Smartphones are by far the maximum common form of camera used today, and it’s easy to see why: they’re compact, most people have single with them at all times, and many could take photos that rival standalone point and shoot cameras. Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
To help you take the greatest photos with your phone, we’ve laid out ten handy tips we find ourselves using every day. With this information in hand, you’ll be able to produce some awesome shots from a fairly limited though continually educating camera platform.
Tricks & Tips for better smartphone photography (Updated)
Know Your Auto Mode:-
Knowing how the automatic shooting method on your smartphone camera works can greatly help you take decent photos. Take the time to learn when it uses in height ISOs, when it uses long shutter speeds, and adjust how you take photos therefore. It especially helps to know when the auto mode struggles, as you can then choose to override the default settings where appropriate. Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
Override the Defaults:-
Smartphones are best than ever when it comes to choosing settings automatically, but they don’t always get it right. Metering in tricky situations, particularly indoors and on overcast days, can still leave a lot to be anticipated, even with the best cameras on the market.
If you think the white balance or exposure is off, numerous smartphone cameras allow you to adjust these parameters to whatever you desire. Almost all phones contain a slider in the automatic mode that can adjust exposure on the fly, so there’s no motive to capture photos that are too bright or too dark. White balance changes often require a switch from auto to manual mode (where supported), but many cameras now support fine changes to color temperature.
The best manual modes permit you to change ISO and shutter speed as well, allowing you to choose how much motion blur will be current in your images, and how much grain will be visible. Longer shutter speeds, characteristically less than 1/30th of a second, will require steady hands. ISOs above 800 on a phone tend to introduce noticeable grain, but capture significantly more light than lower ISOs. It’s worth playing around with these settings to discover the best combination for the shots you want to achieve, and the great news is more high-end smartphones than ever include these comprehensive manual modes.
If center-weighted metering isn’t as long as the right results, you might also considering switching to spot-metering, which some cameras permit you to do. Center-weighted looks at the whole image and meters according to what it sees, with a preference on the middle of the frame. When shooting subjects off-center, it can be a decent idea to switch to spot metering so the area around the ‘spot’ you select is bare perfectly. Not every camera allows you to change this setting, but handfuls that include detailed manual modes do come with a metering mode switch.
Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
Use Good Posture:-
A key method for reducing blur knows how to hold a smartphone camera in a stable way. Holding your arms outstretched or far from your body can make them sway more when photographing. Moving your elbows into the sides of your body could give a bit of extra stability where needed, as can physically resting the smartphone on a unchanging object.
If you want perfect stability, it is possible to get a tripod attachment that you can slot your smartphone into. You’ll probably look a bit silly bringing a tripod out and about to use with your phone, but we have seen and achieved some fantastic shots with a tripod in hand. Tripods are especially useful if your smartphone camera doesn’t include blur-reducing optical image stabilization (OIS), or if there’s a manual mode that supports long-exposure photography.
Never Digitally Zoom:-
In the original version of this article, we advised readers to never zoom with a smartphone camera, but these days that advise isn’t continuously correct. Many phones, including the iPhone X and #Samsung Galaxy Note 8, include secondary cameras that provide 2x optical zoom. There’s no reason you shouldn’t habit those cameras, as they provide an optical zoom without the loss of image quality.
Instead, what we recommend against is digital zooming. This is what happens when you pinch or swipe to zoom on most smartphone cameras: the phone simply enlarges and crops the output as of the sensor before the photo is captured.
“If you have a smartphone that does include a 2x optical zoom, it’s best to stick to photos at either a 1x or 2x zoom, as this will provide you the full quality of the wide-angle and zoom cameras respectively.”
Digitally zooming formerly capturing does not allow you to reframe the image after the fact: you’re essentially losing data and reducing image quality with no way backwards. Yes, the image will appear to show an image in the distance nearer than it would otherwise, but you can very easily take the photo lacking zooming first, and then crop it afterwards. Taking the photo without zooming delivers flexibility and the ability to change your mind later. It’s the top of both worlds.
Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
Take Multiple Shots:
There is plenty of memory in your smartphone, so for every shot that you want to absolutely nail, it’s worth taking many photos in quick succession. When photographing dynamic or fast-moving objects – like as people, pets, cars, etc. – taking multiple photos will allow you to select the best shot later, without worrying about getting that at least one perfect image in the first take.
Better yet, many smartphones offer neat burst photography features/mode. Most will collect a sequence of shots into a ‘photo’ and allow you to set whichever photo from the bunch is the good shot. Some phones will even analyse the photos for you and pick out shots it thinks are the finest, often looking at whether everybody is smiling, or whether the subject is in focus.
We’ve seen phones that could even combine the best parts of every shot into a one photo, ensuring everyone is looking at the camera and smiling without actually needing everybody to do so at once. Play around with what your camera could do, you might be surprised at just how shrewd it can be with a burst shot sequence.
Edit:-
The final piece of the puzzle that frequently stops a photo captured with a smartphone from looking truly best is the post-processing stage. All the detail and necessary information has been taken, but it may not look as vibrant as you were after, or as sharp or as so beautiful.
