Your profile picture is the first thing people see when they come across one of your accounts. Whether it’s a professional or social media account, you want to present yourself in a good light. Tap or click here for tips on taking the perfect profile picture.
Now let’s talk about video. Whether you’re filming something for school, work, or a cute little clip to send to friends and family, you have many tools at your fingertips to get the footage you want. Best of all, they’re built right into your iPhone.
We have some basic video editing tips to make your videos stand out.
1. The right time to cut corners
Let’s say you’re recording a video of yourself for a presentation or a birthday greeting. The lighting is good and you wrote a well thought out message. It’s perfect, save for the awkward start when trying to position the phone for a good angle. And then you knocked the whole thing over when you wanted to stop the recording.
This is where video trimming comes into play. You can cut out the first and last seconds of any video. It’s also helpful when your video is too long to post on social media and you only need the good part. You may want to shrink it to reduce file size before sharing via SMS or email.
To trim your video:
- Open the video you want to edit and tap To edit in the upper right corner.
- move the slider on either side of the video timeline to change the start and stop times. You will see a yellow box around the video timeline.
- To preview your trimmed video, tap play Button.
- Beat Finished.
- Beat save video to save only the cropped version of the video.
- Beat Save as a new clip to keep the original and abridged version of the video.
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2. Adjust light and color
Let’s get back to basics. You can change the look of a photo to emphasize details or change the mood. Your iPhone offers all the basic settings you’ll find in any photo or video editing software:
- Open the video you want to edit and tap To edit in the upper right corner.
- At the bottom of the screen you will see icons for Video, To adjust, filter and harvest.
- Tap on the second icon that looks like a clock face and you can play around with it exposure, highlights, The shade, contrast, brightness and more. There is also a automobile Setting with its own slider to adjust the strength of the automatic processing.
- Beat Finished when you’re done
3. Change the mood with filters
You can change the mood and style of an image or video simply by adding a filter. They can change the color temperature or become monochromatic.
- Open the video you want to edit and tap To edit in the upper right corner.
- The third icon, which looks like three circles, contains the filter. You can change the warmth of the photo or slide all the way to the end for black and white options. There is even one dramatic Possibility. Each filter has a slider to adjust its strength.
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4. Crop, straighten and rotate your video
The fourth icon on the edit screen is similar to most crop tools. Here you have many options.
- Open the video you want to edit and tap To edit in the upper right corner.
- Tap at the bottom of the screen harvest icon (the last one on the right).
- At the top left you will see buttons mirror the video or turn it.
- At the top right is an icon that looks like a series of boxes nested inside each other. Tap on it and you will be given options to change the aspect ratio to square, 16:9, 4:3, freeform and more.
- Is your video out of whack? Tap the straighten Button below the video that looks like a circle with a solid line. Adjust the slider until you have the angle you want.
- Beat Finished when you’re done
5. A new perspective
Let’s say you’re photographing a tall building from the ground. Since you’re shooting up, you’ll end up with a video where the lines converge towards the top. You can change the perspective to make the lines appear more symmetrical and natural.
- Open the video you want to edit and tap To edit in the upper right corner.
- Tap at the bottom of the screen harvest icon (the last one on the right).
- To adjust, tap the center icon, which looks like a trapezoid with a vertical line vertical perspective.
- To adjust, tap the third icon, which looks like a trapezoid with a horizontal line horizontal perspective.
- Beat Finished when you’re done
Bonus tip
We all make mistakes. That’s what undo buttons are for. It’s called differently on your iPhone, but has the same function:
- Open the edited video and tap To edit in the upper right corner.
- Beat To return in the lower right corner to remove all your changes.
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