Better & Brighter

Take your photos from good to great.

I f there is one thing I have always wanted to be able to do, it's take pictures with my iPhone that convey the beauty of the real thing, from birthday parties to camping trips to pictures of sunsets and moonlight. So, I called my friend Terry Peak, professional photographer and owner of Terry Peak Photography in Edgewood, New Mexico, who has long been my official editorial and advertising photographer. Terry teaches a course on specialty lighting for professionals and has shown me some tips on the iPhone using the free Photoshop Express Photo Editor app. If anyone could help me take my dark photos from grainy and unusable to beautiful, I knew it would be him.

“What you want is to bring the photo to what your eye sees,” Terry said, immediately understanding the crux of the problem. Terry uses Photoshop Express frequently for his clients, even on all his professional shoots, where he downloads shots from his Canon mirrorless camera to his phone. “I'll show [clients] five or six really key pictures of the shoot we just took. I'm not doing any of the final Photoshop work, but I can brighten colors, smooth out skin, just with a touch,” he said.

Want to know how he does it? Although getting it right every time takes practice, the steps below will get you started on the road from photos that are nice to photos that make people say, “Wow!”

Step 1: Download and open Photoshop Express and sign in or sign up. If you have an Adobe account, you can quickly and easily link to it here.

Step 2: Tap Edit and choose a photo from your Photos app.

Step 3: From the panel at the bottom of the app, choose Adjustments, and then choose Light in the title bar. From there, scroll right and tap Shadows. Pull the slider all the way to the right for a value of 100 to brighten the image. From there, play with the sliders until the photo looks most appealing.

Step 4: While still in the Light panel, choose Highlights. Again, pull the slider all the way to the right to add additional highlights, and adjust to your liking from there.

Step 5: Next, scroll to the Effects title and choose Dehaze. Pulling the slider to the right adds all the vibrance of the colors we see with our own eyes into the image. While the technical reasons this happens are beyond the scope of this article, Terry explains that Dehaze is a very important exposure tool for the professional photographer. “It takes the milky look out and deepens every color as well as the blacks,” he

says. Terry has chosen a value of 100, but he recommends that you spend time in this adjustment to get the exact saturation that pleases your eye.

Step 6: To put the final touches on your sunset image, scroll from Light down to the Vignette menu. Pulling the slider left adds a black border to the image; pulling it right creates a white one. Because of the evening subject, Terry has chosen a vignette between -35 and -40, giving it that last little professional tweak.

I followed these steps with a similar photo I took of a sunset over a fallow field in southern New Mexico and was quite pleased with the result. While I will never be a paid professional, I can confidently upload pictures such as this to my personal social media, knowing they will get a positive response.

Terry lives in a beautiful mountain town east of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “This was taken out my back door,” he says. “A nice picture, but it doesn’t seem to be as good as I remember. This is because our eye interprets light differently than a camera lens.” BEFORE

“Now, that’s the pretty I remember!” said Terry. Any photographer can achieve this effect by following Terry’s tutorial. AFTER

Not only did the colors come forward, but details which had been lost were much more apparent. I used the following settings—Shadow: 100, Highlights: 100, Dehaze: 90, and Vignette: -37. AFTER

I took this photo of a sunset in New Mexico. Sunsets can be quite vivid to the naked eye, but the camera in the iPhone doesn’t see it quite the same way. BEFORE

SL Sayles is a public relations specialist, freelance writer, avid gamer, and iPhone fanatic. Following the completion of a PhD in water economics and policy in 2019, she started a board game company, Big Girl Games, in southern New Mexico.