It’s easy to fix this: chuck the photo in an editing software on your computer, like Lightroom, or even use an app on the device itself and begin playing everywhere. After moving a few sliders and ticking a few boxes, the outcomes might astound you and your friends. Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
Capture in RAW:-
Capturing RAW photos ties in with the previous tip on editing. For years now, DSLR users have been capturing in RAW to assist with the editing process and get the most out of their shots. Today, a small handful of smartphones support RAW detention, so if you’re serious about editing, considering swapping to RAW instead of basic JPG capture.
For those wondering, RAW is an image format that detentions unprocessed (raw) data from the camera. When you capture using JPG, features such as white balance are baked in to the final shot, and detail is lost in the compression procedure. The RAW format captures the whole thing, before white balance and other limitations are set, and without lossy compression. Editing using RAW images delivers the most detail, and allows you to modify things like white balance and exposure with far less excellence loss relative to JPG.
While RAW is best for editing, photos captured used in this format are naturally 3 to 5 times larger than their JPG counterpart. If storing space is a concern, RAW is not for you.
Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
Light it Right:-
If you want to get serious for smartphone photography, it’s crucial that your photos are lit well. Small sensors typically found in smartphones are not always capable when lighting gets poor, so it’s always best to confirm your subject is well lit when taking a shot. If you can get your camera shooting at ISO 200 or lower, then you’ll see less grain in the final image, and photos will look richer and more impressive.
One way to achieve better lighting for your smartphone photos is to get robust artificial lights, but this probably isn’t practical for maximum people. The flash also tends not to be so good, so you can rule that out as well. This leaves natural light as the top source, and there are a few tips to getting the greatest shots in the lighting you have.
Like when photographing with any camera, ideally the sun should be behindhand the camera’s lens, shining light onto the focus without entering the lens straight. Pointing a camera towards the sun will cause observation and a loss of contrast, so try not to do so unless you need an artistic effect. In cloudy conditions the bright sun could be diffused throughout the sky, presenting a challenge for smartphone cameras with limited dynamic range, so avoid shooting up to the sky if it’s not a bright/sunny day.
As we mentioned earlier, it might also be worth discovering spot metering to get the exposure just right, especially when there’s robust backlighting. Ideally you wouldn’t be shooting when there’s solid backlighting as smartphone cameras typically have weak dynamic range, but occasionally it’s necessary. And sometimes you can experiment with reflective surfaces to get light in just the correct positions: often a simple white piece of paper will suffice at directing light from the sky (or an artificial light) onto your subject.
Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
Sideload the Google Camera App:-
This tip is limited to Android smartphone owners, and those who want to do a bit of tinkering. The awareness here is that Google’s Pixel smartphones have very good cameras, and part of this comes miserable to Google’s excellent processing and HDR implementation. In other words, what styles the Pixel cameras so good is software, not hardware, and if you put the same software on other phones, you might see an improvement to image quality surly. Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
On some smarphones, users have seen image quality improvements by using the Google Camera app in its place of the included camera app, mainly to dynamic range, HDR, and low light performance. The app isn’t going to magically take a poor camera and make it as decent as the Pixel; not every part of the Pixel’s excellent processing is moveable to other phones through the app. The Pixel itself will always deliver the best outcomes using Google Camera. But in some cases, the Google Camera app is far improved than the stock app on other handsets, and is worth installing for a boost to image quality.
Download and installing Google Camera app is easy. Grab the latest version that works on your smartphone from APKMirror, and install it on your phone. Note that the newest version may not work if you are using an older version of Android. It may also be worth experimenting with the Google Camera HDR+ port, which is a tweaked form of the app designed to unlock even more processing power. As with installing any app outside the Google Play Store, you will need to allow installation of apps from unknown sources in your handset’s security settings. But don’t worry, the links we’ve providing in this article are safe, verified versions of the Google Camera app.
Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
Know When to Use Portrait Mode:-
The final tip relates to portrait modes, which have developed increasingly more common in the last year. Portrait modes attempt to simulate the increased background blur, or ‘bokeh’, available from #DSLR cameras with wide-aperture lenses. In many cases this is realized through an additional sensor that provides depth info, though phones like the Google Pixel 2 can simulate bokeh through smart edge discovery and without additional hardware.
As portrait modes are a shallow depth-of-field reproduction, rather than the real deal, they have problems associated with them. Edge detection isn’t continuously perfect, so there are times when you capture a photo and zones are blurred that shouldn’t be. At other times, the blur doesn’t appearance natural, or looks closer to a Gaussian blur than a realistic lens blur. The key to capturing decent photos using portrait modes is knowing when the portrait mode is expected to succeed, and when it will struggle.
Throughout our experience with a wide range of smartphones, most portrait modes struggle in highly detailed scenes, when there is no clear distinction between the foregrounds appears subject and the background you wish to blur. In these cases, you’ll often be left with a inferior photo than if you didn’t use the portrait mode. Some cameras struggle if the image subject is too close, or if the lighting isn’t very good. Stick to ideal conditions for the greatest results.
But when everything is working well, certain cameras produce fantastic simulated depth of field results that could take the shot to the next level. Don’t just ignore the feature because it’s not 100% reliable; play around, see what works, because some results can be spectacular. Tricks and Tips for better smartphone photography
