Hot tip: ☀ create artistic images with the exposure slider on your phone

Photo 101

Jan 24

*The image above is a “silhouette”. To create this kind of image the exposure needs to be adjusted so that the subject is darker than the background.*

Technology has made it so easy for us to take hundreds of images per minute that we often forget that we don’t need 99% of those images. if we just took a bit more time taking the one image we actually want, we might be happier with the result.

hot tip

How to use the exposure slider on your iPhone/Android to control the overall “brightness” of the image

One of the elements that make for a good photo is depth and attention to highlight and shadow. When we take out our phones to take a picture, the little computer on board is trying to do it’s best to make it so that we don’t have to use our human brains at all—it takes in the scene and assumes the best settings to create a well exposed image. Sometimes though, the image it produces does not look like the photo we had imagined, typically it creates really bright highlights which result in images that can look tacky and fake.

Luckily, there is a handy tool on most phones that allows us to override the computer brain and let us take back control with our human one! It’s called the “Exposure Slider”. You may have seen it before and had no idea what it does! When you tap on the screen to focus (in the camera app on iPhone or Android), you will see a little sun icon appear (☀), this is your exposure slider and it’s a pretty powerful tool!

Here are the steps to using the exposure slider:

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Open the camera app on your phone
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Tap to focus
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Now, instead of just tapping and letting go, hold your finger down until you see a little sun icon

Now drag your finger up and down and watch the exposure change!

Here’s a quick video to show you want that looks like on an iPhone

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Watch as I drag the sun icon up and down, as the sun is dragged up, the image gets brighter, as I drag the sun down, you can see the overall image get darker.

how to create better images with your new exposure slider skills

When taking the image above, I reduced the exposure to focus more on the glowing sun behind the family while allowing the pops of highlight behind their hair to create a strong contrast. To do this you would pull that little sun icon down. Without doing that the background would likely be super bright and you would not see that glowy outline of the sun on the grass.

Creating a cinematic style

One of the common aesthetics of the cinematic style is deep shadows and selective highlights. As you can see in the image I was making above, it start with both sides of the face really bright. As I drag the sun icon (☀) down, I create deeper shadows on the right side of the face. This allows for more depth in the image while also drawing more attention to the area of highlight. This creates images that were more common in the film era with softer skin tones and more subdued highlights too.

Here’s a great example of a silhouette. Because the sunset was still bright it was a great opportunity to bring the exposure down until the subjects were fully in shadow, allowing the pink sunset to show behind!

Creating a silhouette

One of my FAVORITE ways to use this tool is also to create silhouettes. A silhouette is an image where the subject is much darker than the background. This effect “flattens” the subject, creating a more artful option How would we do this? Any guesses…?

Yup, you’ve got it! We would tap on our subject and then drag that little sun icon down until our item of focus was completely dark. This only works when your background is actually bright enough to not be affected by the decreased exposure. Good backgrounds include paned windows, sunsets and bright beach days.

So, tell me, did you know about the exposure slider already or is this something new? Leave a comment or send me an email. And don’t forget, I’m always here to make the art for you if it’s just feeling to overwhelming. : )

Hire Alice to take the photos