From the days of using the fish bowl filter on Photo Booth to going through a phase of changing all my photos to black and white, I have loved to play around with photographs for as long as I can remember. When it comes to this blog, the images are a huge part of what I do and so I my hardest try to make them the best they can be. Sometimes this is easy, the sun will be shining and the colours will be perfect, but in the middle of winter on a seemingly lightless day it can become really difficult to get a good shot, and this is where editing comes in! I recently discovered the app ‘A Colour Story‘ and it has been a game changer in how I edit my photos. It is such a simple app to use and today I am going to talk you through how I use it to edit my blog images!
‘A Colour Story’ was created by Elsie Larson & Emma Chapman, the creators of the incredible blog –A Beautiful Mess. From the get-go I knew this was going to be an app that I was going to love because everything that these sisters do is just so beautifully thought out and user friendly. It is described as a ‘bright, fresh photo app’ and that is exactly what it is. It took me less than 5 minutes to work out how to use it and as soon as I had done this I knew that it was going to transform the way I edited blog photos.
There is a desktop version of ‘A Colour Story’ that works with Lightroom and Photoshop, but unfortunately I don’t yet (one day!!) have either of those pieces of software, so went for the mobile app. So, how do I use it to edit my photos?
First of all, I still take my photographs on my Sony Cybershot HX90 Camera because the quality compared to my phone is second to none. This is something that I don’t think will ever change for me, although you do get some pretty snazzy phone cameras these days. The only extra effort that I have added to my old editing routine is that I send the photos from my computer to my phone through Facebook messenger (1000x quicker than emailing them to yourself!), everything else is super easy.
So, now that I have got my pictures on my phone I can go into ‘A Colour Story‘ and select the photo/s I want to edit. Once I have selected my image I then click through the options to rotate/ crop the image and go straight into the main editor. Here’s what I do to every photo when I get there:
1. I go into Filters and choose the Essentials pack.
2. Then I go for the ‘Everyday’ filter, because it gives such a light, fresh look. I also love Lite Bright. It is worth noting that the Essentials pack is free, and to buy other filter packs costs hardly anything, giving you SO many options.
3. Whilst still on the Essentials filter I normally move the slider right a bit to make the filter a bit more natural. Remembering to click the tick to save!
4. Now I go back to the main menu and get up the Tools menu, going into the Adjust options from there.
5. I then normally enhance the Brightness a tiny bit, and the Exposure too, just to make the photos nice and bright. I don’t do this for every photo and only do it by the tiniest bit if I do because it is really easy to overdo it & wash everything out!
And there you have it! Now all I do is click save and use Facebook messenger to send the images back to my computer, ready to upload to the blog for you all to see! This process probably takes me 15 minutes in total, whereas before I may have spent an 45 minutes on iPhoto fiddling around. As I say, it is a game changer!
One of my favourite features of ‘A Colour Story’ is the option to batch edit photographs. This means that after I have sent all my blog photos to my phone I can simply select batch edit on the app, then select the photos I want to edit and apply the same filter to every single one with just the click of one button. This saves me so much time and means I can spend more time writing quality content rather than using my time to faff around trying to perfect the photos, so it is a win-win! You can even review each photo before you save to make sure that they are all looking exactly how you want them to.
The next step in my editing journey is definitely to download ‘A Design Kit‘, which is the A Beautiful Mess team’s other gorgeous photo editing venture. It looks like such a stunning app, and allows you to get drawing on your photos. Just as you would in Instagram stories, only with so many more original options & brushes and stickers galore. Uh, yes please!
Do you like editing photos?
Love Holly x