Simple Enhance and Crop using Photo Editor

The other day I took a picture of our cat looking out the window at some birds on the sidewalk using my iPhone. The picture showed a lot more of the room than I wanted, and the bright window made the room inside very dark. So how do we take the picture from this:

Nice shot of the window, I suppose.

To this:

There are a lot of ways to edit a photo, both on the iPhone and off. I chose to use an app called Photo Editor- by Axiem Systems. It is a very powerful app, but for this picture I just needed two simple things: lighten the photo and crop it. Not necessarily in that order. So I opened Photo Editor-:

The app opens your photo library. It might ask for access first.

I selected the picture I wanted to edit and hit 'Done.' That opened the picture into the app, where I could use the menu to select what I wanted to do to the photo.

Swipe left for more options

I want to enhance the photo, so I tap the 'Enhance' icon

That brings up the 'Hi-Def', 'Illuminate', and 'Color Fix' options.

Tapping 'Hi-Def' lightens the picture a little bit. But what will Illuminate do?

Wow, that is much better. So I hit 'Apply'. Next I want to crop the picture.

I tap on the 'Crop' icon

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That brings up the cropping grid. The corner circles are used to size it to the area you want to keep.

I've moved the circles in so that almost everything except the cat and the window are gone. I'm ready to hit, 'Apply'.

Now that the picture is cropped, I decide I want to try to bring back a little of the view outside the window - the birds the cat is staring at. So I tap 'Adjust'.

The first icon looks like a gear. It controls brightness. I subtract some brightness to reduce some of the whiteness of the curtain. A little more detail appears outside the window, but not much. 

The next icon looks like a circle with a two-tone interior. It is contrast. Bringing down the contrast just a little bit brings out a little more detail. But the birds are still almost impossible to see. Bringing them back may be beyond the capabilities of this app. The next two icons are 'Temperature' and 'Color Saturation'. Neither of them will help bring back the birds. So I'm done with this photo. 

Here is the finished picture.