How to edit phone photos: a five-minute workflow that works
Most phone photographs need five minutes of editing, not fifty. Work in the right order, in the right app, and know exactly when to stop.
The photograph was taken on a phone at the end of Princes Pier just after sunset. On the screen it looked fine: the old piles, the water, a pale band of orange on the horizon. It also looked like every other photograph on the pier that evening. Five minutes of editing on the tram home changed that. The horizon was straightened, the sky brought down, the shadows in the piles opened up, the colour warmed a touch and a messy bit of railing cropped out of the corner. Nothing dramatic. Just a picture that finally looked like the evening had felt.
Editing on a phone is not a lesser version of editing on a computer. For most everyday photographs it is all you need, provided you work in a sensible order and know when to stop. This is a five-minute workflow that works in two free apps: Snapseed and Lightroom Mobile.
Snapseed or Lightroom Mobile?
Both apps are free to download and both edit non-destructively, meaning your original stays intact and every change can be undone later. They suit different people.
Snapseed, made by Google, is free with no subscription. Its tools are laid out as separate tiles, such as Tune Image, Details, Crop, Perspective, Healing and Selective, and you apply them one after another. It is quick, and its Selective and Brush tools allow local adjustments to just part of the frame. Its main limitation is organisation: it edits one photo at a time and has no library to speak of.
Lightroom Mobile, from Adobe, has a free tier with the core editing controls, grouped into panels for light, colour, effects and detail. Some features, such as certain masking and healing tools and cloud syncing, have required a paid plan; what is included changes, so check the current plan before relying on a particular tool. Its strengths are copying an edit from one photo to a batch of others and, for subscribers, syncing with Lightroom on a computer. If you already edit camera files in Lightroom, it is the natural choice. If you simply want better phone pictures at no cost, start with Snapseed.
A five-minute phone photo editing workflow
The order matters more than the app. Fix the geometry first, then the overall light, then the colour, then small details. Doing it the other way round wastes time, because cropping changes what the tones and colours need.
- Crop and straighten (1 minute). Level the horizon or the verticals of a building. In Snapseed use Crop, Rotate or Perspective; in Lightroom Mobile use Crop and Geometry. Crop out anything at the edges that pulls the eye away from the subject.
- Set the brightness (1 minute). Adjust overall exposure until the main subject looks right. In Snapseed that is Brightness in Tune Image; in Lightroom Mobile, Exposure under Light.
- Rescue highlights and shadows (1 minute). Pull Highlights down to bring back a bright sky, and lift Shadows to show detail in dark areas. Go gently. Big shadow lifts on phone files quickly look grey and noisy.
- Correct the colour (1 minute). Use Warmth in Snapseed, or Temp and Tint in Lightroom Mobile, until whites look white. Then add a small amount of Saturation, or Vibrance in Lightroom, if the image needs it.
- Finish locally (1 minute). Remove a small distraction with Healing, brighten a face with a brush or selective adjustment, and add a light touch of Structure or Clarity if the subject has texture worth showing.
That is the whole edit. Most phone photographs need nothing more.
How to edit phone photos without overdoing it
The most common problem with phone edits is not too little editing. It is too much. Phones already apply contrast, sharpening and noise reduction when they take the picture, so the file has less room to move than a camera raw file. Push it hard and it shows. If you notice the edit before you notice the photograph, go back.
If you notice the edit before you notice the photograph, go back.
Watch for a few warning signs. Skies that shift from blue to cyan or purple. Grey, flat shadows after a large Shadows lift. Crunchy halos around buildings and trees from too much Structure, Clarity or HDR-style effects. Skin that turns orange when Saturation goes up. The fix is almost always to go back and halve the last change you made.
Two habits help. First, compare with the original often. Snapseed shows it when you press and hold on the image; Lightroom Mobile has a before-and-after view. Second, edit at a normal screen brightness. Editing on a phone turned to full brightness, then posting the result, is the usual reason photos look darker to everyone else. If you want more room, shoot in your phone's raw format, such as Apple ProRAW or DNG, for the pictures that matter.
Editing a batch of phone photos
After a day out you may have thirty photographs from the same place in the same light. Editing each from scratch is where five minutes becomes an hour.
In Lightroom Mobile, edit the best photograph from the set, copy its settings, and paste them to the others. Then adjust each one briefly, usually just exposure and crop. You can also save an edit as a preset and apply it with a tap next time you shoot in similar light.
Snapseed handles this differently. It can copy the edits from one photo and paste them onto another, though it is built for single images rather than batches. It also lets you save a sequence of tools as a Look to reuse later. For a handful of pictures that is fine. For a whole trip, Lightroom Mobile is quicker.
Whichever you use, cull before you edit. Delete the near-duplicates and the misses first. Editing ten good photographs is quicker and more satisfying than editing forty mediocre ones.
Saving and sharing edited phone photos
Save your edits as a copy when you can, so the original remains untouched in your photo library. Snapseed offers options to save, save a copy or export; Lightroom Mobile exports through its share menu, where you can choose file type and size.
For social media, a JPEG at the app's standard size is fine. For printing, export at full resolution and the highest quality. If you edited in raw, remember the raw file itself is not what you share. You share the exported JPEG.
If you would like to practise these steps with someone looking over your shoulder, our smartphone photography workshop covers both shooting and editing on your own phone. For a deeper one-to-one session on Lightroom across phone and computer, a private lesson works through your own pictures.
Practise this
- Edit one photograph in both Snapseed and Lightroom Mobile using the same five steps, then compare them side by side. Note which app felt faster.
- Time yourself editing five photographs from one outing. Aim for five minutes each, then try to do all five in fifteen by copying settings.
- Take one over-edited photograph from your camera roll and re-edit it from the original, halving every adjustment you made the first time.
Questions, answered.
What is the best free app to edit phone photos?
Is Lightroom Mobile free?
Why do my edited phone photos look worse on other screens?
Should you edit photos in my phone's built-in editor?
Published by CapturEDU, Melbourne photography education. Our educators are award-winning photographers with a Master of Arts in Photography (RMIT), AIPP and RPS membership.
