VSCO Review. Fun and Easy Editing. No Soul-Sucking Algorithm.
I would recommend VSCO to anyone who is ready to break up with Instagram.
Why does everything the Metaverse touches turn into a festering fly magnet? Take Instagram for example. It used to be the ideal platform for photographers and content makers. The platform traded its soul for lackluster influencers and the almighty algorithm when Facebook acquired it. Money was power, and obviously they knew best, right? Insert eye roll here. What made Instagram great became lost…
I was out for a run last night through the park next to my apartment, and I had to stop because the light was just TOO GORGEOUS. Golden hour should be illegal here. Honestly I’m not sure I’m capable of getting anything else done when there are photos that could be taken!
Anyway, since I was running, I only had my phone on me, so that’s what I used to grab a few quick shots. It seemed a little counter-productive to move them to my computer for editing, since they’d have to come back to my phone to share on Instagram anyway, so I decided to edit on my phone when I got home.
Hello, Snapseed! I’ve been hearing good things about this app, but I haven’t had a reason to use it ‘til now! I thought I’d share a guide/review of the app and quick overview of how I edit my landscape photos.
Disclaimer: I’m an android user. The interface should be very similar for iphones, but if you find any differences, let me know and I’ll update this!
When you launch the app, you’ll get a screen that looks like this. When you tap it, it’ll take you to your gallery to pick a photo for editing.
Once you’ve picked an image, you’ll see three options at the bottom of your screen: Looks, Tools, and Export. Looks are like Instagram filters, the Tools menu contains all of the individual options for editing, and Export is how you save your results. We’re going to focus on Tools for now.
My first step is always to adjust the angle. I know I don’t want to share it with a crooked horizon, so I fix it right away so that all of the later steps look closer to what I actually want to share.
Next, I adjusted curves (this link has a pretty good overview of editing with curves in general). When you open this setting, you’ll see a diagonal line across the image (the curve) and the histogram across the bottom. I think histograms probably deserve a post of their own, but the quick version is this: Divide the chart into thirds. The left section shows your shadows, the middle section is for midtones, and the right is for highlights. I like to think of it as peaks showing the most dominant tones and valleys showing the least dominant tones. What you want is for the peak to be somewhat balanced over the midtones and spilling into shadows/highlights. My image was underexposed, so the histogram is skewed to the left (more intense shadows).
You can add handles to the curve by tapping it, and drag up or down to edit the shape. This “S” shape is pretty common; it brightens highlights and darkens shadows, which really makes images pop. I’d suggest playing with the options to find what works for your style! If you need to get rid of a handle, you can tap and drag it off the bottom of the chart. If you move the top-right or bottom-left handles, you can adjust the “pure tones” in the image. Basically, sliding the top-right handle toward the center makes more pixels pure white, and sliding the bottom-left handle toward the center makes more pixels pure black. There’s no reason you have to adjust all these things every time you edit an image, but the option is there if you want it.
I bumped up the highlights, dropped the shadows, and added a little more white because I wanted to really show the light coming through the tops of the grass.
Next, I went for the white balance. There are two main tools here: temperature and tint. Photography rules say you want your whites to be white (such as clouds, someone’s teeth, maybe a blank wall, etc.), and white balance (aptly named) is how you can get there. Adjusting the temperature slider will make your images “warm” (more yellow/orange) or “cool” (more blue). I usually make my photos a little warmer than the “correct” value, but it’s all personal preference.
If you have to make any dramatic adjustments to the temperature, you may end up with a different color tint. That’s where the tone menu comes in. You can use the slider to add more pink or green to even out the image.
I decided to try out the Details next (top row of the tools menu, second from the left). I’ve seen basically the same feature under different names in different programs. Increasing detail (structure) acts like a Sharpen feature; decreasing detail acts like Soft Focus. Here’s how it looked (the center image is from the last step of my white balance edits, so no detail change is applied):
I liked a little bit of the softer look here, so I set it to -20.
The other important menu here is Tune Image. We accomplished pretty much all of the changes you could make here by using other tools, but if you’re more comfortable with this interface, use it! Brightness, contrast, ambience (add light to entire image), highlights, and shadows can be covered by the Curves edit. I use Curves because there’s more of a gradient in how the effect is applied (remember the “S”?); with Shadows/Highlights, it’s all or nothing. Warmth is covered by the White Balance menu, which, again, gives you more options to control the result. I did nudge the saturation up just a tiny bit for some more punch to the orange tones in the tops of the grass.
We’re almost done! If you want to go back and change any of the edits you’ve made, tap on the image options icon in your top toolbar (it looks to me like sheets of paper and an arrow) and then select “View Edits.”
Here you can see all of the changes you’ve made to your image, and you can adjust them if you’d like! You can also go through it step by step to see the change between each edit.
And we’re done with this photo! I decided to save my changes as a preset. To do that, go to the “Look” menu, scroll all the way to the right, and tap the plus icon. Here’s how it looked applied to another photo I took that night:
If you want to try out the filter (Look) I made, you can find the QR code here. (You can add it to your image using the button right under View Edits)
All in all, I’m pretty impressed with this app! I like that it has plenty of options for different editing styles with traditional tools like curves and white balance but also more modern additions that probably look more familiar to instagrammers and the like.
Would anyone be interested in a Part 2 of this tutorial? Maybe a portrait-centric version? There’s so much more to this app than what we’ve talked about here! Masked editing, dodge & burn, black and white photos....
As always, if you’ve learned something from this (or any other post!) and you want to share, tag @littlephotogannie or use #littlephotogannie on Instagram! I love a good before and after from post-processing. Happy editing!
