Why Do Resellers Need to Use a Photo Editing App?

No matter how fancy your “photo studio” is, you’ll likely still need to use a photo editing app in order to make your resale listing photography look truly professional. In fact, when taking photos of clothing, sneakers, shoes, and accessories, for online reselling platforms such as Poshmark, Grailed, or Depop, it’s actually more about your post-production adjustments and tools, rather than your expensive light equipment (or lack there-of).

Reselling Life-Balance

There are a ton of photo editing apps out there, and the majority of them are free. We tend to use several different apps when editing apparel & accessory photos for our resale listings because each one has a particular feature that really shines, and certain features on certain apps just work better than others.

In this article, we will go through the top 4 photo editing apps for resellers, what we use each one for, why, and how.

You’ll probably notice that all of the photo editing tools that are discussed are mobile tools that you can use on your phone. The reason for that is because the resellers at Resell Genius do pretty much all of their reselling, whether it’s on Poshmark, Grailed, Depop, Mercari, StockX, or eBay, on the go on their mobile phones. The ability to work from anywhere and sell from anywhere is a huge convenience. If reselling isn’t your full-time gig, and you work long hours, are frequently traveling, or you just have “a life,” this will help you balance your side hustle, your life, and your job / family commitments. You can work productively, virtually, from anywhere in a completely paperless way, and this skill set can become a huge strength. If you do your reselling and related activities from your mobile phone it can be faster and easier, and sometimes you just don’t feel like turning on your laptop or desktop, am I right?

The Top 4 Photo Editing Apps for Resellers

YouCam Perfect Photo Editing App

YouCam Perfect has become one of our consistent go-to apps for editing the pictures we take for Poshmark and other reselling apps. Years ago it was popular for personal photos because it was one of the best selfie editors around (we think it still is). Over time the features have grown exponentially and YouCam has become quite advanced. With the YouCam Perfect app, you can create unprecedented hyper-realistic virtual effects. The technology is based on decades of patented AR (Artificial Reality), AI (Artificial Intelligence), machine learning algorithms, and 3D mapping to ensure your edits are realistic, precise, and accurate.
What sets it apart even further is that it’s incredibly easy to use and it pretty much does everything you would ever need to make a Poshmark or any listing photo incredible, and not just your basic editing but really advanced photo editing as well.

The YouCam Perfect photo editing features that we use most often are:

• Instant Background Removal: an AI-powered one-click background remover that also allows for advanced touch-up’s so that it actually looks real. This full background removal tool is a great option if you don’t like your photo’s background, don’t have a photography backdrop, or just didn’t feel like setting it up that day. With very few adjustments, it will remove the entire background so you can replace it with a pattern, an image, or our recommendation, a plain light gray or white background.

• The “Instasize” Tool: This turns any photo into a perfectly square 1:1 ratio image. It’s not just a crop or resizing tool. It actually expands the photo to make it square without affecting the image content. Let me explain… let’s say you took a photo on your iPhone without using the 1:1 ratio prior. You’ll end up with a standard-sized photo in a 16:9 or 4:3 ratio photo. If you upload that photo directly to Poshmark, you’ll need to chop off the top and bottom of your image (or more) in order to make it fit, since the photos on Poshmark must be perfectly square. This is a real hassle when you’re trying to upload a stock photo that’s not square or a full body shot of your item. In the latter case, you’re going to end up with just the Torso! YouCam Perfect’s “Instasize” will transform your 4:3 photo (or any size for that matter) into a perfectly sized 1:1 ratio square with a simple click. It doesn’t remove any part of your image, and your entire photo remains intact. To learn more details about this feature, including a short video that demonstrates how to use it, check out this article in the Genius Portal: How to Make Photos Square Without Cropping.

• Text Overlay and add Image/photo: We love the fact that you can add text and other images to your photo. This can be helpful for Logos or Posh Icons. Even if they’re not transparent PNG‘s you can add them in a way that blends them seamlessly, and even removes the background so it creates the appearance of a transparent PNG from a JPEG.

• The Removal Tool: This is really helpful for a number of scenarios. Powered by AI it can erase things that accidentally photobombed your images, such as the edge of your table, your cat’s tail, or some specks of lint in the background. It will even remove the retail price from a tag, or remove your personal details from a photo of a receipt.

Acne Blemish Tool: This is found under the “Beautify” menu rather than the “edit” menu, which means it’s actually one of the tools designed for selfie and portrait editing, however, it works wonders for removing small things from your photos (even if they are inanimate) when the “adjustment tool” does not work. For example, it can be tricky to remove things that jut up against something else, as sometimes the Removal Tool can’t seem to get tight places like this right. In this case, jump over to the Acne Tool, quickly “add face”  and make sure you place your fake face placeholder dots over the area where you would like to use the tool. Once that is in place, adjust the size of the tool larger or smaller, and manually click over all the spots that you want to get rid of. If it doesn’t look the way you want, just keep clicking. This tool is really a perfectionist’s best friend but for some, minor details like the ones. the acne tool can remove simply won’t matter to them, and in that case, you can skip this micro-editing.

