3 Technical Tips for Taking Quality Photos with Your Smartphone

Modern smartphones are equipped with advanced cameras that allow you to take photos with an almost professional quality. However, it is not enough to have a camera phone to get beautiful photos: you also need to know how to make the most of its potential by paying attention to some technical aspects that concern both the shooting and post-production phases. In this in-depth analysis, we will provide you 3 Technical Tips for Taking Quality Photos with Your Smartphone and which concern the good use of the “Manual” or “Pro” shooting modethe non-use of the digital zoom and the use of the RAW format. To these technical aspects, then, must clearly be added one’s artistic and stylistic abilities but, given that our area of ​​expertise is the technical-scientific one, we will not go into the merits of the latter.

Using Pro Mode

It is now possible on many smartphones use Pro mode (sometimes also called manual mode). As its name suggests, this is a shooting mode that allows you to act “manually” on some parameters – including ISO, shutter speed and aperture – thus obtaining more sophisticated shots, just like professional photographers who don’t stop at the simple “point and shoot”. Once the Pro/manual mode is activated in the camera settings of your smartphone (provided that this is available on your phone), we recommend that you proceed with the following adjustments.

Iso

Using this value it is possible check the sensor’s sensitivity to light. We suggest that, where possible, you keep this value as low as possible (for example at 100) and increase it slightly only when the light is so low that it does not allow you to capture appreciable details of the scene you want to immortalize. It is important to keep the ISO as low as possible because, raising this level too much, will inevitably increase the “noise” of the photo, or the disturbance due to the effort made by the photographic sensor to capture more light.

Shutter speed

This determines the length of time the camera’s sensor is exposed to light. Use a fast shutter speed (so with a value of 1/1000 or higher) to capture moving subjects, avoiding blurring. For night photos or photos that, in any case, involve poorly lit scenarios, you can use a slower speed, but only if the phone is stabilized on a tripod. A “classic” example of a situation in which increasing the exposure time can make a difference is the field of astrophotography, since to capture the celestial vault you need to use rather long shutter speeds (from a few seconds to a few minutes). To summarize, therefore, when adjusting the shutter speed, take into account the type of photo you intend to take.

Aperture of the diaphragm

Smartphones that are equipped with variable aperture allow you to control the depth of field by increasing or decreasing the amount of light that the diaphragm lets pass onto the sensor. The work that the diaphragm does, in fact, is very similar to that of the iris of the human eye: by opening and closing it affects the amount of light that hits the sensor. A wide aperture (for example f/1.8) allows you to obtain shots that have a very blurry background (the so-called bokeh) and it is an excellent setting if you want to take portraits by “detaching” the subject from the background to make it stand out better; a smaller aperture (for example f/16) is suitable for photographs where you need to bring the entire scene into focus, such as in landscape photographs.

Don’t use digital zoom

The use of the digital zoom is often one of the distinctive traits of less experienced photographers. It is no coincidence, in fact, that when one approaches photography one has a certain difficulty in do not use digital zoomespecially if you have used the latter extensively. However, it is not difficult to understand why using digital zoom is not a good move. Since it is a digital (and not optical) enlargement, this type of zoom simply crops a portion of the original image and enlarges it to fill the entire frame. This process reduces the effective resolution of the photosince you are not adding new details, but simply enlarging the existing pixels. This causes a loss of sharpness and detail, making the image blurry and less defined, with the unsightly pixelated effect which characterizes shots taken using digital zoom.

If you really want to photograph a subject from closer, use the optical zoom or, even better, get as close as possible to the subject, so as to further train your “photographic eye” and give a more interesting touch to your photographs.

Shooting in RAW format

The RAW format allows you to take photos by capturing all the information on the sensor without any compression or internal processing (it is no coincidence that the English term “raw” can be translated into Italian as “crudo”, “grezzo” or “unelaborated”). This format is essential for those who want to have maximum control in post-production, as it retains a wider dynamic range and more details than the JPEG format. However, working with RAW files requires a more in-depth knowledge of editing processes. To shoot in RAW, you must enable this option in the camera settingsusually available in the Pro/Manual mode.

Since they contain a lot of information, keep in mind that RAW files are significantly larger than JPEGsso make sure you have enough storage space on your device’s internal (or external) memory before enabling this setting.

Once you have taken the photo in RAW format, you can go and edit it using a photo editing app, correcting parameters such as exposure, white balance and contrast without losing quality, as well as recovering details present in the shadows and highlights, operations that are quite limited in JPEG files. The greater color depth of RAW files (often 12 or 14 bits per channel compared to the 8 bits of JPEGs) allows you to apply these more extensive adjustments without introducing color bands or various artifacts, as the transition between tones and shades is very soft and natural.