Editing your street pictures on the go
Damien Demolder explains a simple way to boost your street shots, all within your smartphone
Editing the street pictures you take with your smartphone is as crucial as it is with pictures you shoot with any camera, so find an editing app you like that offers the controls you need. I tend to use Pixlr and Photoshop Express, as both provide detailed controls of contrast, colour, shadows, highlights and the ability to add ‘looks’ if you want to.
Here’s a shot I took while waiting in the queue for Sainsburys. I liked the shadows of the late afternoon and the structure of the paving, along with the feet sticker and the actual feet. It’s called Social Distancing For Dummies. I didn’t have time to switch to Monochrome mode, so shot it in colour and tried to use the exposure controls to make the most of the shadows. The picture recorded is still too bright though.
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I took the picture into Pixlr and used the ‘agnes’ preset to turn it black & white. This preset boosts contrast a bit too and showed that the picture is a little brighter than I want. I used the Exposure control in Adjustments to make it a fraction darker (-12).
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Now to darken the shadows. Selecting Shadows in the Adjustment menu I pulled the slider all the way down to the left to make the shadows as dark as I could. This worked quite well, but they needed to come down a bit more. Before I did that though I pulled the highlights down a bit (-10) to introduce more detail to the brighter areas where the sun is on the pavement.
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I saved these settings and re-opened the Adjustments menu and, returning to the Shadows slider, I again dragged it all the way to the left to make them as dark as I could. This was about right as it gave the shadows plenty of body and added a lot of depth to the image.
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Pixlr has a function called ‘auto contrast’. It doesn’t adjust contrast as we might expect. It adds contrast to micro details that crisps things up in a way that appears a mixture of clarity and sharpening. It can overdo things and you can’t regulate the effect so I use it with caution. Here though it has enhanced the texture of the stones and sharpened the edges of the shadows.
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When I shot this I was concentrating on getting the sticker straight and didn’t notice it wasn’t level with the paving joints. So I used the rotate tool (1.2°) to partially correct this. On correcting it completely I lost too much of the sticker to the crop and the sticker looked wonky. The partial correction gives the impression things are straight even if they aren’t quite.
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I lifted contrast a tad to deepen the blacks and brighten the lightest tones. I generally pull contrast down and use the shadow and highlight sliders to create impact without boosting the very extreme tones; but here, in pulling down the exposure at the beginning of the process I’d created rather grey highlights. This contrast boost adds the sparkle back without losing any tonal detail.