Over the past year, I’ve started using my mobile phone more than my camera for taking photos during my travels. It’s easier, quicker, and makes photos instantly available for sharing.
Many Local Guides also use their phones to take photos of their adventures, food, or a beautiful landscape to upload on Connect and Google Maps. The more beautiful a photo is, the more appreciated it is.
Your phone’s built-in editing tools can help you enhance your photos. Here are some of the things I do when editing photos on my phone.
1. Enabling HDR
Before taking any photos, I make sure I have enabled the HDR (high dynamic range) function.
The HDR takes several photos with different exposures and automatically combines them to give me one photo with the best quality.
On some mobile phones, this feature can be seen on the screen when you open the camera app. On others, it can be found in the camera settings.
2. Cropping
Cropping your photo enables you to get rid of distracting elements or unwanted objects from the edges of the frame. This results in a cleaner, simpler photo with much stronger visual impact.
In some cases, I crop my image to improve composition and symmetry. If a photo is tilted, cropping can help to improve the perspective.
One thing to keep in mind when cropping is not to zoom in too much as this may result in poor image quality.
3. Adjusting light and color
Light adjustments allow you to correct the overall exposure of a photo. You can improve the brightness, highlights, shadows, and contrast of a photo on almost every phone.
Brightness brightens or darkens the photo accordingly. Highlights are the bright areas in your photo and shadows are the dark areas. By adjusting the highlights and shadows, you lighten or darken the different parts of the photo. This makes your photo look more lively and vivid.
The light or “tonal” contrast refers to the difference between the lightest and the darkest tone in a photo. In other words, it shows the transition from white through gray to black. This tool is most effective for black and white images. Low tonal contrast gives photos a more grayish hue and a vintage feel, while high tonal contrast makes objects stand out, giving the image more edginess.
When it comes to color adjustments, I like to play with the color contrast and saturation. The color contrast reflects the way colors interact with each other. It allows you to achieve a better color composition of the photo.
Keep in mind, color contrast works best only if there are just a few colors in the photo. If there are more colors, the tonal contrast comes in handy.
Saturation makes the colors more intense or cancels them altogether. You can make your photos more saturated or black and white, depending on your preferences.
What tools do you use to edit your mobile phone photos? Share your tips in the comments below.
