Have you ever tried to use rim lighting?
It's a great thing to know if you haven't learned yet, and here's a short refresher if you already know.
When there's a light on the far side of someone, the light leaks through right around their head illuminating their hair or hat. Sometimes the line can be so crisp that it looks as though they're being cut out.
Rim light is beautiful, and it adds a ton of visual interest to a photo. The real win here is taking an extra second to try and look around your environment for some kind of rim lighting.
Don't settle for the light you're given, find better light.
And also plan to show up during golden hour, instead of trying to do photoshop later and add in something fake.
More about rim lighting from New York Institute Of Photography:
Compared to Lightroom or Photoshop, sometimes mobile apps are maddening when you want to edit them just a little bit. I want more control to fine tune the image! Here are my top two best photo editing apps that you should check out!
1. Afterlight
Let’s start with the cost of this app — a whopping 99 cents. While I’m definitely not one to buy a bunch of apps, a buck is so worth it when you can manipulate photos exactly how you want.
You begin by shooting a photo or pulling a photo in from your library, and immediately along the bottom you can see the different options. I like to start with a one-touch filter and then modify it exactly how I want later. The list of filters is much longer than Instagram’s filters and they’ve split them up into categories (Original, Guest, Seasons, Fusion, etc).
Once you choose a filter, click on the slider tab and you’ll see you have a wealth of choices to change your photo exactly how you want. Here’s the entire list of things you can change:
Clarify, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Fade, Highlight Tone, Mid Tone, Shadow Tone, Temperature, Vignette, Grain, and Sharpness.
I find that I only use a few of these, but even a little bit of contrast change and sharpness increase and the photo is exactly where I want it. The fine tuning of the app is why it stands out to me — often times the one-touch filters are too drastic of an edit, and with this app I can dial it in exactly where I want.
2. VSCO Cam
Cost? Free. This app is hipster-friendly, solid style and a piece of art. You begin by pulling in a photo or taking a photo, which drops the image into your VSCO grid. From there, you choose from a bunch of one-touch edits and then further customize from there.
You can also purchase more presets if you’re looking for a specific type of edit, or if you want the simplicity of editing differently without doing too much yourself.
The one-touch edits are cool too because you can adjust the amount of the preset that comes through the photo. If you love a one-touch edit but want less of the effect without having to do it all yourself, just tap on the one-touch edit one more time after you select it, which brings up a slider screen to decrease the amount of the effect.
The list of filters available in this app are very similar to Afterlight with a few exceptions — here’s the complete list: Exposure, Temperature, Contrast, Rotate, Crop, Fade, Vignette, Tint, Saturation, Shadows, Highlights, Sharpen, Grain, Highlights Tint, Shadows Tint. All of these specific filters are on a sliding scale from 0 to 12, which is great because you can remember the specific numbers to dial in versus having to remember to slide the bar over “about 65% from the left”, etc.
Hope you enjoyed this list of the best photo editing apps! They’re my favorites for a reason, and that’s saying a lot because I’ve tried so many and there are just so many apps to choose from.