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Almost everyone takes photos on their smartphone these days, with many of us leaving our dedicated cameras alone in favor of our smartphone cameras. However, even the best smartphone photographers among us should tweak our photos before posting them online. Here’s what you need to do.
Why You Should Tweak Your Smartphone Photos
You may think that every single one of your smartphone photos is a gem that doesn’t need editing at all. But that probably isn’t true. Even if your smartphone photos are of high quality, withgood compositionand an innate shareable quality, making subtle changes can improve them in some way.
Whether your shot needs cropping to remove some extraneous components from the edges, or the levels of brightness, contrast, saturation, and warmth need tweaking to improve the look and feel, these edits are a necessary part ofthe mobile photography process.
Producing the most impressive photos with your smartphone needs you to either capture the perfect photo at the time of shooting, or use your editing skills in post to take it to the next level. And achieving absolute perfection at the time of shooting is a near impossibility.
I own a Google Pixel phone, and therefore use a combination ofGoogle Photosand Snapseed (available onAndroidandiOS) to edit my smartphone shots. However, the same basic settings I tweak for every photo should be available on any smartphone and in every photo app.
The photo above is the shot I ended up with after editing the original until I was happy with it. However, below, you will see each setting applied in turn to show my workings.
5 Smartphone Photos Settings I Tweak Every Time
There are dozens of tweaks you can make to your smartphone photos before posting them online. However, there are a much smaller number of essential tweaks everyone should make to every photo.
Before I start tweaking individual settings, the first thing I do is check the suggestions that Google Photos offers me. I’ll try the suggested edits for size and see if they have improved the photo to my high standards. If so, I may leave it alone after that. However, even with the suggestions applied, a small amount of tweaking may still be in order.
The same goes for filters, which most photo apps offer these days.Instagram also offers a range of good filters. With Google Photos, you can try each filter on without actually applying it permanently. And as long as you have an eye for these things, you should be able to spot those that work and those that don’t. And even if you apply one, you can still adjust individual settings.
Crop Your Image to Improve the Composition
The first thing to tweak is the shape and size of the photo. To do that, you need to use the Crop tool. This allows you to crop the image to exactly what you want, which means you can fill the frame, remove extraneous elements that add nothing to the image, and improve the overall composition.
Say, for example, the original photo features leading lines, but not ones that reach to the edge of the image. Some slight cropping can fix this, helping you draw viewers' eyes in with leading lines that start in the corners and aim toward the subject.
Adjust the Brightness to Improve Visibility
Next up is the brightness level of the photo, turning it up or down based on what you captured at the time of shooting. Even if the brightness of the original image doesn’t need repairing, you may want to dial it up or down to affect the mood of the photo.
If your original image was shot in overly dark conditions, increasing the brightness can help make details more visible. Equally, if your original image was shot in bright sunshine, turning the brightness down can help balance the image out.
Tweak the Contrast to Create More Balance
Tweaking the contrast comes next, and this is an important setting to change the highlights, shadows, color, and clarity of an image. As the name suggests, contrast refers to the difference (contrast) between the light pixels and the dark pixels.
Adjusting the contrast can ramp up the detail that is visible, making an image more vivid, or mute the tones to make the image quieter and more subdued. While most of us want our photos to pop on social media, sometimes, dialing things down can make for a better image.
Change the Saturation to Change the Intensity
Next, you should adjust the saturation to affect the intensity of the color in your photo. In a nutshell, saturation refers to the vividness of the colors in the image, with a full range from muted to popping off the screen.
Adjust the saturation downwards, and the colors will become muted. Adjust the saturation upwards, and the colors will appear brighter and more colorful. This can be based on your personal preference or the subject of an individual image.
Dial the Warmth Up or Down to Impact the Mood
Last but not least, I adjust the warmth of the photo, choosing to make it warmer or colder depending on the subject and setting. Warmth can really set the mood of an image, with warm colors literally making the photo feel warm, and cold colors making it feel cold.
Where you want to set the warmth will depend on how you want the viewer of your photo to feel. Ramping up the warmth will make them feel warm and cozy, while cooling things down will make the photo look cold and frosty.
Editing Smartphone Photos Makes a Huge Difference
Unlikeanalog photography, where your options to edit a photo beyond the shooting session are limited, digital photography provides endless options for editing. So you should always take advantage of that benefit of this particular form of photography.
While you’re able to obviously take a dive down the rabbit hole and make numerous edits to your photos, most aren’t absolutely necessary. While things such as white balance and perspective are options, most of your photos will not require that level of adjustment. Therefore, it’s better to focus on the essential edits that will make the biggest difference.
These five settings can make a world of difference, so I recommend applying them to every photo. Sometimes, you’ll find yourself making big adjustments, while other times, you’ll just make minor tweaks. But the result should be better-looking smartphone photos.
