5 tips to improve the sharpness of a photo on a smartphone

We don’t always have a sophisticated camera on hand. Nor will we hire a professional photographer to take our everyday photos. No, it will be easier to grab our smartphone. But for the pictures to be really sharp, it would be wise to take into account the following tips.

The quality of photo modules that equip our smartphones - let’s avoid talking about camera here – is more and more impressive. However it sometimes happens that the result is not really up to our expectations. It is most of the time due to a lack of sharpness. Ghislain Bruyère gives us five effective tips to make your photos as sharp as possible.

When using a smartphone, sharpness is often a matter of light

The sharpness of a picture is often – and even more when the subject is moving – a matter of shutter speed. It is the time it takes for the camera to capture enough light and therefore give the shot enough sharpness. This shutter speed is, except with very high high-end thus very expensive models, a real issue when taking a photo with your smartphone. Indeed, unless you use a tripod, there is a high risk that your smartphone moves or the subject slightly moves at the very moment you are taking the picture. This will result in a slightly blurred shot. To reduce the risk, you will look for a well-lit location where you will place your object. You can also wait that the sun hits the object of your photo’s object to immortalize it. Eventually, you can also add artificial light sources, but then you need to be very careful and check that no shadow will disturb the beauty of the shot. Would you like an additional tip? Apps like Halide allow you to change the shutter speed of your smartphone and switch to manual mode to improve the quality of your pictures.

The stability of your smartphone is the best ally of sharpness

You have all experienced it already when taking a picture with your standard camera: when the subject is moving, it happens that the resulting picture is blurred. The explanations are more or less the same as for the previous point. But where things get more complicated with a smartphone is that you can get a blurred picture even if your subject is not moving. Holding the smartphone at arm’s length to take pictures will necessarily induce movements which will have the same negative effect as when your subject is in motion. A very simple way to avoid these unwanted movements is to hold your smartphone with both hands and keep your elbows as close to the body as possible. You can also lean against a fixed support, such as the back of chair. Using the timer on your smartphone’s camera can also help. Indeed, you will not have to press the ‘virtual’ button to snap the photo hence you will avoid moving the smartphone. Eventually, for those who plan to take pictures regularly with their smartphones, buying a small tripod could be useful.

Help your smartphone to be smarter in terms of sharpness

Your smartphone’s photo sensor is not always the smartest on Earth. Because your photo has too many potential subjects, it does not know which one it should focus on. An example? The person you want to photograph is not sharp, unlike the bouquet of flower located next to him/her. Most photo software, whether by default on your smartphone or to be downloaded from apps stores, allow you to point the main subject of your photo by putting your fingertips where that subject is showing on your screen. The software will thus know exactly where to focus, therefore avoiding any unpleasant surprises.

The zoom of a smartphone is not a friend of sharpness

There are two types of zoom on smartphones, digital and optical. While the optical zoom has no influence on the sharpness of your shot, you need to understand how a digital zoom works to grasp its potential impact on the image’s sharpness. A digital zoom will stretch part of the image to its ‘standard’ format. The process being fully artificial, it is quire logical that the quality of the image (and therefore its sharpness) will suffer. If you don’t plan to print large format hard copies of your picture, but rather use it on Instagram or Facebook, you can choose not to use the zoom and then use a photo editing software to crop it and frame it. The result will be all the better.

Using image editing software to improve sharpness

One last good news is that you can also rework your images later to improve their sharpness. To do this, there are apps that use your smartphone’s artificial intelligence. A tool like Snapseed will allow you to get various features, and one of them is specifically dealing with blur reduction in all or part of a photo. Be careful though not to abuse too much of it or you may greatly reduce the image quality, which would be harmful if for example you want to print your shot on paper.

Photographing a person or an object with your smartphone remains a fun moment. If you would like to get a more professional result, especially for business photos or pictures taken for the creation of a brochure for example, you can organise a photo shooting with a professional photographer.