Often your best camera is the one that’s on you. So whether you’re using it to record a part of a job in progress or for that special moment with the family, there’s always ways to make them pop. You can of course use filters :) but if you’d like more control and something a bit more realistic, below are my top 5 tips! (Specials thanks to the gorgeous models I get to photograph :)
1. Increase brightness
Unless you’re outside on a sunny day (with your subject facing the light), your phone photos are almost certain to be a bit dark. So the first adjustment I normally make is increase the Brightness level. Just enough so the main focus area is well lit but not so much that any other white/bright areas lose all their detail.
If you’re photographing indoors, the overall photo will tend to be on the darker side. You’ll notice white walls suddenly looking grey.
2. Increase contrast
After increasing brightness, blacks tend to lose their punch and make photos look a bit flat. Increasing the contrast will generally fix that. This basically makes dark colours darker and light colours lighter. You don’t want to go too far with this as you’ll lose detail in the darker areas.
3. Increase saturation
This is about adding rich colour back into your photo. It can make the subject of your photo really pop but go too far and it’ll start to look unrealistic. Skin tones especially can start to look sickly. It’s a fun one to play with if your photo has a few colour elements in it.
4. Increasing shadow or highlight detail
I love this little gem for the way it can emulate what you’d get with a DSLR where you have a lot more control on the exposure. It basically allows you to just change the detail visible in the dark areas (shadows) or the light areas (highlights) of a photo.
This works well in photos where there is a larger area of either dark or light around the main subject. You want the subject to be lit as is but you want to show more of the surrounding area. Have a play and see what is revealed.
5. Crop your photo
More often than not, people take photos with a lot more space around their main subject than necessary. What this means is that there is a lot of empty space that takes away from what you want people to look at. One of the quickest ways to increase impact is simply to crop down to the essential element in your photo.
The way to do this is, scan the photo edges and ask, do I need to see that? If not, crop it out. Also, cropping for the intended space it’s going in (eg. square inserts or profile shots) also makes a big difference.
Hope you find these tips useful. Have a play and turn those phone snaps into masterpieces you’d love to print! :)