To help you take the best photos with your phone, we’ve laid out ten handy tips we find ourselves using every day. With this knowledge in hand, you’ll be able to produce some awesome shots from a fairly limited though continually improving camera platform.
HDR greatly improves visible detail in shadows. Photos taken with the now dated Samsung Galaxy S5. If you think the white balance or exposure is off, many smartphone cameras allow you to adjust these parameters to whatever you desire. Almost all phones include a slider in the automatic mode that can adjust exposure on the fly, so there’s no reason to capture photos that are too bright or too dark. White balance adjustments often require a switch from auto to manual mode (where supported), but many cameras now support fine adjustments to color temperature. The best manual modes allow you to change ISO and shutter speed as well, allowing you to choose how much motion blur will be present in your images, and how much grain will be visible. Longer shutter speeds, typically less than 1/30th of a second, will require steady hands. ISOs above 800 on a smartphone tend to introduce noticeable grain, but capture significantly more light than lower ISOs. It’s worth playing around with these settings to find the best combination for the shots you want to achieve, and the great news is more high-end phones than ever include these comprehensive manual modes. If center-weighted metering isn’t providing the right results, you might also considering switching to spot-metering, which some cameras allow you to do. Center-weighted looks at the entire image and meters according to what it sees, with a preference on the center of the frame. When shooting subjects off-center, it can be a good idea to switch to spot metering so the area around the ‘spot’ you select is exposed perfectly. Not every camera allows you to change this setting, but a handful that include detailed manual modes do come with a metering mode switch.
What is seen on the left is the product of a digital zoom. Notice the massive loss in quality. Shot on the Huawei Mate 9. 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. Instead, what we advise against is digital zooming. This is what happens when you pinch or swipe to zoom on most phone cameras: the phone simply enlarges and crops the output from the sensor before the photo is captured.
Captured on the Samsung Galaxy S8+ and edited in Lightroom. Original here. If you have a phone that does include a 2x optical zoom, it’s best to stick to photos at either a 1x or 2x zoom, as this will give you the full quality of the wide-angle and zoom cameras respectively. Better yet, many smartphones offer neat burst photography features. Most will collect a sequence of shots into a single ‘photo’ and allow you to set whichever photo from the bunch is the best shot. Some phones will even analyse the photos for you and pick out shots it thinks are the best, often looking at whether everyone is smiling, or whether the subject is in focus.
HDR shot taken with a Samsung Galaxy S5 and edited in Adobe Lightroom. The original can be seen here. It’s easy to fix this: chuck the photo in an editing program on your computer, like Lightroom, or even use an app on the device itself and begin playing around. After moving a few sliders and ticking a few boxes, the results might astound you and your friends.
Shooting into the sun can create an artistic look, but it might create dark foreground objects and poor visibility. Shot on the Samsung Galaxy S8+. For those wondering, RAW is an image format that captures unprocessed (raw) data from the camera. When you capture using JPG, aspects such as white balance are baked in to the final shot, and detail is lost in the compression process. The RAW format captures everything, before white balance and other parameters are set, and without lossy compression. Editing using RAW images provides the most detail, and allows you to modify things like white balance and exposure with far less quality loss relative to JPG. While RAW is best for editing, photos captured used in this format are typically 3 to 5 times larger than their JPG counterpart. If storage space is a concern, RAW is not for you. One way to achieve better lighting for your smartphone photos is to get strong artificial lights, but this probably isn’t practical for most people. The flash also tends not to be so great, so you can rule that out as well. This leaves natural light as the best source, and there are a few tips to getting the best shots in the lighting you have. Like when photographing with any camera, ideally the sun should be behind the camera’s lens, shining light onto the subject without entering the lens directly. Pointing a camera towards the sun will cause shadowing and a loss of contrast, so try not to do so unless you want an artistic effect. In cloudy conditions the bright sun can be diffused throughout the sky, presenting a challenge for phone cameras with limited dynamic range, so avoid shooting up to the sky if it’s not a sunny day.
As we mentioned earlier, it might also be worth exploring spot metering to get the exposure just right, especially when there’s strong backlighting. Ideally you wouldn’t be shooting when there’s strong backlighting as smartphone cameras typically have weak dynamic range, but sometimes it’s necessary. And sometimes you can experiment with reflective surfaces to get light in just the right positions: often a simple white piece of paper will suffice at directing light from the sun (or an artificial light) onto your subject. On some phones, users have seen image quality improvements by using the Google Camera app instead of the included camera app, particularly to dynamic range, HDR, and low light performance. The app isn’t going to magically take a poor camera and make it as good as the Pixel; not every part of the Pixel’s excellent processing is transferrable to other phones through the app. The Pixel itself will always deliver the best results using Google Camera. But in some cases, the Google Camera app is far better than the stock app on other handsets, and is worth installing for a boost to quality. Downloading and installing Google Camera is easy. Grab the latest version that works on your handset from APKMirror, and install it on your phone. Note that the newest version may not work if you are stuck on an older version of Android. It may also be worth experimenting with the Google Camera HDR+ port, which is a tweaked version 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 provided in this article are safe, verified versions of the Google Camera app. A portrait mode photo captured with the Google Pixel 2 XL. Notice the creamy background blur and decent edge detection As portrait modes are a shallow depth-of-field simulation, rather than the real deal, they have problems associated with them. Edge detection isn’t always perfect, so there are times when you capture a photo and areas are blurred that shouldn’t be. At other times, the blur doesn’t look natural, or looks closer to a Gaussian blur than a realistic lens blur. The key to capturing good photos using portrait modes is knowing when the portrait mode is likely to succeed, and when it will struggle.
But when everything is working well, some cameras produce fantastic simulated depth of field results that can take the shot to the next level. Don’t simply ignore the feature because it’s not 100% reliable; play around, see what works, because some results can be stunning.
