With More People Shooting On Smartphones, How Has Photo Editing Changed

Do you know how smartphones have changed photography and how has Photo Editing changed?

The use of smartphones has overtaken the use of desktop computers on many fronts; in fact, you’re probably reading this on your mobile phone. Smartphones have also all but wiped out the compact camera market.

Photographs are now shot on the object that is most easily accessible at the time, and for humanity, this is the smartphone.

The recently release iPhone 7 offers a 12MP camera with an aperture of f/1.8, while the Samsung S7 also offers 12MP with an aperture of f/1.7. These specifications sound standard-issue in 2017, but 12.8MP was ground-breaking in 2005 when Canon released its flagship 5D, a camera which became the first choice for professional photographers.

free photo editing

Nowadays, it’s only the professionals who can be seen lugging around a camera and lens kit that can weigh a few kilograms; the rest of the population simply reaches into their pocket and pulls out their slim, shiny phone. Without the need to manually download your photographs from a memory card stored in your camera, you have instant access to them at all times.

Of course, this heavily affected what photo editing software people use to edit their photos. Instagram spawned a society of photographers who could now document their lives almost in real-time. And with it, it brought the need for fast, easy-to-use editing programs. Many apps simply never reach the mass market, possibly due to being too difficult to use, too slow, or only available for a fee. But, there are a few which remain popular, and if you’ve used any of them, you’ll understand why.

If you ask any Instagram users that which apps they use to edit, you’ll hear mention of Snapseed – which is owned by Google and offers finely-tuned editing capabilities built into an exceptionally beautiful user experience. VSCO is both an editing app and an online community, offering editing and a huge array of filters, and well as online albums. And of course, Adobe features with their mobile versions of both Lightroom and Photoshop.

However, the drawback to most of these mobile apps is the need to edit each photo individually, which is far too labour intensive for someone who is simply trying to improve on their holiday snaps. For this, there are apps available for your computer, which can batch process your photographs for you. But first, with 2 clicks, you can upload the photographs from your African adventure to your Google Drive, where they are readily available on your computer.

photo editing

I’m not referring to the giants of photo editing, because even those require individual editing; I’m referring to a program developed with artificial intelligence. A program so smart, that it can tell the difference between human faces and human bodies; cloudy skies and green, rolling hills.

Photolemur is an automatic photo enhancement software or photo editing app, except it’s not, because it takes the manual labour out of editing your holiday albums. This auto image enhancer detects the content of your photographs and makes the required adjustments. You have final control over the look of your images, but it gets better.

Basically, Photolemur learns from you, and how you edit. If you’ve reversed an adjustment, it understands not to apply this adjustment to the next photo. Think of it as software the teaches you as much as you teach it.