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How to EDIT your photos 📸 on your Google Pixel/iPhone to make them ✨ POP ✨ (using Google Photos!)
Learn how to edit photo on your phone using the free Google Photos app. This is a simple edit on my Google Pixel 4a to explain how to get a more pleasing results from pictures that Google Pixel, iPhones or Samsung smartphones take. Most times, phones underexpose the pictures to avoid clipping the highlights. In this edit, we will recover the brightness and color to make the picture pop!
🔗 ORIGINAL & EDITED PHOTOS: https://lbaphotographie.ca/google-photos-quick-edits-droplets
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- 350$ Phone Camera vs 3500$ Canon DSLR: https://youtu.be/4KY9rIr0ifE
- Google Pixel 4a Review: https://youtu.be/7wNDXsDKoCg
- How to shoot the stars with your phone: https://youtu.be/LwnMOsq0Mpk
📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:29 - Photo I Will Edit
00:29 - Why we are editing this photo?
00:54 - JPEG Limitations
01:08 - AI edits suggestions
01:38 - Cropping & composition
02:20 - Portrait Mode Blur adjustment
03:11 - Basic Editing Settings
05:14 - Pop & Vignette
06:02 - Checking the result
06:45 - Conclusion - Thank you for watching!
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hello everyone in my last videos i got a lot of requests to talk about how i did my shots but instead of creating one or two very long videos on how i did with multiple shots i want to create a new video every two weeks where i did one shot at a time and this will allow me to use different devices so today i have my cell phone next time i might use an ipad i could use my computer also it's also going to allow me to use different apps so today we're using google photos next time i'm thinking of using snapseed and i'm probably going to use lightroom in the future too the photo i decided to edit today is a picture of a water droplets on a branch and one problem i have with pictures coming from the pixel phones and it's actually a problem for most smartphone is that they're always a little bit underexposed because they prefer to underexpose a shot than having blown out highlights so this is a very simple edit we're gonna do inside of google photos and that works either on smartphones that are android or ios if you have an iphone now let's edit this shot because it's a portrait mode shot it's actually going to be a jpeg so we don't have a raw picture in this case you only get raw pictures when you're using the normal mode or the night sight mode but if we come in the settings here we're still going to be able to recover a little bit of information and if you look right here we have some ai suggestions so here we have enhanced that brings back some of the contrast and some of the brightness which is what we want to do in our case just black and white and colourpop and these change each time you open a new picture and the interface for the google photos is a little bit different on iphone and android android got a new version recently to make it a little bit easier to use but the settings are exactly the same and you can use any other editing app you can have the same options too so you don't need to use exactly this one to do the edit we're going to be doing today but now if you move inside of crop here so i don't like the fact that here it's all blurry in the background and that we really don't have a lot of space on the side here and we have a lot of space on this side of the water droplets so we're going to come inside of here and we're going to resize it and if we see here we can actually resize it as we want but i don't want that i actually want to come here inside of this ratio and select the original one so we're going to put the original ratio and now we're just going to scale it down to have about the same spacing on this side and this side of the water droplets but you don't want to have a branch here that's like half inside of the shot so we're going to bring it back up here quite a lot to make sure we get this branch nice and inside so we get a better composition so once we're happy with the crop you can come in the next tab right here and like it's a portrait mode shot we can actually edit the blur here and i think um it's a little bit too intense right here and you can actually click on the picture here and it's going to change the point where they apply the focus so if we come right here and the center that's about where i want it i'm actually going to bring it down to about 40 here and we're going to see if we get a lot more of the branch here in focus which is what i want i want to have most of the water droplets in focus and only the background to be blurry so i think even a little bit less here it's going to be pretty good the next thing you can look at is def and we're not going to touch this this changes uh where the blur is being applied but in our case it was actually already pretty good uh color focus is if you wanted to keep like only the green here you could select green and only keep green but that's not what we're trying to do so we're not going to use it here uh we're going to come here first in the brightness and we're going to bring it up quite a lot here and it might not look really good right now but that's actually okay because the next steps are going to bring back uh the exposure and the contrast to something that's a bit better so usually when you bring up the brightness you want to go in right away inside of contrast here and just bring it up to bring back some of the details and some of the separation and the highlights and the shadows then we're going to come in the white point and we want to bring them up just to make the white even more wider and then we're going to come and highlight i'm going to bring it down so why i use a highlights down and white points up is that white pointers get out to create a little bit more white inside of the picture and a little bit brighter but i don't want the highlights to be overblown so i just want to make sure that the highlights are not at the maximum then i'm going to come in shadows and shadows