How to shoot sharper phone photos in bright daylight
Hard sun is the light most people shoot in and the light phones handle worst. 5 habits that fix most of it before you edit anything.
A phone camera is built for the hard case: a dim room, a moving subject. Bright midday sun is the opposite problem, and it is the one people complain about most. Blown-out skies, black shadows, faces you cannot read.
Expose for the bright part
Tap the brightest area you care about, then drag the exposure slider down until nothing is pure white. A shadow can be lifted afterwards; a blown highlight has no detail left to recover. Every phone does this, and almost nobody uses it.
Put the sun behind them
Facing the sun makes people squint and carves shadows under their eyes. Turn them around and let the sun light the back of their head, then tap their face to expose for it. You get a rim of light in the hair and even light on the face, which is the shot at the top of this page.
- Wipe the lens. Pocket lint is the single most common cause of a soft photo.
- Use the main camera, not the zoom, whenever you can walk closer instead.
- Turn the grid on and put the horizon on a line. A tilted horizon reads as a bad photo even when nothing else is wrong.
Shoot fewer, look more
Burst mode is a way of avoiding a decision. Take 3 frames and look at them before you move on, and you will come home with photos you actually keep.
Daniel Reid
Mobile editor
Follows phones, the software on them, and the slow business of making 2 platforms talk to each other.
