10 ways to improve your iPhone pictures in an instant

The iPhone has the reputation for giving the best pictures amongst smartphone photographers, despite its relatively low pixel count. If you’re thinking of upgrading to an iPhone 6S or you’ve just bought one, here are 10 tips from techradar’s in-depth iPhone 6S Plus camera test that will help you make instant improvements to your photos.

But what if you have an older iPhone and you’ve no intention of upgrading? Most of these tips will work fine on older iPhones too.

01 HDR – Keep Normal Photo
The iPhone’s Auto HDR function does a terrific job of controlling highlight areas, such as skies, and keeping detail in parts of the picture that might otherwise get blown out. It can produce unnatural-looking outlines around out of focus objects, though, so go into the iPhone’s ‘Photos & Camera’ settings, scroll to the bottom and check the ‘Keep Normal Photo’ in the HDR section. That way, you’ll always have a regular non-HDR version to fall back on.

SEE MORE: iPhone 6S camera – a need-to-know guide for photographers

02 Tap to focus
To set the focus and exposure for a particular part of the scene, just tap on the screen. It’s so quick to do that it almost becomes second nature, and this gives you the kind of control that you expect in a proper camera. That’s not all – once you’ve tapped an area, you can drag up and down on the screen to apply exposure compensation.

03 Tap and hold for AE/AF lock
The AE/AF lock function gives you even more control over the focus and exposure – it’s the next best thing to manual control. It enables you to get a constant focus and exposure setting even over a sequence of shots (you have to tap the screen again to deactivate it). That’s not all – it also works when shooting Pano (panoramic) images and video.

04 Perfect panoramas
In Pano mode it’s tempting to keep panning the camera to capture as wide a scene as possible – but these can be oddly unsatisfactory. Your main subject often looks rather insignificant, and superwide letterbox images are an awkward shape to look.

Instead, work out your composition more carefully and pan over a shorter distance (tap the shutter button to stop and save the panorama at any time). The best panoramas are often those that cover an angle just that little bit wider than the lens can capture on its own.

05 Square is good
The Square mode might seem like a pointless novelty that makes it hard to compose interesting shots and wastes pixels, but stick with it. Square shots have a very different ‘retro’ feel, they can force you into thinking more carefully about composition and their shape suits the square thumbnails used by many image browsing tools. Best of all, you don’t have to turn the phone to shoot horizontal pictures – iPhones are much easier to hold upright!

06 Shutter release – tap or press?
You can use the iPhone’s volume buttons as a shutter release when you’re using the Camera app, but you have to press fairly hard and this can loosen your grip and jog the camera. The on-screen button is easier to use and less likely to cause camera shake.

07 Have fun with filters!
The Camera app offers a selection of different in-built filter effects and you don’t lose anything by trying them out. That’s because the filters are applied ‘non-destructively’. The iPhone captures a regular image but applies the filter effect you chose when you view it on the iPhone (or your Mac or another iOS Device). If you don’t like the filter you can go back in later and remove it or choose a different one.

08 Flare for effect
The iPhone lens is quite prone to flare when you’re shooting into the light, but you can use this for dramatic effect or to add a romantic look to portraits. A slight shift in position will change or remove the flare effect, and you can see it working on the screen as you change position. You can also try shielding the lens with your hand or a credit card, for example.

09 Video primer
The 4K video on the iPhone 6S is extremely good, but you’ll need to use the right shooting technique to get the most from it. Don’t use any sudden camera movements and don’t chase round after your subject or you’ll get horrible, jerky footage. Instead, work out what’s going to happen in your video clip, find the best place to stand, and if you need to pan to follow your subject, keep it as smooth and slow as possible.

SEE MORE: What is 4K video – every question answered

10 Slo-mo magic
The iPhone 6S can also shoot standard HD video at an amazing 240 frames per second – this plays back perfectly smoothly, but 8x slower than normal. The clever part is that the iPhone plays back the start and end of the clip at normal speed and switches to slo-mo for the bits in between. This not only gives a very professional-looking effect, it’s editable too – you can open up the clip later and use simpler sliders to set the points at which the playback speed changes.

The post 10 ways to improve your iPhone pictures in an instant appeared first on Digital Camera World.