How to Take Good Photos on Smartphones
Last Updated on November 30, 2022 by Peter Wood
Taking photos with a smartphone is increasingly popular. You might wonder how to take good images on smartphones. It is a luxury topic in the past because the built-in camera was usually poor. However, smartphone brands have already noticed such demands. They improved the camera technology of smartphones continually. Today, the built-in cameras of high-end smartphones are as excellent as digital cameras. And some smartphones’ performances are even better than digital cameras.
iPhone 14 Pro, for example, provides a 48MP main camera with an f/1.78 aperture, a 12MP ultra-wide camera with an f/2.2 aperture, with a 12MP telephoto camera for most types of photography. Therefore, the tutorial will discuss how to take good photos with our smartphones.
- Taking Good Photos Factor 1: Gridlines
- Taking Good Photos Factor 2: Avoid Zooming
- Taking Good Photos Factor 3: Natural Light
- Taking Good Photos Factor 4: An External Lens
- Taking Good Photos Factor 5: Flash
- Taking Good Photos Factor 6: A Unique Perspective
- Taking Good Photos Factor 7: Explore the Potentials of Your Camera
- Taking Good Photos Factor 8: Shoot Special Subjects
- Taking Good Photos Factor 9: Creative
- Taking Good Photos Factor 10: A Powerful Enhancer
Taking Good Photos Factor 1: Gridlines
Gridlines are a useful built-in feature to take good photos; however, many smartphone users have neglected this feature. You may find that the gridlines will divide your picture into thirds horizontally and vertically. The benefit of the third rule is to make the composition of your photos more balanced. Do you want to take a balanced picture? Enable camera’s gridlines right now.
iPhone: navigate to the Settings app and select Photos & Camera. Then enable Grid on.
Android handsets: open the camera app and go to Settings. Find out Gridlines and turn them on.
Taking Good Photos Factor 2: Avoid Zooming
One of the differences between a built-in camera and a professional camera is the performance to capture the distant subject. And if you attempt to zoom in the photo when shooting, you will discover that the scene becomes blurry and pixelated. So you’d better avoid zooming when you want to take good images with your smartphone. Instead, you can shoot the subject close to you. Selfie, for example, is a better partner with a smartphone. When it comes to the moon and stars, you can try to save them with your eyes or SLR camera.
Taking Good Photos Factor 3: Natural Light
Light is everything to a photographer whether you use a professional camera or smartphone. So whenever you take good photos with your smartphone, you should take advantage of natural light as much as possible. On the other hand, natural light does not mean we do not need shadows anymore. The interaction between natural light and shadows will make your photos dynamic.
Taking Good Photos Factor 4: An External Lens
More and more people use a smartphone to take photos, so accessory manufacturers have developed various external lenses for smartphones. The lenses are from fish-eye lenses to wide-angle lenses and 360-degree lenses. You can choose your favorite external lens and attach it to your smartphone when you take good photos. When selecting an external lens, ensure the lens accessory supports your smartphone.
Taking Good Photos Factor 5: Flash
Flash is an essential tool to take good photos with digital cameras. It is also true for a smartphone. The majority of the smartphone has the feature of flash when shooting. But many smartphone users only use flash at night or indoors. Flash is helpful on a sunny day as well. When you take photos with a smartphone on a bright day, the sun will create harsh shadows on the subject. At this time, you can utilize flash to compensate extra light to the shooting subject. Then the photo exposure will be more even.
Taking Good Photos Factor 6: A Unique Perspective
One benefit of a smartphone is portable. So you can utilize this benefit to take good photos. A unique angle or perspective can make your photos attractive and impressive. You can take images with a smartphone from an aerial view or make the ground background. Moreover, you can shoot upward and place the sky and cloud as negative space. In short, you can take your smartphone anywhere and shoot at a unique angle.
Taking Good Photos Factor 7: Explore the Potentials of Your Camera
As other smartphone techniques have reached their peak, brands begin to put their efforts on on-camera technique upgrades. And recently, major smartphone brands have released new versions of smartphones with powerful built-in cameras. iPhone 7 Plus, for example, has portrait mode. Huawei P10 is with a Leica lens and portrait technique. When taking good photos with your smartphone, you should read the parameters of your lens and explore its potential.
Taking Good Photos Factor 8: Shoot Special Subjects
Good photos must contain good subjects. If you want to shoot good photos with your smartphone, you should focus on unique objects. Symmetry, for instance, will make people comfortable. So you can shoot images of the symmetry subjects. Leading line is another subject to make your photo vibrant. Viewers will extend their vision with the lead line in your photos.
Taking Good Photos Factor 9: Creative
Adding some creative elements to your photos is a good idea when taking good pictures with a smartphone. Your smartphone is ready to capture everything around you. So when you discover some creative subject or elements, take out your handset and shoot. The creativity may be some details, like a delicate net created by a spider or an ordinary object like a cup of fancy coffee on the fancy marble.
Taking Good Photos Factor 10: A Powerful Enhancer
Post-processing is an important factor for taking good photos, especially for smartphone photography. Even though the built-in cameras are similar to digital cameras, there are lots of drawbacks, such as the camera settings, the quality of images, the adapter to the environment, and more.
WidsMob AI Retoucher is a versatile photo enhancer with AI algorithms. It enables you to minimize noise, recover low light, remove haze, touch up portraits, mosaic faces, and apply analog films automatically. Moreover, you can also convert photos to cartoons, paintings, pencil sketches, and more with AI algorithms.
1. Make photos better via noise reduction, haze removal, and lowlight recovery.
2. Adjust exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, vibrance, etc.
3. Apply light lenses, HDR filters, old photo effects, analog films, and more.
4. Convert photos to B/W images, sketches, cartoons, and paintings with AI.
Step 1: Once you have imported the photos from your smartphone to your computer, you can launch the program and click the Import button to add them for further editing. It supports JPEG, PNG, HEIC, and most RAW file formats.
Step 2: Choose the desired photos and click the Edit button in the upper right corner. To remove the image noise, you can select the AI Retouch menu and click the Noise Reduction button to enhance the photo quality and make good photos.
Step 3: To further edit the images, you can choose the Adjust menu on the left side. After that, you can adjust the sliders for exposure, contrast, tint, temperature, and sharpness. You can even adjust the tone colors and noise reduction parameters manually.
Step 4: When you need to take the optimal photos, you can also use the filters from the Filters menu, in which you can apply some special effects, adjust HDR effects, change light lenses, and render different B/W films before clicking the Save As button.
Conclusion
This article has introduced ten tips related to taking good photos with smartphones. The tips have technology devices, like an external lens, flash, gridlines, and perspective. And if you want to take good pictures with a smartphone, the subject is severe. You have to choose unique objects and add some creativity. After shooting, you can also utilize WidsMob AI Retoucher to polish our photos.