How to take Great Photos with your Android Smartphone or Apple iPhone

They say, the best camera is the one you have in your pocket. We walk around every day with a camera in our pocket attached to our phones. Even though these smartphones are equipped with tiny image sensors, you can still take some great shots with it.

Here are a few tips to get great photos with your Android smartphone or Apple iPhone

1. Learn to Edit. Almost all photographers on Instagram with millions of photographers edit their photos. For some, there are even dedicated teams working on images to create masterpieces. There is this new trend of people posting #nofilter or #noedit photos on the gram. By doing that, you are not giving anything your own to the image. In order to stand out from the crowd, you have to learn to edit the photos you took and add your own style to the images. Learn to edit. Some of the popular photo editing softwares available on Android Play Store are Google Snapseed, Polarr, Adobe Lightroom Mobile etc. At first, you are sure going to make less impressive final images, but with practice, you will be able make great edits out of your phone camera captures.
2.  Shoot RAW images instead of Jpeg. Normally, if you click the shutter button of your camera phone, it creates a jpeg image ( .jpg ). Jpeg images are often small in size ( around 5-10MB ), however, they are not designed to be used in editing. If you edit it, you often loose detail and a lot of grain aka noise will be introduced to the image resulting in a bad final picture. A RAW DNG image on the other hand contains all information the camera sensor captured and are bigger in size ( around 24MB - 40MB ). Since this type of files have a lot of information hidden in it, you can easily edit these files and bring out shadows and pull down highlights without destroying the image. Once you are done with the editing, you can export them to regular jpeg files. Since the DNG RAW image size is quite big, i would suggest you avoid shooting casual snapshots in this format. Adobe Lightroom Mobile has a camera app built in to it which supports RAW shooting. Some of the manufacturers like Huawei, has a Pro mode build in to their camera app where you will find a toggle to enable raw+jpeg shooting. Btw, there are some phone manufactures who disable raw shooting and can't be enabled by the user without rooting.
3. Learn Composition. The difference between a good photographer and bad photographer can be easily identified by looking at the composition in their images. No matter how expensive your phone is or your camera is, without learning composition, your images would end up as just snapshots.
4. Try Google Camera HDR+ app. Google has developed an impressive camera app for their Pixel series of Android smartphones. The Gcam app is mainly known for two things - HDR+ and Nightsight. When you take a photo in HDR+ mode, the app takes multiple frames and stack them all together to create a crispy sharp final image. Nightsight on the other hand is designed to create images when the light is very low - it works like HDR+, but takes a lot more frames and combines them together to create a well lit final image. Since Google Camera can only be installed on Google Pixel phones, you will have to check Xda forums to find a suitable ported Gcam app for your phone. 

There are a lot more advanced techniques to create great images with your Android or Apple iPhone. I will be updating this post often and adding new tips and tricks soon.