How do I edit photos properly on my phone?

Phone editors are genuinely capable and non-destructive, so nothing you do is permanent. The problem is that the sliders are presented as a list with no hierarchy, and the ones at the bottom are the dangerous ones.

Step by step

1. Work on a copy or trust the undo.Most phone editors store the original and apply your changes as instructions, so revert to original is always available. Check that yours does before working on anything irreplaceable, particularly if you are using a third-party app that saves a new file.
2. Straighten and crop first.Everything after this is judged against the composition, so fixing it last means redoing the rest. Level the horizon, remove distractions at the edges, and decide the shape of the picture before adjusting a single tone.
3. Set the overall brightness.The exposure or brightness slider moves everything together. Get the picture to roughly the right overall level before touching anything selective. Judge with the screen at a normal brightness, not at maximum outdoors.
4. Recover the highlights.Pull the highlights slider down to bring back detail in bright areas — sky, a white shirt, a lit wall. If it does nothing at all, that area was clipped in the original and there is nothing to recover.
5. Lift the shadows sparingly.A little opens up dark areas. A lot produces the flat, grey, weightless look that marks an over-edited photograph, and it exposes noise. Photographs are allowed to contain black.
6. Fix the colour next.Warmth or temperature to remove an orange or blue cast, tint for green or magenta. Judge on skin, or on something you know is white. Get this right before touching saturation.
7. Add contrast last and gently.Contrast undoes some of the highlight and shadow recovery, which is why it comes after them. A small amount restores the punch that recovery removed.
8. Be very careful with three sliders.Saturation raises every colour including skin, which goes orange. Vibrance is gentler but does the same thing. Clarity, structure or texture increases local contrast and turns skies grey and skin harsh. Sharpening on a phone file adds halos to something already sharpened.
9. Use selective adjustments where the app has them.Brushing a change onto one area, or adjusting a single colour range, solves problems that global sliders cannot — a face too dark under a hat, a sky slightly too pale. This is where phone editors have improved most.
10. Stop, and look again later.Every editor over-edits while looking at the picture. Come back the next day and almost every adjustment will look slightly too strong. Halving everything is a reliable improvement.

Tips

• Compare against the original constantly — most apps let you press and hold to see the unedited version. If the edit does not obviously beat it, undo.
• Edit at a normal screen brightness in a normally lit room. Editing outdoors at maximum brightness produces photographs that are far too dark everywhere else.
• The automatic or magic button is a reasonable starting point on a difficult photograph. Use it, then back it off — it habitually goes too far.

Common mistakes

• Raising saturation to make a picture look better — It affects everything at once, including skin, which turns orange, and any colour already near maximum, which loses all detail. Adjusting one colour range, or the white balance, achieves the intended effect without the damage.
• Sharpening a phone photograph — The file has already been sharpened aggressively by the phone's processing. Adding more produces visible pale halos along edges and turns fine noise into speckle.
• Editing at maximum screen brightness — Photographs edited on a bright screen in daylight come out much too dark for everyone else. Use a normal brightness in a normal room.

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