• Adjustment Tools: If you’re already using the app to resize, Instasize, or remove the background it’s easy to also use YouCam Perfect’s lighting, tone, and adjustment tools; that said, we do find that some of the other apps on this list have a slight edge when it comes to lightening and brightening, but it wouldn’t be noticeable enough to open another app if you’re already inside YouCam.

• Other: Of course, like most of the other apps on this list, YouCam Perfect also has advanced cropping tools. You can do basic cropping in a number of different ratios or free-form, the crop tool also has rotate-and-turn feature, and even includes a full 3D crop perspective transformer which enables you to change the perspective of the photo. With 3D 360° perspective cropping, you can “virtually” pull up the top of the photo so it appears closer to your face/the viewer, you can also do the same with the bottom, the left side, and the right, rotating one or all so that the item in the photo is perfectly centered, perfectly flat, not on an angle, and it looks like the photo was taken that way originally.

Check out the article in the Genius Portal, YouCam Perfect Photo Editor, for even more details about this photo editing app.

YouCam Beauty app is free to use for both Android and iOS. However, it contains in-app purchases to access premium features.

Snapseed Photo Editing App

Not to be confused with Snapchat, Snapseed is the photo editing tool created by Google. It’s a free app that includes a lot of easy looks, sort of like filters that are just different coloring tones and other editing tools that are automatically applied. It also includes the ability to really get detailed on a micro-level. You can even edit RAW images and do adjustments with the curves, although this is optional inside the app, the really advanced photographers may like this capability and the level of control it can provide.  I like Snapseed because of the advanced features and I really think the Adjustments tools (lighting brightness and tone adjustments) are some of the best out of any app. I particularly like it for landscape photography, but it’s also been I use for my listing photography, especially when the photos look like shit. You can pretty much fix anything with Snapseed, it will help you transform a poor photograph into an amazing one, and all without having to retake the photo.

Snapseed is available for FREE from the App Store. Unlike many other photo editing apps, there are no extra in-app purchases to pay for.

Snapseed Cons

• • There is a slight learning process, even though it’s still considered pretty user-friendly.
  • Not for complete beginners, as some of the other apps on the list may be slightly less complicated.
  • You have to be vigilant about saving your work, as the options included are not very intuitive.
  • Doesn’t include some of the features that the other photo-editing apps have, particularly the AI-assisted smart tools like  Instant Background Removal, Instasize, etc., but for what it lacks in these areas it makes up in the professional adjustment tools especially since they work just as well as true professional editing software.
  • Arguably one of the best photo editing apps if you need to fix photos that are under/over-exposed too dark, too light, lacking vibrance, are grainy or have the wrong color tones.

Photoshop Express (PS Express) Photo Editing App

Photoshop Express, or “PS Express,” is Photoshop’s mobile editing app. It has an incredible amount of photo editing tools and features that are almost as good as their well-known (and expensive) desktop software. If you’re familiar with editing your photos on a computer using Adobe Photoshop, you’ll feel right at home with this app.

PS Express is FREE to download from the App Store, but you’ll need to pay to access some of the premium features, such as advanced healing edits, working with RAW images, and using HSL sliders.  Photoshop Express gives you everything you need to quickly edit and transform images including all the typical adjustment and correction options that you’d expect, basic to advanced cropping tools,  perspective tools, as well as auto-enhance and blemish removal.

Here is what we believe sets PS Express apart from the other photo-editing apps:

• • Intelligent Photoshop tools that take care of complex tasks like cutouts, dehaze, and noise reduction.
  • A “Display Feed” feed of other users “looks” that they’ve created and posted, which you can easily apply to your own photos.
  • Four perspective correction options – vertical, horizontal, and two auto modes for Full Auto and Balanced Auto.
  • An Image Resize tool that will scale photos down to the selected long edge, while preserving the photo’s current crop ratio. You can also resize to a custom aspect ratio.
  • When you export you can also change and control the JPEG quality
  • You can send and pick up editing in the desktop Photoshop, and back again, and can also pick up editing in some of the other Adobe Photo-editing apps such as Photoshop Mix, Fix, and Lightroom.
  • Of course, there is a background removal tool, replacement tool, and pretty much anything else you’d imagine dreaming up, especially if you include the two “connected” Adobe mobile apps, Adobe Mix and Adobe Fix, because, with those you can also accomplish layers, overlays, and the (very awesome and precise) distort, transform and nudge tools, which if you’ve ever used Photoshop you’ll know how cool useful those tools are.
  • And finally, the biggest strength PS Express has over YouCam, because in all honesty, these two tools offer vastly similar features, and are in the top two out of all the photo-editing apps, is that the image quality is higher when a photo is exported from PS Express. You may trade some ease-of-use for that, so that’s why we actually use both and rate them equally.

