- Exposure or brightness adjustment
- Some kind of "auto" button you can ignore or use
- White balance or color temperature control
That's it. That's the entire tool set for this class. If a free app has those four things, it's plenty.
I know that sounds too simple. People assume you need something with forty sliders and a subscription fee before you can call yourself "doing photo editing." You don't. Free apps are plenty for a beginner, honestly more than plenty. I've been doing this for years on the free version of one app and I have never once hit a wall where I thought, well, if only I'd paid for this. Learn the free tools until they stop being enough. For most people that day never comes.
How to pick one
Go to your phone's app store, search "photo editor," and look for one that's free, has decent reviews, and doesn't ask you to pay before you've even opened it. If it wants your credit card before you've cropped a single photo, close it and try the next one.
Don't overthink this. You're not marrying the app. If you hate it in two weeks, delete it and try another one. Nothing you learn about crops and exposure is specific to one piece of software. It all transfers.
If you've already got something on your phone, built in from the manufacturer, that counts too. Half of what we're doing this course can be done in the editor that came with your phone's photo app. You may not even need to download anything.
A quick word on white balance, since it'll come up
You're going to run into a setting called white balance or color temperature. Don't let the name scare you off. I call it "the blue-picture problem," because that's what it looks like before you know what it's called.
Here's how I learned it. I photographed my tomato harvest for the ward garden group, nice big haul, proud of it, and every white surface in the picture, the cutting board, my shirt, came out this flat blue-gray. Looked like the photo was taken underwater. That's just what phone cameras do indoors under certain lighting. It took me three tries, and a fair amount of muttering at my phone, before I understood that white balance is just the app's guess at what "true white" looks like in that light, and sometimes the guess is wrong. You nudge the setting, the blue drains out, and suddenly your tomatoes look like tomatoes again.
You don't need to understand the science. You just need to know: if your photo looks a little blue or a little orange overall, that's a white balance problem, and there's a slider for it. We'll practice that later. For now just know the setting exists and don't panic when you see it.
What I want you to do this week
Go download an app, or find the editor built into your phone, and just open it. Poke around. Find the crop tool. Find the exposure slider. Find the white balance setting. You don't have to fix anything yet. I just want your fingers to know where things live before we start working on real photos.
One honest caution: some of these free apps are a little pushy about wanting you to sign up for an account or turn on notifications. You don't have to do either one to use the basic tools. Skip past it if it asks.
And don't worry about picking wrong. This isn't a permanent decision, it's a Tuesday-night decision. Try one, see how your thumbs feel about it, switch if you want. 😊
Before next time: find your app, open it once, and locate those four tools we talked about. That's the whole assignment.