Five Tips to Take Better Photos with Your Phone

Someone posted a list of ways to take better photos with your phone.  And we’d seen some of them before.  But there were a few new ones mixed in.  Here are five tips . . .

1.  Clean the lens.  A lot of people never do it, and even minor smudge marks can affect quality.  You can clean it with your shirt in a pinch.  But try not to, because you can scratch it.  Microfiber cloth for sunglasses is ideal.

2.  Pay attention to framing.  Most Androids and iPhones have a “Grid” mode that adds lines to the screen to help you line things up and make sure they’re level.  Just go to your camera settings, and there should be a button to turn it on and off.

3.  Don’t use digital zoom.  All it does is crop the image and resize it.  So the resolution goes down, and you end up with grainier photos.  When possible, just get closer.  Or buy a lens that snaps on to your phone and zooms without messing with image quality.

4.  Turn your flash off.  It’s really hard to take a good photo with your flash.  So look for better lighting instead.  Or if you’re desperate, have someone else light people from the side with their flashlight.  It usually makes flash photos look a little better.

5.  Watch out for cloud storage shenanigans.  If you’re saving photos directly to the cloud, it could automatically be storing them at a lower resolution to save space.  You might have to pay for more storage, but you’ll end up with better photos.

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