Apple iPhone Photo Editing App

People tend to overlook the regular Apple iPhone default photo app, it’s the same one that stores all of the photos you take on your iPhone and is accessed on your phone screen by clicking your “photos” icon.  Perhaps it doesn’t “appear that special” but everyone who has an iPhone already has as a default standard, and it actually has a ton of useful photo editing features. It’s a great tool to use for editing your apparel, sneakers, and accessories listings and it’s one of the easiest and quickest editing tools around. Most people already know how to use it, but they may not be aware of all its features, and some don’t even know it exists. If you consider yourself someone who cringes at the thought of editing your photos at all, then this is the app for you. It’s simple, easy, and fast. Read on to learn what it can do.

When you edit a photo in the iPhone Photos app, the original image gets replaced by the edited version. However, editing in the Photos app is non-destructive. This means you can undo edits or revert back to the original image at any time.

Inside the editor, there are three icons at the bottom of the screen (except if you’re editing a Live Photo, in which case there will be four icons.) These icons give you access to a range of editing tools for improving your image.

The native iPhone photo editing app is easy to use and very convenient when you don’t need to do advanced or extensive edits (its best for cropping, perspective, lighting, and tone) and since it’s connected to the iPhone’s camera app you can jump right in do your edits real-quick, and then jump back to the camera app to finish taking your photos.

Markup Tool: A feature that all resellers should be aware of is the Markup tool. Its icon is three dots in a circle and it’s found at the top right of the screen when looking at any photo.  This allows you to add a text or shape overlay such as a circle or arrow to point out a flaw plus text to explain more detail. You can also use Markup when posting a receipt to your listing in order to cover up your address, your credit card number, and any other personal details that you don’t want to show. We also advise covering the sales assistant‘s name and your VIP customer number, and even the price on the receipt (because who needs to know if you got that item on sale?!). You can do all of this in seconds by adding filled shapes over the information. We also recommend that resellers add a text overlay of their Poshmark Closet or seller account when they add a copy of an original receipt to their listing photos. If you make it slightly transparent and copy it several times, it acts as a watermark. This essentially claims ownership of the photo and ensures that counterfeiters won’t steal it and try to pass it off as their own because it would be impossible to remove these text overlays.

Live Photos: Another helpful feature about the iPhones photo editing app, is the ability to cycle through the “Live” renditions of your photo, if you have the “live setting” turned on when taking photos (and why wouldn’t you?!)  This enables the phone to automatically capture a few seconds before and after the shot when taking a photograph and store the versions inside the editing tool. This can really save you in a pinch because sometimes your hand might shake slightly when taking a photo and you don’t even realize it until after. If this happens your photo will be blurry but don’t fret, it’s really simple to go into Photo Edit, click on the “Live” edit icon, and then scroll left or right to choose the version of the photo you want instead. When you’re taking a photo in the iPhones camera app you can make sure that the “Live Photo” setting is on by ensuring the tiny bull’s-eye icon in the top right of the screen when you’re about to press the shutter button.

The Bullseye icon in the editing menu bar at the bottom of the screen is for “Live Photo” editing. Going right, the next icon looks like a clock, with a circle of round dots around, and this is where all the “adjustments” editing tools are located. The next icon houses all the “filters” and looks like a triangle of three overlapping circles. We do not recommend adding filters to your listing photography. And finally the last icon holds the “crop and perspective” tools. This is a really impressive crop tool with similar features to YouCam Beauty and PS Express. It features 3D 360° perspective cropping, rotation, and basic crops.

The Apple iPhone photo editing app is not meant for advanced editing, but for a quick and easy light & tone adjustment, a quick crop or perspective adjustment, fixing a blurry photo, or adding text and shape overlays with Markup, it’s a great go-to tool that’s quick, easy, and free.

If you try Apple’s standard editing app you may be surprised at the quality of the results, especially the adjustment tools for lighting and tone adjustments. It also has two adjustment tools that many other photo editing apps don’t have, and those are Brilliance and Vibrance.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use all the adjustment tools within any of the photo  apps that we mentioned, or even one of your own favorite editing apps, we recommend that you check out the Genius Portal article called “Easily Edit and Fix Your Listing Photos”

      Live       Adjustments      Filters         Crop