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How to take better pictures on your phone. A thread:
First of all, stop using your built in camera app. The camera app corrects some of your photos and doesn’t give you the RAW files. The picture on the left is taken on my camera app, while the picture on the right is the RAW file. Notice how much more detail you get?
Don’t get me wrong! Your camera app is not bad, but if you want to preserve the quality, you would want to start using apps that allow you to take raw photos. The raw photos will look bad at first, but it’s all in the editing! Look how much detail it kept for me to work with
Now, the editing. The editing took me some time to get down, but I promise you it’s really not that hard. I personally use Lightroom (and to take RAW pictures, I use the Halide camera app, but we’ll get to that later).
Sometimes I would be looking around and see a scene I enjoy but I know my phone camera won’t pick up (like the library picture for example— it’s simply too high up for me to capture both the window, the people studying, and the books/architecture.
So what I would do is, I would take a picture including all the elements I want to have in the final product. For example, I wanted the fountain, the little water stream, the quote, and the architecture to show in this one.
How did I turn it into that? Well, it’s simple! I used the geometry tool. I simply play around with the X and Y axis options on there, and do it up until I found a straight line in my picture and then I crop out the things I don’t want and edit the colors, etc.
for this picture, I wanted the library to be the main focus, while all the buildings stand tall behind it. What I did was make sure that the library IS the straight line, and if anything seems out of place while making that happen, I simply zoom in to crop it out.
How do I bring out the details in the pictures? Well, simply, I use the selective tool in Lightroom, and I highlight the area I want to bring out (the text in this case), and I adjust the brightness/sharpness.
For the colors, it’s what YOU want. Whatever your theme is. You want a bright theme, you go ahead and saturate them. You want a monochrome type of theme, you go ahead and do that.
At the end of the day, I’m not a photographer. I just happen to see beauty in certain things and use my creativity and what I have to make it happen without editing anything into/out of the picture. I just change the perspective to align with what I personally see or want to see.
I’ll give you guys a picture that helped me understand all of these geometry tools at the end (it’s really simple but it’s perfect for helping you understand all of this). Lets talk about apps first.
Personally, I use Lightroom to edit, and Halide to take pictures. Halide is a one time purchase, but it was around $6. However, the VSCO app (on iPhone atleast) now lets you shoot raw and edit raw pictures which is great because it’s free.
Another free app to edit your raw pictures on is Darkroom. However, the thing about these two is that they don’t let you do selective editing. For example, if you want to darken a certain area and brighten up another, you can’t do that on those apps.
Lightroom lets you do that and it’s super cool, but unfortunately, Lightroom has a monthly subscription fee. I do these edits for fun (I don’t make money off of them), and so for me, I like to gather all the RAW pictures I want to edit and edit them in one month’s subscription.
So to end this off, trying it is better than me explaining it. I want you to go into one of the free apps I highlighted above, and edit the left picture’s geometry to make it look like the picture on the right. Once you get that part down, it’s really easy from there!
DM me or reply with your attempts at editing the geometry of other pictures and I’ll donate a meal in your name to kids in need (first 10)! GO 