are actually pretty okay but i might just bring them down a little bit to bring a little bit but contrast back and then we're really going to bring down the black point because this is what is going to bring back some contrast in the shot here so we can see that if we go down too much it's too much but if we bring it down to around let's say -18 it's pretty good then if we go on saturation here this is one place where most beginners do the error of going too far so if you bring it up completely here you can see it adds a lot of color inside of the shot but this doesn't look good at all so you want to be very careful when you use saturation to just add a little bit but not too much so i would say something around at 15 is pretty good in this case we're not going to add warmth inside of the picture because it's a jpeg and jpeg already has the color temperature baked in so even if you play fit it doesn't give too good results and actually pixel phones are really good to have the right color temperature right away and same thing for the tint we don't want to touch to that skin tones also we don't have any people inside of the shot so we're not going to play with the skin tones and we're going to leave it to its default and then we have blue tones here um that allow us to bring some blue out or a knot this is great for when you have a sky and you want to make the sky a bit more more blue and then we have the option here that's pop i don't like using listening at all uh if you bring it to the max here and this is a trick actually when you're not sure what an effect does on the picture you can bring it to it max it's max and you're gonna see right away how it affects the picture so if you bring it here you can see i think it doesn't look good at all uh adding too much pop maybe add one or two just to bring back a little bit of that contrast but really nothing else more than that theater is an awesome thing another thing that most beginners tend to put too much if you put it in yet that's big like this that's not good when you're adding it you want it to be really really subtle probably just gonna add a vignette here of two one or two where it just adds on the borders here a little bit of darkness to bring your eye to the center of the shot but really nothing dramatic that really shows that you have a vignette on and now if we look at the picture we can actually do a long press and we're gonna see the original shot and the new one here and we can see we brought back quite a lot of detail and actually going to go back to saturation just bring back a little bit more saturation because i think it can use a little bit more but we can see here that we had a quite great shot at the original one and when we let go now we have a much lighter one with uh that's a little bit more interesting to look at so once you're satisfied with the result you can come here click on done save a copy it's gonna take a few seconds to process the picture and we're gonna have the result right here don't stress if it comes back to your normal shot right here uh if you look at the little thumbnails in the bottom here you can actually come to the second one here and you're gonna see your result here that you just edited it if you enjoyed this video please let me know in the comments below and also go check out my instagram if you want to see other pictures i took you can leave a comment on instagram to let me know you would like to see how i did that shot and i might make a video on it pretty soon also let me know which app i should be showing in the next video i was thinking of using snapseed for the next one and probably lightroom afterwards but yeah please let me know anything you like or not about this video in the comments below also hit that like button if you enjoyed the video it does really help and hit that subscribe button to learn more when i come out with new videos see you in the next one bye
Video Links
- 🔗 ORIGINAL & EDITED PHOTOS
- 🔗 BUY THE PIXEL 4a
- 350$ Phone Camera vs 3500$ Canon DSLR
- Google Pixel 4a Review
- How to shoot the stars with your phone
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
In this video, I'm breaking down how to edit a photo on your phone using Google Photos—the free app that works on both Android and iOS devices. A lot of people ask me how I get my shots to look the way they do, so instead of making one massive video covering everything at once, I'm doing a new editing breakdown every couple of weeks. This keeps things focused and lets me show different devices and apps along the way. Today it's Google Photos; next time might be Snapseed or Lightroom.
The photo I'm editing is a water droplet on a branch shot in portrait mode on my Google Pixel 4a. Here's the core problem with smartphone photos: phones tend to underexpose pictures to protect the highlights and avoid blown-out whites. That means your shots often come out looking a bit flat and lifeless, even if the moment was beautiful. With some simple adjustments, we can bring that image back to life.
I'll walk you through the whole process. First, the basics: since this is a portrait mode shot, it comes as a JPEG rather than raw, so we're working within those limitations. I'll show you how to use the AI enhancement suggestions, then move into cropping to improve the composition. We'll adjust the portrait blur to control where the focus falls, then get into the real magic—the editing settings. This is where brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, and black point adjustments come together. I also cover saturation, vignette, and that "pop" effect, and I'll explain why less is more with these tools. Most beginners oversaturate or over-vignette their photos, so I'll show you how subtle adjustments actually look better.
By the end, you'll see the difference between the original underexposed shot and the final edited version. The tools are straightforward, the app is free, and this workflow applies whether you're shooting on a Pixel, iPhone, or Samsung. Check the links below for the original and edited photos side by side so you can see exactly what we're working with.